Confounding Lethe in the Moyola: Heaney, Virgil and the Cultural Unconscious

Eugene OBrien

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2021.e78994

Authors

Eugene OBrien University of Limerick https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5970-967X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2021.e78994

Abstract

This essay discusses Seamus Heaney’s ‘Route 110’, from Human Chain, as an example of life writing as embodied in the very specific genre of poetry. His use of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI as a type of cultural unconscious is examined, and the connections between the two works are viewed as tesserae, which come together as type of mosaic. Heaney has described this poetic sequence as an attempt to translate parts of Book VI of the Aeneid. ‘Route 110’ is also read in the light of Heaney’s book-length posthumous translation of Aeneid Book VI, and all three texts cohere and combine to form the mosaic of significant aspects of his life, as seen from an older perspective. The sequence is read in terms of the connection between the two books as an attempt to explore aspects of Eros and Thanatos in his own writing

Author Biography

Eugene OBrien, University of Limerick

Senior lecturer, and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, and is also the director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies. He is the editor for the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory, and of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series. His more recent books include Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker (Syracuse University Press); The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Notre Dame University Press); Recalling the Celtic Tiger, with Eamon Maher and Brian Lucy (Peter Lang) and Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, with Deirdre Flynn (Palgrave). He is currently working on a monograph on the writing of Paul Howard, a co-edited book on Irish poetry and climate change (with Andrew Auge) and a co-edited book on the reimagining Ireland series

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Confounding Lethe in the Moyola: Heaney, Virgil and the Cultural Unconscious

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Author Biography

Eugene OBrien, University of Limerick

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