ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney is one of the pre-eminent katabatic poets of our time, deploying the structure of a descent journey into memory, in many poems dating from the beginning to the end of his writing life. His first four volumes of poetry conduct archaeological excavations into Northern Ireland’s rich cultural and linguistic heritage. His later volumes, published in the first decades of the twenty-first century, deploy classical models of katabasis, particularly that of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, to explore the subjects of tribal loyalties and sectarian violence, human mortality and generation, and the forwarding of culture. This chapter focusses on two contrasting examples of Heaney’s Virgilian underworld poems, ‘District and Circle’ (the title poem of his 2006 collection) and ‘The Riverbank Field’ (prefacing the Virgilian sequence, ‘Route 110’, in both his 2007 and 2010 collections) in order to show how both memory and forgetting are integral and essential components of contemporary katabatic poetry.
