Immanent Spirituality and Legitimacy of Poetry in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Squarings’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1991, with the publication of his collection Seeing Things , Seamus Heaney confirmed that the focus and diction of his poetic practice have shifted. In my essay, I revisit the second part of this volume, the sequence titled ‘Squarings’, in order to examine what has inspired this profound transformation and what is being expressed as a result of this shift in Heaney’s aesthetic tectonics. Contrary to numerous critics who argued that the poet either left the earthly grounding of his earlier poetry or that he lost his faith, I am convinced that drafting the sequence, Heaney did not commit any act of detectable abandonment but much rather creatively reclaimed what had been his already. Dealing with his complex and non-credal spirituality which has found a fascinating expression in the ‘shifting brilliancies’ of words and images in ‘Squarings’, I articulate my conviction that the transcendental element introduced (yet in many respects re-inhabited) in the sequence cannot be fully understood and reflectively incorporated unless the poem is read as a reflection of the threefold morphology of the self. In this structural interpretation of the individual human existence, the physical body is temporarily united and infused with spirit (forming the individual soul). The dynamic and unique juncture which is thus created is represented by the individual consciousness. It is this consciousness, re-emerging in the awareness of its potential and intuitively in touch with its immanent spirituality, which finds its expression and aesthetic terrain in ‘Squarings’. Further, it is this re-animated and synthesizing model of human consciousness which liberates the poet’s expression and signals the opening up of a new creative space which Heaney could finally enter without ‘guilt and anxiety characteristic of [his] previous works’. [1] [1] Panzera, Daniela, ‘Heaney’s Journey into the Self: Towards a Dantean Light’, Nordic Irish Studies , 15.2 (2016), 12.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".