죽은 부친과 동료 문인에 대한 그리움이 창작 동기가 된 『환영을 찾아서』는 애가인 동시에 작가의 사후세계에 대한 호기심을 엿 볼 수 있는 초월 시 작법 서다. 시인은 죽은 자의 소유물을 응시함으로써 그들에 대한 기억을 떠올리고 그들의 영혼이 어디로 갔는가에 대한 질문을 던진다. 이와 더불어 작가는 그들이 사라 진 사후세계를 상상 함으로써 현실세계로부터 영혼세계로의 항해를 시도 하고 있다. 그리고 이 시들은 죽은 자들에 대한 회상 및 연민을 그린 점 때문에 낭만적 태도로부터 탄생 되었고 죽은 이들이 남겨 준 정신적 유산에 관심을 보이면서 다른 한편으로는 새로운 작품을 만들려는 점 때문에 부분적으로 모더니즘 작품의 특성을 나타낸다. 나아가 구체로부터 추상으로 의미의 다양화를 시도한 점 때문에 포스트모던 경향 역시 띤다고 평가할 수 있다.

Seamus Heaney is one of the representative writers who wrote many poems in memory of the dead people and memory is Heaney’s principle muse. Through rereading the selected poems for the dead, I could find out that Seamus Heaney used the different genres as memory art for the dead: some pastoral elegies of Field Work, a series of sonnets of The Haw Lantern and some free verses of Seeing Things containing the method of pastiche and incantation. Pastoral elegy is a funeral song or a lament for the dead with some convention: Although, Seamus Heaney following this convention, “The Strand at Lough Beg” and “Casualty” show some digression. And sonnet means “little songs” of fourteen lines that follow a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure with the theme of love. However, Heaney’s sonnets also show some transformation in line and rhyme. And the word pastiche means either a “hodge-podge” or imitation of several original works. Heaney’s some memory poems of Seeing Things apply some method of incantation which transforms keepsakes into the spiritual ones with the method of pastiche. What I came to the end from this study is that when Heaney commemorated victims of Ulster Trouble, he used somewhat artificial genre of pastoral elegy. However, for the memory of his dead mother, he used the sonnet genre of lyric mode which can contain praise and love of the dead. To our interest, he used free verse with pastiche and incantation to express love for his dead father and the late Philip Larkin. In short, he can be evaluated as a craftsman, memory digger and occulter.

Modernism and post-modernism are two aspects of aesthetic modernity reflecting some of the spiritual crises of the western civilization as resistance against the scientific modernity. These two are similar or the same to each other in seeing the modern world as fragments and discontinuities with pessimistic tone, the reality as relativity, and the language as lack. By contrast, many differences between the two can be seen as well. For example, modernism reflects Elite's taste of high culture while postmodernism is impatient with Elite's taste of ideas. And also, modernism hands down humanism and enlightenment while postmodernism rejects the so-called humanism and enlightenment. More likely than not, however, the foremost difference will be that modernism has the spirit of betterment by a kind of stoic attitude through self-criticism hoping for the birth of the hero who searches for the spiritual father, while postmodernism reflects a kind of Epicurism emphasizing 'seize the day' by accepting the commercial, technological and scientific values. It follows that modernism tries to expand freedom of more people through digging inner reality while postmodernism tries to expand equality of more people through de-constructing the concept of hierarchy of the western civilization. I think that Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things is characterized by the combination of modernism and post-modernism: his poetry contains the characteristics of modernism in respect that it continuously reflects the pursuit of tradition. At the same time, it includes post-modern aesthetics in respect that Squarings of Seeing Things transforms the concrete into the abstract by de-constructing some of the fixed meanings, from which readers can enjoy the entire freedom. My last conclusion is that Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things reflects not only his pursuit for the past tradition but also his desire to de-construct it. In brief, his poetry reflects some ambivalence: the search for the father and killing him, waiting for Godot and searching for light, freedom, equality and song.