Slow Erosions

Abstract

Focusing on Seamus Heaney’s poetry, this chapter explores the limitations of Irish postcolonial criticism. Acknowledging the invigorating influence of Said on Irish critics, it nevertheless argues that an overemphasis on Ireland’s colonial and “postcolonial” status has restricted attention to the nation and its political history. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger permits a global reframing of Irish culture that emphasizes transnational flows of money, people, culture, and literature. While Heaney’s poetry may seem archaic (rather than avant-garde), this chapter finds it creatively engages with transimperial affiliations. Rather than reading Heaney as a provincial northern Irish poet rooted in the native soil, the chapter emphasizes the poet’s embrace of mobility, fluidity, and non-Irish sites. Underscoring Heaney’s indebtedness to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett—whose works represented the circulations of seafaring cultural exchange—the chapter discovers in Heaney’s meditations on oceanic networks a corrective to the narrow critical focus on decolonization and nationhood.