According to Paul Muldoon, Irish writers experience an often disabling tension between the urge to express private concerns in their work and the compulsion to address identity politics, inherited atavisms and the legacy of sectarian strife. His comments restate the competing definitions of what Seamus Heaney terms 'the government of the tongue'. This is an obligation to 'concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality'. Yet it is also a liberating manifesto, allowing the poet to submit to 'the jurisdiction of achieved form', with poetry 'as its own vindicating force'. Heaney has consistently attempted to address these apparently conflictual imperatives. In Wintering Out and North, he engaged with what are euphemistically termed 'the Troubles' by advancing images of bodies drawn from the bogs at Tollund, Grauballe and Windeby as archaeological emblems of victimhood. This poetic reflex, whilst deep-felt and instinctive, was interpreted as providing decontextualised analogies (if not unintentional justifications) for the killings in Northern Ireland. Heaney had become, according to his fellow-poet Ciaran Carson, 'the laureate of violence - a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for “the situation”, in the last resort, a mystifier'.