Trust in words

摘要

The best political poets, on the whole, are those least anxious to write about politics. This is especially true of Irish poetry. W.B. Yeats is the classic example, a poet whose dreams were invaded by public catastrophe, and much the same could be said for Seamus Heaney. He is thought of by many readers as the persona of his first two books, a country-boy nostalgic for a rural life that, even then, in the 1960s, had already passed away. It was, in fact, Northern Ireland's troubles that made him; not, as some noisy spokesman for his tradition, but as a poet whose guilty ambivalence could register the time's complexities.