Past Poetic : Archaeology and the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney

by Finn, Christine

• ISBN13: 9780715632376
• ISBN10: 071563237X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Duckbacks

Summary

This book considers the way two Anglo-Irish poets, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, have used archaeology in their work, and how it surfaced in their lives. As well as providing new insights on Yeats and Heaney, their poetry and its analysis provides a filter for an original reading of the history of archaeology as it emerged from the mid-nineteenth century. Christine Finn draws on an array of data, tracing the path of the poets through museums, their childhood landscapes, and archaeological sites in Ireland, Italy and Scandinavia. Past Poetic reveals the ways in which these two great poets received the past, as images in books and photographs, and as tangible objects.

Table of Contents

List of plates	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	1	(10)
Irish, Greeks and antiquarians	11	(24)
`Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere': Yeats's early excavations	35	(20)
`Some philosophical worker in mosaic': Yeats and the past in a modern world	55	(24)
The body phenomenal: Heaney's fieldwork	79	(32)
Raising ancients: Heaney's later excavations	111	(18)
Fieldwork and field work in transformation	129	(20)
Conclusion	149	(10)
Notes	159	(32)
Select bibliography	191	(12)
Index of titles and first lines	203	(2)
General index	205