How and why this impacts on their texts is demonstrated. Excavating the basis of the writers' theories of fine art/the arts, in their ideas of perception/seeing, seeing and hearing, and their concepts or use images and mediums, the second chapter argues that these assist the two writers to develop oppositional ideas of the power of language/ekphrasis (Yeats) and of the limitations in language which conscript fine art objects and its visual images (Beckett). The first chapter reveals how and why the writer's readings, and subsequent re-writings, of fine art theory/history, permit them to selectively focus on, and inflect, the themes (identified above), detectable and available in the fine art theories of the "sister arts" and the "separate" arts which they read and cite. The thesis is structured in four chapters. The study demonstrates how and why the writers' fascination with seeing fine art, compounded by reading its theories/histories, produced their own essays engaging with it it evaluates how and why fine art/its theories assist with their themes/aesthetics, provide images for their creative praxis, and supply a focus for self-reflection on the capacities/incapacities of language and literary forms which they engage in, and which conscript (or fail to conscript) fine art images. The study demonstrates how these diverging positions are responses conditioned by, and filtered via wider, twentieth century intellectual and contextual shifts and embedded in the art history and theory the writers read and use in their texts. Yeats's emphasis on transcendence/the eternal and beauty, and Beckett's sponsorship of finitude/doubt and irony, are revealed as reinforced by, and partly built out of, the two writers' divergent responses to fine art theoretical texts, and use of fine art images. The study's conceptual framework suggests how and why enlisting fine art/its theories assisted the writers' oppositional thematics and aesthetics. Exploring how and why fine art and its theories shape these two writers' respective ideas, themes, and concepts and use of language, the study's method is comparative: it compares the writers' documented encounters with fine art and citation of its histories/theories in discursive texts in tandem with evaluating how and why fine art theories and images inspire their creative texts it's method reveals how theory and praxis pressure, complicate and modify each other. The primary focus is on the writers' relations with painting/its theories this occupies more space, quantitatively and qualitatively, in this study (as in does in the writers' texts), although sculpture, a key consideration for Yeats, and embroidery are also considered. The study's comparative framework rectifies this critical deficit to contribute new knowledge by synthesizing past individual studies and comparing more recently available sources it also provides a new slant on old knowledge in a new place. Previous studies have tended to focus on these writers' texts' literary qualities and junctures with history and philosophy: fewer have focused on fine art, and those which do have treated each writer separately. This thesis is the first detailed comparative study framing how and why fine art and its theories were deployed in the discursive and creative texts of two major Irish writers, W.B. Thus, Heaney's poetic vision is rendered in terms of an authentic attunement to the maternal-feminine silence of Being, recorded as "rhythm" or the "sound of sense" at the threshold of the pre-linguistic origins of language. The bog, as the principal trope of Heaney's oeuvre, is closely studied, in a cautiously de-politicized context, to reveal a feminine, pre-reflective realm of memory traces, inviting the reader to listen in thoughtful remembrance to the call of Mnemosyne. A Heideggerian reading of the prominent rural and agrarian sensibility of Heaney's early poems demonstrates how objects and topological features as poetized in his work exceed symbolic representation, and bring forth the aletheia of Being, and how the sense of the unhomely/uncanny in the poet's work serves to gather his community in the same vicinity where co-pre-sencing, letting-be of the other, and staying with things assure the unity of the fourfold. This essay aims to study Seamus Heaney's vision of poetry, particularly concerning his early oeuvre, in the light of Heidegger's approach to poetic language, memory, and dwelling.
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