Heaney’s Mythic Method: Modernist Afterlives in The Burial at Thebes

Abstract

This essay analyses the relationship between myth and modernity in The Burial at Thebes (2004), Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Antigone. It focuses on the poet’s cultivation of what T.S. Eliot, in his review of Ulysses, called the mythic method; that is, ‘the art of holding a classical safety net under the tottering data of the contemporary.’ If, for Eliot, the mythic method was part of a reactionary disavowal of modernity, for Heaney it belongs to a more progressive political and aesthetic agenda. Drawing on debates from New Modernist Studies, the article traces and interrogates the significance of the mythic method within Heaney’s landmark play. In doing so it demonstrates the ways in which the legacies of modernism continue to shape Irish writing in the twenty-first century.