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The object is inexhaustible, but it is this inexhaustibility which forces the viewer to new decisions. —Pearce 1994 Poets are editors of the inspirational world. They observe and choose seemingly disparate people, places, and things, essentialize them, and pare and trim and hone the words in the heart, in the head, and on the page. This consideration of poetry as a process is at the center of this chapter. I could have taken a straightforward approach to poetry as it relates to archaeology and, within this scope, considered the many poems inspired by such things as artifacts, sites, and the peopling of the past (see, for example, Henig 2001). But I have been fascinated by this material for nearly ten years, and returning to it after an absence, I ¤nd an alternative presentation: the idea has morphed into a text that considers the “how” of poetry as it relates to archaeology, an approach that places the poet in hand with the archaeologist. This chapter brings together ideas relating to the transformative process. It gathers artifacts, places, and bodies seen in a particular context, that is, the work of the northern Irish, and Nobel Prize–winning poet Seamus Heaney. I have written elsewhere about Heaney’s use of the curious northern European¤nds known as “bog bodies,” and I used the material as a basis for a doctoral thesis that considered how Heaney and W. B. Yeats made use of antiquity and archaeological tropes over a period spanning the late nineteenth to late twentieth century (Finn 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2003). It was a period in which archaeology can be said to have emerged as a discipline. But neither Yeats nor Heaney was an archaeologist; they ingested their sense of the past from other places, such as books and museums, and from being among archaeologists. 7 / Poetry and Archaeology The Transformative Process Christine A. Finn Seamus Heaney ¤rst saw the bog body with which he is most often associated —the Tollund Man (¤gure 7.1)—as a photograph in a popular book, The Bog People, by Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob. Heaney used his craft to transform that image into a poem, “Tollund Man,” which was published as the last poem in one collection, Wintering Out, and spawned another, North, in which he draws on other bog bodies, and bog ¤nds, as inspiration not to articulate archaeology but to create a metaphor for the Irish Troubles. The “how” of this transformative process is the crux of this chapter. I consider both the archaeologist and the poet to be mediators of sorts. In the manner of an archaeologist, Heaney, the poet, digs down through layers of personal memory to bring some “thing” to the light, to mind, and to the surface of the page. The process has associations connected with the poet as a seer, and it can be taken further, as both the poet and the trained archaeologist can “see” what is not obvious. In my treatment of the “things” in the poet’s work I am mindful of continual reinterpretation that is part of the understanding and interpretation of poetry and archaeology. The idea of archaeologists communicating on behalf of inanimate objects can be extended here to poetry to show how Heaney’s words allow “bog ¤nds” to “speak.” And it is a two-way process. As Heaney has noted, the bog bodies helped him articulate personal feelings about the atrocities in Ireland (see, for example, Heaney 1999), while his use of such ancient motifs gives the objects a new audience, outside archaeology, and in the realm of literature. What is apparent here, then, is a process of transformation. American archaeologist and anthropologist Michael Schiffer (1976) has described the effect of “C-transforms,” the cultural changes at work on objects consigned to the archaeological record that arise out of social behavior or, more plainly, use. These include things becoming discarded and consigned to a temporal wasteland , only to be retrieved and given status hundreds or thousands of years later as valuable data. Objects from the bogs of northern Europe were originally found during the cutting of the bog for fuel. We do not know what has been discarded; by the time of the Tollund Man ¤nd, such curiosities as bodies arising out of the landscape prompted a call from their ¤nders to an archaeologist , such as P. V. Glob. The body was a “thing,” an artifact, and archaeologically classi¤able. But in Heaney’s eyes it was a wondrous still-person...

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