http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzJgbNANzk
Kieran Quinlan claims that "Heaney's elevation [to Professor of Poetry in Oxford, 1989] said much not only about the character of a poet who had been emormously successful from almost the very beginning of his career, but also about the changed and changing self-perception of the people on the island from which he had come - a former colony of the First British Empire now slowly, painfully, and still partially emerging into its proper postcolonial consciousness." (63) Interestingly, however, according to Quinlan, Heaney claimed that in "Digging" the intriguing description of the speaker's pen "snug as a gun" in his hand "had more to do with clumsily invoking the American western gunslinger for an analogue of the writing process then with any project of subverting British colonial hegemony"(63).
(Source: Kieran Quinlan, "Tracing Seamus Heaney", World Literature Today, Vol 69, No 1, Postmodernism/Postcolonialism (Winter 1995) pp.63-68.Finally, here's a characterful picture of Heaney I found. :)
Jo xxxxx
