Write an essay on Heaney's poetry in the light of his statement that it represents a "search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament".

... Write an essay on Heaney's poetry in the light of his statement that it represents a "search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament". Seamus Heaney has identified the precise moment at which the process of writing poetry "moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament."1 It was the "summer of 1969", when the "original heraldic murderous encounter between Protestant yeoman and Catholic rebel was...initiated again".2 Thus the predicament to which Heaney refers in his statement is specifically the resurrection of the sectarian violence that has plagued Northern Ireland for centuries. However, the poetry of Seamus Heaney is not exclusively concerned with the political climate of his birthplace: it is merely one of a number of concerns that informs his verse. The quest for symbols to communicate the crisis in Northern Ireland at that

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