Seamus Heaney Critical Essay | Critical Essay by J. R. Atfield

Critical Essay by J. R. Atfield

SOURCE: "Seeing Things in a Jungian Perspective: Archetypal Elements in Seamus Heaney's Recent Poetry," in Agenda, Vol. 33, Nos. 3-4, Autumn-Winter, 1996, pp. 131-43.

In the following essay, Atfield offers a Jungian interpretation of the poetry found in the volume Seeing Things.

Seamus Heaney is clearly conversant with Jung's psychology and its relevance to art, specifically literature: in a conversation with Borges [in The Crane Bag, Volume 7, 1983], he referred to the "Jungian archetypes" as "valid explanations of what we experience in the subconscious worlds of dreams and fiction," and more recently in The Government of the Tongue, he used Jungian terminology quite naturally when he emphasised that poetry and the imaginative arts "verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life." He has spoken of "The secret between the words, the binding element … a psychic...
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