ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney’s dealings with Dante have been the occasion for acute selfquestioning about the responsibilities of poetry, coming to a head in his ‘Station Island’ sequence of poems, in which the Dantean framework of encounters with the dead gives scope to the extensive voicing of selfrecr imination, self-doubt, self-justification. When in poem VIII of the sequence Heaney makes his murdered second cousin Colum McCartney question Heaney’s earlier poetic practice, specifically that of the memorial poem ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ (in Field Work), he implicitly raises the issue of poetry’s relation to politics: Colum is made to accuse Heaney’s earlier poem of ‘confus[ing] evasion and artistic tact’. In particular, Colum is made to say that Heaney
whitewashed ugliness and drew the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio and saccharined my death with morning dew.
