University of Bucharest Review Vol. XII, no. 1, 2010 107 Nicoleta Stanca Ovidius University VERSIONS OF IRISH PASTORAL POETRY: W.B. YEATS AND SEAMUS HEANEY Keywords: pastoral poetry, tradition, post-colonialism, nationalism, Irishness Abstract: The paper aims at presenting Yeats and Heaney as poets that inherited and continued the Irish pastoral literary tradition. Irish literature has shown its preoccupation with place and nature since its creation of the ancient dinshenchas, i.e. place-name poetry, expressing the lore of the place. The Irish pastoral tradition has been fruitfully interwoven with the classical and the English one. Moreover, a nostalgic mood/mode, typical of the pastoral tradition, has been a prominent characteristic of a people who has always sought the means to bridge the past and the present, to recover the past and heal the traumas of disruptions and emigration. Yeats’s pastoral verse may have grown out of the need to create a self-consciously nationalist literature, as an attempt to continue previous models, in a context of the occul t. Heaney’s pastoral poetry has emerged in post-colonial Ireland, during a period of violence and chaos, in an “in-between” space. His early metaphors (the bog, the digger) and his representations of the Irish landscape, as feminine or as “the other”, endeavor to establish or, at least, question, spatial, historical and cultural continuity. The article aims at presenting Yeats and Heaney as poets that inherited and continued the Irish pastoral literary tradition. What early elements of the Irish pastoral could be traced in Yeats and Heaney‟s works? How has the idealized version of Yeats‟s peasant been transformed into Heaney‟s digger or water-diviner? The article will attempt to show that there is much continuity and little discrepancy between the two poets, one representative of early-twentieth-century Irish culture and, the other, a spokesman of contemporary Ireland. If studies on Yeats tend to focus on his relying on the European and Romantic tradition to recreate a self-consciously national literature, or on the occult and the visionary in his poetry, it would be worth analyzing these elements, together with his immersion in folklore, myth, as a political tool and the manner in which he was offered responses in the Irish poetic tradition. On the other hand, Heaney has been widely discussed as an inheritor of the Irish pastoral mode. The point is not to demonstrate the mere endurance of the Irish pastoral into contemporary poetry, from Yeats to Heaney, but to discuss the questioning and re- visitations of this mode (traditionally associated a poetry of the landscape seen as feminine, and in terms of (dis)continuity and suffering) in Seamus Heaney‟s “frontier