CoPo

 i hope this makes sense

 I fell completely in love with Heaney’s poetry while reading the first assigned section of poems.  The way Heaney taps into a collective memory without nostalgia necessarily I really found intriguing, because I think a lot of American poetry and fiction when referencing shared history or memory too often looks with rose colored glasses and glosses over especially horrific moments in that shared history.  We’ve encountered a lot of exceptions to this nostalgia and sense of longing in copo, but even in poetry today (I’m thinking specifically now of Ted Kooser and Billy Collins) there is a lot of romanticism of early American life or a “simpler time.”  One of the aspects of today’s lecture by

Temple
Cone that I was happy to learn about was more of the Irish history that influenced Heaney’s writing.  I thought it gave elucidation to Heaney’s poetry, which is steeped in history, but has no illusions of romanticism.  I find it oddly appropriate, however, that Heaney considers himself a Wordsworthian: odd because generally, I think of Wordsworth as highly Romantic, but that should be inverted (the Romantics are very Wordsworthian); appropriate because Heaney and Wordsworth share a preoccupation with memory and connection to the land.

Original post by emcla6ep