The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Being a poet in a culture obsessed with politics is a risky business. Investing poetry with the heavy burden of public meaning only frustrates its escape: however tempting it is to employ one's poetic talent in the service of an agenda or an ideology, the result usually has little to do with poetry. This is not about condemning the so-called “literature of commitment”; eye-opening and revealing, it has served its purpose in the unfinished story of our century, and now is certainly not the time to call for the poet's retreat into the "ivory tower" of the self. Preserving the individual voice amidst the amorphous and leveling collective must be the first act of poetic will, a springboard from which every poet must begin the effort of poetry. A simple look at recent Irish history is enough to show a place where this preservation is particularly difficult. The pressures that the bifurcated Irish society exerts on its poets are enormous: taking a political position is no longer a temptation (this implies a certain luxury of choice on the part of the tempted) but rather an inescapable reality imposed by the agora of public discourse. The condition of exile thus becomes the only way out for the poet, the only means of preserving the autonomy of his poetic voice. More than just a survival tactic, however, it is a strategy to find a home "elsewhere", both in the original language of the island (and in today's minority), as in the case of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and in the broader reality of poetic poetry. imagination. Seamus Heaney, who occupies the precarious position of being Ireland's most famous and accomplished living poet while refusing to become its bard, draws our attention to the role of esi......middle of paper...... Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957.Haviaras, Stratis, ed. Seamus Heaney: A Celebration. A Harvard review monograph. 1996.Heaney, Seamus. Accreditation of poetry: the Nobel conference. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.---. The Government of Language: Selected Prose 1978-1987. New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1989.---. Selected poems 1966-1987. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: the literature of the modern nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Malloy, Catharine and Phyllis Carey, ed. Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. Said, Edward W. “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals.” Grand Street 47 (1993): 113-124. Welch, Robert. Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing. London: Routledge, 1993.