This paper aims to explore the processes of poetic transformation ofIreland matter in W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney and compare the twopoets’ characteristics of attitudes to Irish politics. Even though one doesnot have any idea of their poetic prepositions in their poetry, there can besome understanding of the relationship between each poet’s poetic materialand his works of poem. Yeats and Heaney keep distances themselves fromIreland in their poetry as a man does to woman. Some critics’ attacks thatthe contamination of literary discourse by political statements points to thepoetics of Yeats and Heaney, and those attacks are resulted from thenotion of the identification of woman with the land, which are thecharacteristics of these two poets. To the tradition of romantic love poemsYeats admires the Ireland and its people and transforms them into a sortof mythology. That is to speak that love poems and patriotic poems areblended in Yeats. With this point of view one feels in reading Yeats’spoems the period after the Easter Uprising of 1916, like “NineteenHundred and Nineteen” or “Easter 1916” and “September 1913,” a terriblenew beauty that changes the old political and moral landscape. Hestruggles to question the situations caused the bloody violences andsacrifices. With this questioning he mystifies the imagined or idealcommunity.
The essential Yeatsian themes and attitudes sound through the earlierworks of Heaney. He draws an analogy between the preserved bodies ofhuman sacrifices in the peatbogs of Denmark and corpses on the streetsof contemporary Northern Ireland. And He employs gender stereotypes andmyths to describe the violent and depressive situations in Ireland in his poems. Sometimes he uses myths, whether of apocalypse or sacrifice. Buthe always takes a questioning stance toward the power of mythicsignification. In “The Tollund Man” the speaker comprehends thetransforming and eternalizing power of myth and he also recognizes thatpower as a ‘blasphemy’ because it averts his, and the reader’s, eyes awayfrom the specific victims and from the horror of the individual violent act.With this focusing on the individual victims, Heaney gives voice to thosevictims who can no longer speak, not silencing their individual voices onfavour of a single voice and eternalizing their mythic power.