Magdalene College Parnell Lecture 2020, presented by Parnell Fellow, Mr Fintan O'Toole.


Seamus Heaney is generally thought of as a poet of memory and rootedness. But he is also a poet of history, and his relationship to the historic past is much more dynamic and uncertain. He grew with, and was an active participant in, a system of communal and tribal memory that he could neither continue nor disown. Paradoxically his irresolvable dilemma became a source of creative energy. Faced with a range of options for dealing with history developed in Irish writing, he chose them all.