Seamus Heaney Experimenting Through the Tercet (2013)

Undergraduate: Caleb Agnew

Faculty Advisor: George Lensing
Department: English & Comparative Literature

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This presentation will examine Seamus Heaney¿s development of poetic technique from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), to his sixth, Station Island (1984), by looking at his use of the tercet as a stanzaic form. The intervening books will also be discussed in this particular point of technical usage, and the thematic implications of this form will be explored. This examination will touch on some of Heaney¿s most important political poetry as a point of contrast, establishing the entirely different character of his tercet poems. His rural upbringing, poetic influences, and relationship to Dante through Catholicism will all have significant bearing on this issue. His relationship to the Italian poet, expressed through his poems on dead subjects and his use of terza rima in ¿Station Island,¿ will be the focal point of this presentation. The tercet form in Heaney¿s work connects to experimentation and more importantly, the mediation between what Helen Vendler refers to as the ¿virtual¿ and reality. Looking at this trend in the first half of his career will also lend us insights into his more recent poetry, in which he has dedicated a greater portion of his writing to the tercet form.