“Anything can happen”: Heaney, Auden, and Anxiety

This analysis explores poetic anxiety, bringing together textual analyses and biographical insights into the lives of two canonical authors in “‘Anything can happen’: Heaney, Auden and Anxiety”. The unspoken backstories of Heaney’s poems provide a starting point for the revealing of a pattern through which Auden is “managed” as one would anxiety. The parallels with W. H. Auden, but also with Philip Larkin and W. B. Yeats are always centred on Seamus Heaney, as a tribute brought to Mihaela Irimia, who was not only an avid reader of his work, but also a scholar interested in Irish identity and its similarities to the Romanian cultural space, as revealed in her interview with the Northern-Irish poet in Dialoguri Postmoderne (Postmodern Dialogues, 1999).