Virgilian hauntings in the later poetry of Seamus Heaney

Abstract

This article examines the influence of Virgil upon the poetry of Seamus Heaney through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. The paper argues that the present and future are influenced by spectres of the past through what Derrida would term hauntology. Heaney’s later poetry inherits deeply from what has come before it in terms of classical mythology. Similarities are drawn between contemporary Northern Ireland and that of the classical past in the poetry and it is the circular, repetitive nature of history that enables the poet to locate a plateau, outside his primary world, to view the events of his present world.