The Georgic Tradition: Examining Nature through Rural Labour and Farm Lives in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
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Abstract
The Georgic tradition is the literary representation of rural lives that focuses on an agrarian society where crops and livestock farming become the fruitfulness of hard labour. Traditionally in literature, the writers of the trend often imagine the natural environment to create balance and peace in nature, a response to emotions and experiences of human beings living a romanticised pastoral life. However, the georgic mode investigates the farmers’ hard labour in ploughing the land to produce crops and rear animals while encountering the complexities of nature such as the weather, seasonal cycle, success and failure in the birth and death of plants and animals, the didactic mode of farming knowledge, and the use of tools and technology in farming. Although the georgic tradition was popular in the 18th century, this paper explores the 20th century Irish poetry of Seamus Heaney to examine the georgic elements in the reminiscence of his childhood and his imagination of the natural environment within an ecocritical framework. Heaney’s poetry reveals the interconnectedness between the agrarian culture and society, highlighting the significance of hard labour and farming as a result of his strong bond with the land, and the ancestral and cultural heritage which are needed to pass on to the generations to come.
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