through fuller self-possession, and accordingly rehearses the
compensations conducted by Irish Romantic nationalismí.^21 However,
as we have seen in Lloydís analysis of ëEaster 1916í, Yeatsís poem
problematizes the assumption that the poetís role is as a nationalist
curator of lost origins and demonstrates a far from straightforward
relationship to tradition. Yet Lloydís argument in ëPap for the
Dispossedí implies that Heaney is Yeatsian in his ëRomanticí
preoccupation with the past. Surely Lloydís criticism of Heaney
cannot claim that, like Yeats, Heaney unproblematically delves for a
lost national consciousness, when his later chapter on Yeats
problematizes such delvings to notice how Yeatsís poetry provides an
ambivalent writing of the national consciousness that the Revivalists
sought to build. Here, there is an apparent inconsistency in what at
first appears to be a thoroughly persuasive argument undertaken by
Lloyd.
The Place of Heaney
Heaney writes:
Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory constructed an imagined place that gave eternal
life to Gaelic country people of the West and their Anglo-Irish lords and ladies
[...] the Revivalists, in their different ways, prepared cultural paths for the
political fact of Irish independence [...] The Irish Free State was from the start
coterminous as a demographic and geographic entity with the textual Ireland of
Joyce and the Revivalists ñ the Ireland, that is, of urban Catholicism and rural
peasantry and those of the Protestant ascendancy and professional classes who
were prepared to stay on after the Union Jack came down.^22The Southern context of Independence contrasts with the Northern
context where the Union Jack has not come down. Heaney writes from
a place very different from that of Yeats and the Revivalists. Yet early
on in ëThe Sense of Placeí (1980) Heaney imagines that it is to ëthe
21 Lloyd, pp.16ñ20.
22 Heaney, ëFrontiers of Writingí, p.195.