The Flight of the Vernacular : : Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante / / Maria Cristina Fumagalli.

• Superior document: Cross/Cultures ; 49
• VerfasserIn: Fumagalli, Maria Cristina
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden; , Boston : : BRILL,, 2001.
• Year of Publication: 2001
• Language: English
• Series: Cross/Cultures ; 49.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

In this book, Dante, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott engage in an eloquent and meaningful conversation. Dante's capacity for being faithful to the collective historical experience and true to the recognitions of the emerging self, the permanent immediacy of his poetry, the healthy state of his language, which is so close to the object that the two are identified, and his adamant refusal to get lost in the wide and open sea of abstraction - all these are shown to have affected, and to continue to affect, Heaney's and Walcott's work. The Flight of the Vernacular , however, is not only a record of what Dante means to the two contemporary poets but also a cogent study of Heaney's and Walcott's attitude towards language and of their views on the function of poetry in our time. Heaney's programmatic endeavour to be "adept at dialect" and Walcott's idiosyncratic redefinition of the vernacular in poetry as tone rather than as dialect - apart from having Dantean overtones - are presented as being associated with the belief that poetry is a social reality and that language is a living alphabet bound to the "opened ground" of the world.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu -- 'L'Alto Volo' and the return to the real -- 2. Flight and Folly -- Or, Dante and the megalomania of the signifier -- 3. Epitaph for the Young -- Walcott's apprentice years -- 4. The Style of Her Praise -- Dante's Vita Nuova and Walcott's Another Life -- 5. Breaking the Tribe's Complicity -- Heaney's Field Work -- 6. Shabine's alto volo and Ulysses' folle volo -- Walcott's "The Schooner Flight -- 7. Out of Avernus: Heaney's Station Island -- 8. The Book of Change: Heaney's The Haw Lantern -- 9. A Caribbean Epic of the Self: Walcott's Omeros -- 10. A Poetry of Paradise. Heaney's Seeing Things and The Spirit Level and Walcott's The Bounty -- Conclusion -- Appendix I -- Appendix II -- Works Cited -- Index.