“Secure the Bastion of Sensation”: Seamus Heaney’s and Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry of the Everyday

Abstract

This essay attempts to situate Seamus Heaney’s poetics of the everyday in relation to the work of Czesław Miłosz, who for many years served as one of his sources of inspiration. Although Heaney frequently treated Polish poetry as a lesson in the poet’s ethical responsibility, he also found in it, thanks to translations, a testimony to amazement at seemingly trite objects and trivial phenomena. A comparative analysis of selected poems confronts Miłosz’s and Heaney’s poetry of the everyday with the long tradition of literary epiphanies, paying particular attention to the Romantic and Modernist moments, and to both poets’ turn towards the Dutch masters.