ABSTRACT
“The Bookcase,” 1 poet Seamus Heaney’s elegy to a bookcase and its con-tents, offers a cogent reminder that books and bookcase are one in purpose: to hold and disclose insight, wisdom, and words that play with, evoke, and nurture the life of the mind with all its imaginings. The bookcase contains the writings of those who open up and enflesh the world. Elizabeth Bishop’s travel-endowed poetry takes her readers to lands beyond their own. Wil-liam Butler Yeats is the architect of recuperated memory, reinstating the language and imaginative constructions of a tradition on the brink of oblit-eration. Thomas Hardy gives voice to those who are distressed and who live on marginal territory. Dylan Thomas (and it is interesting that Heaney uses the familiar “Dylan” here) shouts to us about our own fears and pas-sions. These, and the others in Heaney’s bookcase, are there to tell us what kind of person he or she is and what kind of word hoard we may access by entering his or her space.
