Landscape was not only important for Romantic poets. If we take a look at some outstanding modern examples from three Nobel prize-winning authors, we can discover that they use childhood landscapes still living in their memories to describe contemporary issues.

Seamus Heaney (1995 Nobel Prize Winner), a poet of the Irish countryside, depicts images so vividly that they seem almost tangible.

From the collection Death of A Naturalist an excerpt from a poem called Digging (1966):

• What senses does the poem appeal to?
• What could make it Irish?

Have a look at another interesting example from Gunter Grass, (1999 Nobel Winner). Having left the country of his childhood he returns to the familiar landscape in the opening of his most famous novel The Tin Drum.

From The Tin Drum:

"Late one October afternoon, my grandmother Anna Bronski was sitting in her skirts at the edge of a potato field. In the morning you might have seen how expert my grandmother was at making the limp potato plants into neat piles; at noon she had eaten a chunk of bread smeared with lard and syrup; then she had dug over the field a last time, and now she sat in her skirts between two nearly full baskets. The soles of her boots rose up at right angles to the ground, converging slightly at the toes, and in front of them smouldered a fire of potato plans, flaring up asthmatically from time to time, sending a queasy film of smoke out over the scarcely inclined crust of the earth. The year was 1899; she was sitting in the Heart of Kashubia, not far from Bissau but still closer to the brickworks between Ramkau and Viereck, in front of her the Brenntau highway at a point between Dirschau and Karthuas, behind her the black forest of Goldkrug; there she sat, pushing potatoes about beneath the hot ashes with the charred tip of a hazel branch."

• What does the description tell you about the history of the area?
• Have you got any memories of your own childhood connected with the countryside?
• Ask your parents and grandparents about their memories? Do they reveal any changes in the countryside in any way?
• Could you express (in English) the countryside of your mind?

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