ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney has contributed to the notion of ars poetica his meditation on the circumstances of the poet faced with the double pressure inherent in attending to the aesthetic demands of poetic language and those of his contemporary historical reality. Heaney exposes the reality for what it is and, by revealing his artistic agony over how best to position his poetry in relation to reality, he shows how profoundly political and historical upheaval affects artistic expression. In Heaney’s ‘Frontier of writing’ and ‘Republic of Conscience’ the reality is not spared its horrible manifestations; on the contrary, the poet creates a language which engages with it deeply and meaningfully. Heaney looked to the ‘historically tested imaginations of post-war poets in Eastern Europe’ as he reassessed his aesthetic values in the 1980s. Heaney’s elegy ‘To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert’ presents the Polish poet as one who is favoured by the god of poetry.
