Heaney and the Photograph: ‘Strange Fruit’ in Manuscript and Published Form

What is it about?

This article considers the composition history of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Strange Fruit’, published in North (1975), by analysing manuscript drafts held at Emory University. Tracing the Christological and pre-Christian symbolism of earlier drafts of the poem, and the significance of photography for P.V Glob’s The Bog People (1969) and Heaney’s imagination, it considers the figure of the blind double in Heaney’s work.

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