Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary

Abstract

In his tender, witty, unillusioned poem 'An Afterwards', in Field Work, Seamus Heaney imagines himself confined after death to the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno, part of a 'rabid, egotistical daisy-chain' of 'backbiting' poets. When his wife visits him there (accompanied by Virgil's wife) his instinctive, spontaneous question to her is a question about the state of the art: 'My sweet, who wears the bays In our green land above, whose is the life