Confounding Lethe in the Moyola: Heaney, Virgil and the Cultural Unconscious

Abstract

This essay discusses Seamus Heaney’s ‘Route 110’, from Human Chain, as an example of life writing as embodied in the very specific genre of poetry. His use of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI as a type of cultural unconscious is examined, and the connections between the two works are viewed as tesserae, which come together as type of mosaic. Heaney has described this poetic sequence as an attempt to translate parts of Book VI of the Aeneid. ‘Route 110’ is also read in the light of Heaney’s book-length posthumous translation of Aeneid Book VI, and all three texts cohere and combine to form the mosaic of significant aspects of his life, as seen from an older perspective. The sequence is read in terms of the connection between the two books as an attempt to explore aspects of Eros and Thanatos in his own writing