@inbook{15864ae8a2694f7aa98a81d030c7e459,
title = "{"}Small dreamself in the branches{"}: Seamus Heaney's birds",
abstract = "Heaney often reflected on the relationship between the freedoms of the creative imagination and the restrictions imposed by conditions on the ground, describing this tension as one {\textquoteleft}to which all artists are susceptible, just as the children of temperamentally opposed parents are susceptible. The child in this case is the poet, and the parents are Art and Life{\textquoteright}. The broad trajectory of his oeuvre is evident enough: initially painting the life of his native world in {\textquoteleft}thick and faithful pigments{\textquoteright}, his art became increasingly impressionistic and etherial as it climbed away from earthly matters ({\textquoteleft}art{\textquoteright}, writes Heaney in his essay {\textquoteleft}The Government of the Tongue{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}improvises an inspired sketch{\textquoteright} of {\textquoteleft}a better reality{\textquoteright}), before returning to reappraise familiar ground in late volumes such as 'Electric Light'. Following the movement of birds as they migrate through this body of work is as good a way as any of tracking how the {\textquoteleft}appetites of gravity{\textquoteright} so characteristic of Heaney{\textquoteright}s early writing were transformed into an imaginative mastery of {\textquoteleft}new rungs of the air{\textquoteright} ({\textquoteleft}The First Flight{\textquoteright}) in the transcendent impulse of middle-period work, before the birds come home to roost in late intimations of mortality.",
keywords = "Seamus Heaney, poetry, birds",
author = "Tim Hancock",
note = "Reference text: Bloom, Harold. {\textquoteleft}The Voice of Kinship.{\textquoteright} Times Literary Supplement 8 February 1980: 137-8. Print. Cole, Henri. {\textquoteleft}Interview: Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry No. 75.{\textquoteright} The Paris Review. 144 (1997). Web. 27 August 2014. <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1217/the-art-of-poetry-no-75-seamus-heaney> Corcoran, Neil. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Revised edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Print. Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Print. Haffenden, John. Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Print. Hardy, Thomas. Selected Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Print. Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Print. ---. Door into the Dark. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. Print. ---. District and Circle. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print. ---. Electric Light. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Print. ---. Field Work. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. Print. ---. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971 – 2001. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Print. ---. Human Chain. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Print. ---. North. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Print. ---. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968 – 1978. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. Print. ---. Seeing Things. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Print. ---. Station Island. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Print. ---. Stations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975. Print. ---. Sweeney Astray. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Print. ---. The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Print. ---. The Haw Lantern. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Print. ---. The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Print. ---. The Spirit Level. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Print. ---. Wintering Out. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Print. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. Print. Hughes, Ted. Lupercal. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. Print. Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Print. Kinahan, Frank. {\textquoteleft}An Interview with Seamus Heaney.{\textquoteright} Critical Enquiry 8.3 (1982): 405-14. Print. Kramer, Jill. {\textquoteleft}Rusty Schweikart: Space Man{\textquoteright}. Jill Kramer, 7 July 2004. Web. 27 August 2014. <http://jillkramer.net/rusty-schweickart-space-man/> Laird, Nick. {\textquoteleft}Human Chain by Seamus Heaney: review{\textquoteright}. The Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2010. Web. 28 August 2014. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7977782/Human-Chain-by-Seamus-Heaney-review.html> O{\textquoteright}Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Print. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 3-24. Print. Thomas, Dylan. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Jones. Revised edition. London: Dent, 1974. Print. T{\'o}ib{\'i}n, Colm. {\textquoteleft}Human Chain by Seamus Heaney – review{\textquoteright}. The Guardian: Review Section. 21 August 2010: 6. Print. Wordsworth, William. The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Print. Yeats, William Butler. Yeats{\textquoteright}s Poems. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London: Macmillan, 1989. Print.",
year = "2015",
month = nov,
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-86821-605-9",
pages = "119--143",
editor = "Marie-Luise Egbert",
booktitle = "The Life of Birds in Literature",
publisher = "Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier",
address = "Germany",
}