Seamus Heaney

Personae and Identity in Post Modern Aesthetics

Abstract

  Great poets of all time never narrowed themselves to individual concerns, subjects, or images that are too personal to be shared, rather they expanded their images into a universal aesthetic to be enjoyed by the collective consciousness across diverse cultures; Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire, Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Khayyam, Tagore never allowed their personality mar the collective expansion of universal human understanding across history and culture. Still, in Post Modern thoughts, this is true when we search for the key with which great Post Modern artists and poets maintain a subtle and sophisticated balance between individual and personal consciousness, identity, and collective cultural identities through their personae which allow them to achieve unique aesthetics. Exploration is required to know how his personae resist all efforts to be identified with generalizations. Heaney too resisted those efforts by not only the critics, and reviewers but also his apparent Irish identity in his poetry