LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY IN SEAMUS HEANEY’S NORTH: AN ECOCRITICAL READING

Abstract

The current paper emphasizes landscape and memory in the North by Seamus Heaney, where the writer leaves the reader to explicitly understand the ways in which the poet uses ecological factors in the combination with history and personal landscape in Northern Ireland where he lived. In an ecocritical approach to reading, this paper examines how Heaney writes on nature, memory and identity as mutually reinforcing issues that contributed to his poetic voice. The study finds out that the image of landscape in North by Heaney is revealed not as a pure physical setting but it is something that holds historical trauma and cultural memory. It is also analyzed how the work by Heaney could be perceived as executable through ecocriticism as the relationship between environmental and emotional memory remains relevant to the studies. Some of the arguments that the paper bear out include that the poet deploys the view of the landscape as such a medium through which personal and collective histories are recalled, dealt with, and given sense. This ecocritical reading highlights the role played by Heaney as a literary person who involves himself in nature creation as an active participant in the identification of memory and who He is.