The anxiety of influence: Heaney and Yeats and the place of writing (Pre-published version)

Abstract

This essay compares and contrasts the writing of William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney in terms of their respective enunciations of place. Both writers have a pluralist and emancipatory sense of place, and real places and imagined ones interact in a dialectical and complicated relationship. The essay will also compare their respective Nobel Laureate speeches in terms of their enunciations of place.