In my article titled “Nationalism of William B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney intheir early poetry: mythic nationalism and realistic national consciousness” which waspublished in The Journal of English Language & Literature Vol. 45 No. 3, Ianalyzed three among four factors of nationalism (implicated) in the two poets’ earlypoetry, that is, ethnicity, language, territory. This article deals with one remainingfactor of nationalism, religion, in their middle poetry.
Religion is so powerful an influence in Ireland that Irish nationalism can beconsidered Irish Catholic Nationalism. The political, religious, and economic conflictsbetween Anglo-Irish Protestants and Catholic Irish made Ireland divided into NorthernIreland and Southern Ireland, after Ireland was liberated from British imperialism in1922. The native Irish who had lost even their mother tongue, Gaelic during thecolonial period of almost 800 years ruled by the British Empire sought their nationalidentity in Catholicism and made the religious oppression of Britain their centripetalforce.
To Yeats, religion was not a dogmatic faith of institutionalized religion but afield in which his imagination of the supernatural is allowed full play to go beyondthe ephemeral real world to the eternal spiritual world. He set the Irish religiousidentity on Irish countrymen’s native faith in faerie, ghost, eternity of soul, and theworld of magic expressed in Irish legends, folklore, myths, and oral traditions. Hesatisfied his hunger for the ultimate truth of universe with the Irish ancient faith inthe mystical world of the everlasting soul and the visionary as well as various kindsof mysticism in the East and the West. The mystical religious identity of the nativeIrish emphasized by him anticipated the continuous collisions among him, the Catholic pulpit and Irish nationalists. His romantic belief in a heroic spiritual Irelandmaterialized his Irish Literary Movement and his idealized Anglo-Irish Ascendancyculture was far from the political nationalism of the middle class of Ireland, thepolitical class of the people democracy.
Seamus Heaney has also suffered from the conflict between his cultural?political ideals which are fundamentally Ireland-centered and the political reality ofthe violent IRA (Irish Republican Army) which kills even civilians at random for thecause of nationalism. To Heaney the religious faith was a recognition of the deepvalue of the religious ritual and the Catholic ritual has been internalized in hisfeminine poetic sensibility of patience, humility, duty, discipline, guiltiness, grace,wonder, and the ritual supplication. The Irish religious identity he put an emphasison was not the visionary mystic one of Yeats but the real one which has beeninternalized in the minds of the native Catholic Irish as “self-afflicting compulsions”and spiritual paralysis, especially in terms of political martyrdom complex in IRAand historical defeatism of Catholic priests in Northern Ireland.
Both Heaney and Yeats opposed violence of nationalism and sought their idealone. Religion has had a devastating influence on the two tribal struggle in Ireland sothat the two poets refused the established Christianity and tried to enhance Irishrepublican nationalism to the genuine nationalism allowing the peaceful co-existenceof the two races living in Ireland. Heaney demythodized Yeats’s myth of the politicalmartyrdom and denied the religious halo of Irish nationalism as well as themythodized force in the history of the Northern Europe. His quest of democraticco-existence of plural culture in Ulster seems realistic and idealistic solution of theTroubles in Northern Ireland.