Both Uses of
steadfast
in
Crediting Poetry by Seamus Heaney
- Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the 1930s, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my noncombatant status when I heard, for example, that one particularly sweetnatured school friend had been interned without trial because he was suspected of having been involved in a political killing.†
*
- It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called "the steadfastness of speech articulation," from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors.†
Definition:
-
(steadfast) firmly consistent -- especially in loyalty