Seite 31 [31]
OCR
Seamus Heaney’s Sense of Place Seamus Heaney opens his essay “The Sense of Place” with the following assertion: “I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antipathetic. One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious.” While Heaney’s principal point to illustrate in the essay is the way how place provides a point of orientation for a selected number of poets he feels affinity with, his position is general enough to attribute an essentially personal frame of reference for the experience of the category of place. Although the broader and more abstract term to cover the dimension he addresses would be “space”, Heaney uses the term “place” to address the spatial aspect of the work of the respective poets, suggesting a more particular approach to the object of his inquiry. Heaney’s reading of his poets of choice aligns with the usual critical practice that sees place as an important element of Irish poetry, a definitive aspect that marks Irish poetry as a distinctive set within poetry written in English. By suggesting that the poets he reads gain a strong point of reference from their places, he also offers an implicit insight into his own poetic allegiances and convictions both in terms of the importance of the spatial element for his poetry and its more general position in human experience. The relation of space and place, according to Yi-Fu Tuan, is a complex one that is essentially centred around the meaning attributed to and value bestowed on the practical scope of the respective terms. Though he claims that the meanings of the two terms often merge in experience, he indicates a conceptual difference opening between them: “[w]hat begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”? It follows from this that “[f]rom the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa.”? Approached in this way, place is comprehended, interpreted and humanised space whose understanding is a function of the interpretational framework imposed on it by human intelligence. This attributes a major role in the understanding of place to the observer and consequently allows for various possible readings of the same place by different persons, both simultaneously and at different 1 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968-78. (New York: The Noonday Press, 1980), 131 2 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6 Tuan, Space and Place, 6
