Masterpiece

Critical

Seamus Heaney \

THE REDRESS
OF POETRY

Highlights

Heaney: Life and Works

Introduction to The Redress of Poetry’

Arguments in Defence of Poetry

The Redressing Effects of Poetry

Heaney’s Prose Style

Text

Glossary

Important Questions with Answers

Bibliography

By: Miss Mahwish Zahid

M.A. English (P.U.)

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CONTENTS ,.

01 A Biographical Sketch of Seamus

Heaney 1-6

02 Seamus Heaney: Major Works 7-8

03 The Redress of Poetry: An Introduction 9-11

04 The Redress of Poetry: Arguments in

Defence of Poetry 12-19

05 The Redressing Effects of Poetry 20-28

06 George Herbert: Thr Perfect Example of

a True Poet 29-33

07 Heaney’s Prose Style 34-38

08 Introduction to Seamus Heaney’s

Redress of Poetry by William Logom 39-48

09 Introduction to Redress of Poetry by

Seamus Heaney 49-56

10 Redress P* Poetry: Text 57-74

11 Glossary v 75-85

12 Values a«d Literature 86-101

13 Important Questions with

Answers

14 Select Bibliography
A Biographical Sketch of
Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest

member of a family which would eventually contain nine
children. His father owned and worked a small farm of
some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but
the father’s real commitment was to cattle-dealing.

There was something very congenial to Patrick

Heaney about the cattle-dealer’s way of life to which he
was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after
the early death of his own parents. The poet’s mother came
from a family called McCann whose connections were
more with the modern world than with the traditional
rural economy; her uncles and relations were employed in
the local linen mill and an aunt had worked ”in service” to
the mill owners’ family.

The poet has commented on the fact that his

parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattleherding
Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial
Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a
significant tension in his background, something which
corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from
his parents, namely that between speech and silence.

His father was notably sparing of talk and his

mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which
2 01-A Biographical Sketch of Heangy Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the

”quarrel with himself” out of which his poetry arises.

Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the

local primary school.

As a very young child, he watched American

soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields, in preparation
for the Normandy invasion of 1944. They were stationed at
an aerodrome which had been built a mile or so from his
home and once again Heaney has taken this image of
himself as a consciousness poised between ”history and
ignorance” as representative of the nature of his poetic life
and development.

Even though his family left the farm where he was

reared (it was called Mossbawn) in 1953, and even though
his life since then has been a series of moves farther and
farther away from his birthplace, the departures have been
more geographical than psychological: rural County Deny
is the ”country of the mind” where much of Heaney’s
poetry is still grounded.

When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney

won a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a Catholic
boarding school situated in the city of Derry, forty miles
away from the home farm, and this first departure from
Mossbawn was the decisive one.

It would be followed in years to come by a transfer

to Belfast where he lived between 1957 and 1972, and by
another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where
Heaney has made his home, and then, since 1982, by
regular, annual periods of teaching in America.

All of these subsequent shifts and developments

were dependent, however, upon that original journey from
Mossbawn which the poet has described as a removal from
”the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education.”
Redress of Poetry A Biographical Sketch of Heaney 3

It is not surprising, then, that this move has turned

out to be a recurrent theme in his work, from ”Digging”,
the first poem in his first book, through the much more
orchestrated treatment of it in ”Alphabets” (The Haw
Lantern., 1987), to its most recent appearance in ”A Sofa in
the Forties” which was published this year in The Spirit
Level.

At St. Columb’s College, Heaney was taught Latin

and Irish, and these languages, together with the AngloSaxon
which he would study while a student of Queen’s
University, Belfast, were determining factors in many of
the developments and retrenchments which have marked
his progress as a poet.

The first verses he wrote when he was a young

teacher in Belfast in the early 1960s and many of the best
known poems in North, his important volume published
in 1975, are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in
English.

His poetic line was much more resolutely stressed

and packed during this period than it would be in the
eighties and nineties when the ”Mediterranean” elements
in the literary and linguistic heritage of English became
more pronounced. Station Island (1984) reveals Dante, for
example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of Virgil - as
well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid - are to
be found in Seeing Things (1991).

Heaney’s early study of Irish bore fruit in ihe

translation of the Middle Irish story of Suibhne Gealt in
Sweeney Astray (1982) and in several other translations
and echoes and allusions: the Gaelic heritage has always
has been part of his larger keyboard of reference and
remains culturally and politically central to the poet and
his work.
UA-A oiugrapnicai anetcn ui aeaucy

Heaney’s poems first came to public attention in

the mid-1960s when he was active as one of a group of
poets who were subsequently recognized as constituting
something of a ”Northern School” within Irish writing.

Although Heaney is stylistically and

temperamentally different from such writers as Michael
Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul
Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson
(members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he does
share with all of them the fate of having be en born into a
society deeply divided along religious and political lines,
one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quartercentury
of violence, polarization and inner distrust.

This had the effect not only of darkening the mood

of Heaney’s work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a
deep preoccupation with the question of poetry’s
responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry
is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself
and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt
by the poet as citizen.

The essays in Heaney’s three main prose

collections, but especially those in The Government of the
Tongue (1988) and Trie Redress of Poetry (1995), bear
witness to the seriousness which this question assumed for
him as he was coming into his own as a writer.

These concerns also lie behind Heaney’s

involvement for a decade and a half with Field Day, a
theatre company founded in 1980 by the playwright Brian
Friel and the actor Stephen Real. Here, he was also
associated with the poets Seamus Deane and torn Paul in,
and trie singer David Hammond in a project which sought
to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its members
into productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in
Irish political life.
Redress of Poetry A Biographical Sketch of Heaney 5

Through a series of plays and pamphlets

(culrninatirtg in Heaney’s case in his version of Sophocles’
Philoctetes which the company produced and toured in
1990 under the title, The Cure at Troy), Field Day
contributed greatly to the vigour of the cultural debate
which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in
Ireland.

Heaney’s beginnings as a poet coincided with his

meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who was
to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like
her husband, came from a large family, several of whom
are themselves writers and artists, including the poet’s
wife who has recentlv published an important collection of
retellings of the classic Irish myths and legends (Over Nine
Waves, 1994).

Marie Heaney has been central to the poet’s life,

both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly
and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his
oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it
possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying
on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the
family home.

The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year

abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a visiting lecturer at
the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was
the sense of self-challenge and new scope which he
experienced in the American context that encouraged him
to resign his lectureship at Queen’s University (1966-72)
not long after he returned to Ireland, and to move to a
cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full time as a
poet and free-lance writer.

A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and

Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a
teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of
the English Department until 1982, when his present
Ul-A Biograpnicai OK.CIXU ui nc

arrangement with Harvard University came into existence.

This allows the poet to spend eight months at home
without teaching in exchange for one semester’s work at
Harvard.

In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of

Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university’s most
prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year
period to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a
post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public
lectures every year but which does not requite him to
reside in Oxford.

In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has

always contributed to the promotion of artistic and
educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad.

While a young lecturer at Queen’s University, he

was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the
rising generation and took over the running of an
influential poetry workshop which had been established
there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when
Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966.

He also served for five years on The Arts Council in

the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has
acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry
competitions and literary conferences, establishing a
special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats
International Summer School in Sligo.

In recent years, he has been the recipient of several

honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish
academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of
The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996,
subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1995, he was made a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et
Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
Seamus Heaney:
Major Works

Seamus Heaney (pronounced as SHE-MUS

HEANEY) is an Irish poet and writer, was born in 1939
and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995, beside various
other Prizes at home and abroad. He has published many
collections of poetry and prose and at least one drama. His
major literary works are as follows:

Poetry:

> Death of a Naturalist. Faber 1966.

> Door into the Dark. Faber 1969.

> Wintering Out .Faber 1972.

> North. Faber 1979.

> Selected Poems 1965-1975. Faber 1980.

* Sweeney Astray. A version from the Irish by

Seamus Heaney.

> Station Island. Faber 1984.

> The Haw Lantern. Faber 1987.

> New Selected Poems 1966-1987. Faber 1990.

> Seeing Things. Faber 1991.

01-A Biographical Sketch of Heaney _ Seamus Heaney

Prose, Essays

Drama

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. Faber

1980

The Government of the Tongue. Faber 1988

The Place of Writing. Introd. by Ronald

Schuchard. Scholars Press 1989

A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. by Elmer

Andrews. Macmillan 1993

The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures. Faber

1995

The Cure at Troy. A version of Sophocles’

Philoctetes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1991
The Redress of Poetry:
An Introduction

Poetry demands a creative freedom and a sense of

social obligation felt by the poet as a citizen. Seamus
Heaney was born in a society deeply divided among
religious and political lines that suffered a quarter of a
century of violence.

This triggered the questioning of the poet’s

responsibility and the role of poetry as a whole. Heaney’s
father had a rural background and was less talkative while
his mother had an urban background and she was always
ready to speak out. This conflict in speech and silence led
to Heaney’s Redress of Poetry.

The essay in Heaney’s three main prose collections

bear witness to the earnestness this question assumed for
him.

Meaning:

By ’redress’ Heaney means ’reparation of satisfaction

or compensation for, a wrong sustained or the loss
resulting from this.” If used in form of a verb ’redress’
refers to, ”raise again to an upright position.”
It also corresponds to set up again, restore, reestablish
etc. It is a course where something unhindered,
yet directed, can speed ahead into its full potential.

If we discuss ’redress’ in the light of The Redress of

Poetry it comes to represent the duty of the poet to be
responsible and publicly accountable. It includes the duty
of the poet to restore - re-establish the dignity of poetry
and remove and correct the false notions about poetry.

Hence the redress of poetry tends to bring

consolation, compensation, comfort and reassurance.

Questioning the Role of Poetry:

It is not a new subject that Heaney has decided to

deal with. The nature and purpose of poetry has always
been important and practical to those who have an interest
in poetry.

The question about poetry’s responsibility and its

duties as to what it can do is as old as time. It has been a
constant debate whether poetry can give assurance,
comfort and confidence to its readers.

Another frequently asked question is about poetry’s

useful activity and its practicality in the modern times. It is
pragmatic, or aesthetic, or both? Can poetry help in the
complexities, and miseries of We? Are poets worthless or
useful members of society?

Heaney has decided to defend poetry in the age of

reason, science and technological advancements... a social
setup in which poetry has become an ideal mental luxury.
He chooses u» defend poetry and quite successfully and
most comprehensively accomplishes the task. He presents
various notions and responses against poetry, and then
gradually and systematically presents counter argument to
justify and protect his stance.
The utility of poetry or what poetry means to life is
Heaney’s thesis. He uses the technique of comparison and
contrast to provide his reader with a clearer view of his
stand point. His entire lecture is a confrontation and
justification of a poet writing on ay subject.

In his lecture, Heaney does not want to give the

impression that poetry must always be exercised in
earnest, serious, morally permediated ways. He wants to
profess the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability. He
wants to celebrate poetry’s given unforeseeable thereness
in the society, particularly in our lives.

In his ”Redress of Poetry” there is no hint of ethical

obligation but it is a matter of finding a path to bring the
heart to its focal point.

The Redress of poetry means redefinition of what

poetry is. Redress by poetry means what and how poetry
can redefine in our social, political and cultural context,
thex reality which surrounds us. Heaney’s lecture can be
divided into three parts. In the first part of his lecture he
presents arguments against poetry and then his own
counter arguments in favour of poetry.

In the second part of his lecture, Heaney presents

various redressing effects of poetry and elaborates what
should be the functions of poetry. In the last part of his
lecture Heaney discusses George Herbert, the
metaphysical poet, as a perfect emblem of a true poet
fulfilling and carrying out all the functions of poetry.
Redress of Poetry:

Arguments in Defence of

Poetry

In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has

always contributed to the promotion of artistic and
educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad.

In his lecture Redress of Poetry, he illuminates

poetry as a force capable of transforming culture and the
self. Poetry, Heaney states, is essentially an answer to the
conditions of the world given in poetry’s own terms rather
than the language of uplift or rhetoric.

To effect the redress of poetry, it is not necessary for

the poet to be aiming deliberately at social or political
change. Which of course does not mean the poet dodges
his civic responsibilities; only that poetry reconciles two
orders, the practical and the poetic, the former teaching us
how to live, the latter how to live more abundantly.

After a brief introductory statement of his thesis,

Heaney comes to his main subject, the utility of poetry or
what poetry means to life. Heaney adopts the technique of
comparison and cross argumentation. He first presents
various arguments and accusations against poetry and
then presents his own arguments in favour of poetry.

12
The first arguments against poetry comes from
Plato conceived this world as a world of illusions ~ ”
world we live in is an imperfect copy of the idea, ,
perfect world existing in our ideas. Hence ideal means ,
the idea. No one is perfect in this world. We all strive^ to ”^
perfect which we are actually not.

Plato in his ideal ”Republic” would allow only ^^

people who might take humanity to perfection. Accc^j.
to Plato, the poets take us away from the ideal, so h«; doeg
not allow poets to be a part of his Republic.

On the other hand Aristotle, the student of pjato

opposed his teacher and said that the poet was a v*sJonar^
and he sought the ideal in the actual appearar^ Q^
mankind. The poets are essential to maintain a bala •
the society.

Poetry performs catharsis and purifies human ^^

They are a healthy influence on the society accord. tQ
Aristotle. They keep their minds normal by ren\ovmK
wrong passions, false assumptions and confusion^
their minds.

If we consider Plato for instance, he believe^

poetry did not play any positive and constructive
the society -Plato accused poetry of being impractic^ ag ^
deals with the world of ideas. He believed that the<;reticaj
ideas or imaginary concepts cannot affect or make a
better citizen.

Theologically poets destroy the image the

image of God as the ultimate truth by questiorun
Since humans and the real world are copies of th«
poets make copies of copies hence they are twice
from reality.

Poetry makes man irrational and enc^lirages

impracticality and emotions to take over. Plat^
believed that poetry encourages moral degradation.
2* 04-Arguments in Defence of Poetry Seamus Heaney Redress of Poetry 04-Arguments
in Defence of Poetry 15

^^^^^^^^^^’

After presenting these allegations against poetry, ^agination. They compel the society to take on
the shape

Heaney steps forward and says that since times of their imagination,
immemorial, professors of poetry, apologists for it have

been trying to prove and show the present use of poetry. ’Thus **?. are communal and collective
in nature.

They have been explaining how poetry’s existence as a ^ ailegation is «*** Poets conJure UP °^
&ea own

form of art relates to our role and existence as citizens of reader’s sense of what is
desirable/possible/imaginable

society. Heaney refers to Philip Sidney who in ”Apology and ^ do nOt cater to aU walks of ^ or
society as a

for Poetry” writes- whole. Hence their contribution is very personal rather

than collective. Their contribution appears insignificant as

”A poet is a nightingale who sits in it is generally thought ’useful’ and ’practical’ to change
the

darkness and sings to cheer its own people at the communal/ collective level,
solitude and with sweet songs. Poetry

strengthens the faculty which is the organ To Presenl a counter argument Hea”eY 1uotes

of the moral nature of men, in the same Wallace Stevens who says:
manner as exercise strengthens a limb.” ”The nobility of poetry is a violence from

Heaney presents another important aspect of poetry within *at Protects us from a violence

i.e. it teaches as well as becomes a source of delight. without.

Through syllogism (logical argumentation) Heaney The revolutionaries/governments

compel the society

explains how Plato rejects poets and questions their role in to revolt physically to bring about a
change. They believe

an ideal society, yet he practices the highest form of poetic in registering a protest on physical
grounds expressing

imagination to conjure up the idea of the ideal world. physical/brutal force resulting in riots,
mass massacre and

This itself becomes contradictory to Plato’s former mass destruction at national level.

stance. Hence Plato’s world (Republic) is also a product of In short the revolutionaries/
governments deem it fit

imagination which is initially utilized by poetry to redress to give an expression to the violence
from within in the

what is wrong or aggravating in the prevalent conditions form of external violence. Heaney
advocates the grandeur’

of the world. of poetry as an outward expression itself which exhibits

Among many others who advocated the case of external violence.

poetry is Oscar Wilde. He said that life should imitate art The grace and respect of poetry lies in
the fact that it

because art presents ideal life. Art is life recreated by promotes a non violent way of registering a
strong

imagination, and imagination never conceives the personal protest. Poetry shows that it is
an expression in

imperfect. the form of diction and words that emerges as an outcome

The second argument against poetry comes in the of ** violence from within’ ProhibitmS m
expression of

form of the Governments and Revolutionaries. Both derive physical/external violence,

’useful’ and ’practical’ responses from the world of
Poetry appears as a way of making sense out of
chaos.. .finding a certain meaning from the
meaninglessness.

Another allegation against poetry comes from a

heckler (a propagandist/trouble maker) from the group of
Rhubarbarians. He cries against the mystification of art (to
make it uncertain, ambiguous hence leading to a general
confusion) and its appropriation by the grand supporters
of aesthetics. He calls it false. He believes that art and
poetry can’t change the destiny of man.

The destiny of man, actually, presents itself m

political terms. It is absolute nonsense according to him,
that poetry has the power to look into the great mysteries
of universe. The poets subvert the truth. They use obscure
metaphors to put a protest against authorities and
injustices.

Instead, poetry should be an applied art i.e. it should

have its use in the real life. It should be harnessed to
movements that alleviate distress/problems of mankind
by direct action.

In response to the heckler’s allegation, Wallace

Stevens presents a poet as a ’potent figure’ who has the
power to produce and give life to words. He is powerful
enough to give birth to a world to which we all turn
without being aware of it.

The poet gives life to ’supreme fiction’. All the

discoveries and modern advancements were a figment of
imagination once. Hence the poet presents a possibility for
an alternative world mat might exist one day in reality. All
human development is based on the power of imagination.

The poet is bestowed with the power to imagine first

and then convert it into reality. Actual experience is a
labyrinth which yields confusion, entrapment and a sense
Redress of Poetry 04-Arguments in Defence of Poetry 17

of being lost. It does not provide with a remedy or a clue to

get out of that situation.

Poet’s imagined response is an experience that

enables the person ’to foreknow his potential and rehearse
comebacks’. There is nothing to lose contrary to the real
experience. Poetry does not actually make you go through
the entire experience for real but it gives you a glimpse of
truth and prepares you for reality.

For example video simulations are used these days

to train pilots and equip them with various techniques. It
helps in developing their skills that are needed in different
situations/conditions. Hence, when put in a real situation,
they foreknow what to do knowing their skills/
potential/capacities.

Another example can be a situation in which you

want to go on a trip with friends and you need your
parents’ permission. You would rehearse several ways and
means in your mind to seek permission rattier than taking
a direct action. This helps you understand various pros
and cons of a particular situation without facing the
consequences of direct action.

We can conclude that poetry offers a liberating

response to reality without intervening into the actual.
Reality does not provide you with such an opportunity.

The last allegation comes from a political activist

who says that there is no point in imagining an order
which is comprehensive of events but unable to trigger
events itself. The poet lives in a world of his own which is
self created providing no benefits to others.

According to the political activist imagined images

will remain images no matter how original or inventive
they might be. And redress of poetry should be an
explication (explanation) of the political activists’ point of
view and be of any advantage to him. For example, if you
are an English poet at the Front during World War I,
pressure will be on you to dehumanize the face of the
enemy. Same holds true for journalists.

If you are an Irish poet during 1916’s ”Easter

rising”, you should and you must condemn the tyranny of
British. If you are an American poet in Vietnam War, you
should wave the flag rhetorically. There has always been a
general desire for simplification and there can be nothing
simple than siding with the government/political party.

Heaney very patiently presents his answer to the

political activists’ accusation. He says that if the imagined
image was to remain an image no matter what, then all the
latest technological advancements would not have been
possible at all. Flying, latest telecommunication etc. was
only a dream a few centuries back.

Now they are the living truths of our lives. The

political activist would want the poetry or poetic fiction to
be an advantage to himself but Simone Weil, in her book
”Gravity and Grace” presents a law that shatters the
political activist’s dreams She says:

”Obedience to the force of gravity is the

greatest sin.”

What she really means to say is that moving with the

majority is nothing but the greatest sin of all. The voice of
the poet should be genuine and based on truth.

Simone Weil introduces the concept of COUNTER

WEIGHTING i.e. balancing out the forces of redress. In
terms of poetry, it has a tendency to place a counter reality
in the scales - a reality which can only be imagined but
which nevertheless has weight.

Poetry encourages a view from both sides. It

emphasises that one must not side with the majority. One
mast nse against die gravitational pull of the
jnajority/herd mentality. One must have an opinion and
should learn to respect it too.

If you don’t side with the majority or do not blindly

follow one set of ideology, you might be able to free
yourself from the shackles of national/social/patriotic
constraints and pressures. When one is able to see the
reality from both ends, a British soldier in WWI can see a
German soldier as a human, a friend and a secret sharer.

An Irish poet might see the British government as a

body who might keep faith. An American poet might be
able to see the South Asian expedition as an imperial
betrayal.

This point of view arises various complexities

against the established norm that there is a desire for
simplification. One should not always see things in black
and white. There should be an acceptance for the grey
matter too.

Poetry gives us a message of peace. For example in

the poem, ’The Man He Killed’, Hardy says that war
divides people. If there are no wars, all will be friends.
Poetry tells us that enemies can be friends too. A poet is
always a humanist. He is never Parochial or Partisan.

Irina Ratshinskaya, Wilfred Owen, Cezlaw Milosz,

Osip Mandelstan are a few who have been living examples
of poets as humanists exercising the principle of
counterweighting.
To create a balance in the world the poet adds
t to the lighter scale. The poet attains the capacity to

see both sides of the picture and sides with the deserving

entityFor

example W.B. Yeats, an Irish Poet, remembers

^CHAPTER the Irish men who were killed in the Easter rising of 1916.

-** But he is also sorry for the Englishmen who died in the

fight. The poet does not discriminate between them as both

The Redressing Effects of were fightingfor their own idealsHence

poetry conveys that all men either black or

white, are all equal and all have the same feelings,
passions and blood etc.

* • The majority might be authority but not for the poet.

. The poet is not influenced by any pressure. He is driven by

There has been a lot of discussion whether poets and . . ,£_,•_,_ /^^i •.„ . ,. , , , ,. ,, y

,. ,, ... , . . , his vision/moral commitment which takes him beyond the

poetry are of any use in the complexities and miseries o realm of artistic ^^ ation mtQ Js

modern, every day lives. In this age of t^logic^ of the wilr^ to his own vision.

advancements, Heaney takes on the challenge of

defending poetry. Such poets of spiritual stamina incline to understand

,...,, t*16”” ner°ic role and remain strictly attached to the artistic

Heaney presents various arguments agamst poetrv j--,.^ ,..,, , , . J _Ar. .

, , r tu -u. u- * • f ’discipline at the heart of their vocation. With their vision

and then comes forth with his own arguments in favour of i „_„, .. . ., , , ,

6 . , and moral commitment they go beyond the realms of

poetry. He tries to prove that poetry not only Provides labelled roles
delight to human soul but also brings wisdom to mankind

Poetry has many redressing effects and Heaney discusses Another important redressing
effect of poetry is the
them one by one. exercise of hope. Both poetry and hope are inter-related.

_, ,. , . ,£ * c ^ • i,- A u Heanev quotes Vaclav Havel who says:

The first redressing effect of poetry is achieved by J

the counter weighting force. Since poetry itself is a ”Hope (poetry) is a state of mind. It is
not

glimpsed alternative, the poet stands witness to the plane the state of the world. Either we have
hope

of consciousness established in the poem. (Poetry) within us or we don’t. ..It is an

-1^1 -Ui.1. j.i j • A orientation of the spirit, an orientation of

The potential of the poem might be currently denied , . ^ ’ . . UU11 U1

, j, • T. • n. T i^. A t”6 heart...It is not the conviction that

or threatened by circumstances. It is the loyalty and l uiai

,, , .. ,., t, ,. , ” ..,, something will turn out well, but the

commitment of the poet s vision that he disobeys gravity „„,+.,•„! ^ ,. ^- ,

, ., , t - i TJ i. i i. i.- ^ certainly that something makes sense,

and sticks to that potential. He stays close to his own / 5 ociioc,

,, u ,ii ^ j u • j. jj£ regardless of how it turns out.

opinion although threatened by circumstances and does

not side with the majority.

20
o */„„ Redress oj roetry us-1 ne Kearessing Effects of Poetry 23

22 05-The Redressing Effects of Poetry Seamus Heaney ”^ i __£ 1 ^

can easily understand poetry as a pleasurable study of life.

deals with the matters of heart and spirit. It does not touch

the immediate world. It deals with the experience of the W.H. Auden is an English poet. His
famous trinity of

soul It opens new possibilities. poetic functions include making, judging and knowing.

v -A i M K,if it chow.: ’The Process of making is the faculty that stretches itself to

Poetry does not create the uieal world but:ishows ^ ^^ Qf ^.^ ^ ^ fo ^ ^ ^ destmation

the possibility of creating that world and this is; a taowin^ ^ fc h th ^ f d

reassurance in itself. This gives us confi|denc^ a be«« poets create to judge and that brings
awareness^

world can be created. This world is a labyrinth where man v & 5

is lost. Poetry shows us the right path. The fourth redress of poetry is its self-delighting

• i. A i ,oc f^ opt nut inventiveness; its joy in being a process of language as well

Poetry provides us with answers and clues to get ou as a representation of ^ ^ £e worM *

*

of this labyrinth. Poetry gives us a consolation that it at

present the situation is not favourable, there will be a time Poetry is a play of words. It is the
magic of language

when it would become favourable. that amuses and delights the reader but on the other hand

•T--TI, u rt,^ it is also a graphical and visual representation of the world

The vision of poetry brings a possibility, a hope that ^ ^ ^ ^^ .g ^ amgl Q£ both

diction

change will come one day. Poetry enables one to make a representation of the worfd

sense out of the labyrinth of life and puts us into the world
of possible solutions. Imagination actually colours the One can only experience both in poetry.
Such an

reality and gives it an artistic vision. opportunity can’t be availed while going through the

, . ., . .. , t^ actual experience. The play of words... rhythm and rhyme

Anomer redressmg effect of poetry is that it takes del.ghte ^ ^ ^^^ ^ ^^

one to wisdom through delight, not delight tnrougn representation of ^ acfua, world feads tQ
knowled

wisdom. When a poet writes the immediate concern is the wisdom and understandm

pleasure of the scene, the delight in experiencing the

words and expression. This relish and delight takes the W.B. Yeats states that:

poet to a certain meaning and understanding. me win must not usurp ^e work of

The world of reality and imagination co-exist and imagination - feasibility or practicality

they are complimentary to one another. The process of should not take over a poet’s vision. The
’

creation takes place on the grounds of imagination. At this poet should and must maintain his
artistic

time it is free of the grand questions of poetics. It is sheer integrity. He should not narrow down
his

delight and felicity of the rise and fall of the inner voice scope by limiting poetry to
certain

the rhythm and rhyme of words and pleasure of the art d dimensions of time and space. It should
be

expression at the time of creation. free from ^Y bounds implied by the will.

r ., , The poet should make first to later

judge

Man studies poetry to amuse and satisfy his soul bu and knQw Not ^ verga Thg ct Q[

in this psychological state he also attains wisdom. Thus w«

poetry is psychological not practical.
Poetry does not force man to go and fight.
But poetry shows what is wrong or right.

Poetry’s main function is to create psychological

effect rather than leading to violent practicality. This
reminds us of Heaney’s reference to Wallace Stevens in the
earlier part of the lecture. Wallace states that:

”the nobility of poetry is a violence front

within that protects us from a violence
without.”

Another important redressing effect of poetry

emerges as a power, giving voice to aspects which have
not been expressed in ethnic, social, sexual and political
life in factual writing. Tims poetry appears as a very-strong
weapon to correct various social injustices.

In the world today, politics has entered literature.

We find the ’post colonial backlash’ and ’silence breaking’
characteristics in the poetry written in the late Twentieth
Century.

Poetry is one forum where one can discuss most

freely those topics/elements which are absent in factual
writings as they are considered controversial.

Heaney states that if the poet transcends into the

domain of the previously denied facts or suppressed
realities, he should make sure that his poetry should never
become propaganda.

Heaney quotes Wallace Stevens, that poetry creates

an alternative world to the world of fact. Poetry suggests
what ought to be. Poetry should maintain its integrity at all
times. It should not dissolve itself in politics. If it does so it
will lose its meanings and context. Poetry should be for its
own sake.
Poetry can maintain its artistic integrity yet can
promote cultural and political change at the same time,

Allama Iqbal’s poetry is one living example. His

poetry incessantly tries to change the plight of the Muslims
of the Subcontinent yet it does not deviate from the
domains of artistic grandeur. Hence a poet can very
successfully articulate his imagined consciousness and the
national ideology.

Irish poetry is another example having a firm

ground in national purpose. In emergent cultures, the
struggle of individual consciousness towards affirmation
and distinctness becomes a collective consciousness
towards self definition when expressed in poetic diction.

Heaney moves forth to introduce the sixth

redressing effect of poetry. In the process of redress poetry,
reshapes, redefines ideas of literary excellence originally
considered ideals. Poetry gives new ideas and opens new
horizons of thought.

All writers begin as readers and even the most

disaffected ones internalize the norms and forms of
tradition from which they want to break.

Edward Said shares Heaney’s point of view in

Culture and Anarchy. He says that the sensibility of the
people of the colonies is coloured by the sensibility of the
imperial masters. Imperialism has circulated in our minds
a culture that we try to reject.

The rebellion of a poet towards a particular

tradition arises from that very tradition. Before the
partition of India, Hindus launched a big campaign against
reading and speaking English. Their slogans encouraged
people of subcontinent to speak Hindi and read Hindi. But
ironically the slogans were written in Urdu.
^o to-1 ne Keoressing miects 01 r« etry seamus tieaney

If a poet wants to rebel against a tradition, he will

have to deny the normative authority of the dominant
language. A good, responsible poet has read vastly about
the tradition in which he writes. You can’t rebel against a
tradition if you don’t become a part of it first. Hence to
question authority/challenge the normative authority of a
language is also a form of redress.

If a poet’s creativity is challenged by reading other

poets, he may not be a true poet. The more one reads about
other cultures, the more grasp one gets in starting a new
tradition. Both Thomas Me Donagh and James Joyce
challenged and questioned the authority of British Empire
and English lyric/novel and its weakness but their
principal language was English itself. Both did not criticize
for the sake of criticism.

The seventh redressing effect of poetry introduced

by Heaney is that poetry works towards an inclusive
consciousness, not towards simplification but towards a
complex reality.

As long as the imagined consciousness falls within

the domain of the world in which we live, poetry is
fulfilling its counterweighting function. It becomes an
alternative truth to which we can turn before which we can
know ourselves in a more fully empowered way.

Heaney says that poetry is comprehensive. It is not

merely a product of events. Poetry gives an understanding
of life. It doesn’t change We as a whole but shows us what
should be changed. To read such poetry is an experience of
a life time which is both memorable and increases in
values as we proceed in life.

Heaney quotes Jorge Lois Borges who explains

such an experience...about what happens between the
poem and the reader:
Redress oj roeiry u:>-1 ne Keoressmg Jbiiects 01 roetry in

”The taste of the apple lies in the contact

of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit
itself, in a similar way, poetry lies in the
meeting of the poem and the reader, not in
the lines of symbols printed on pages of a
book. What is essential is...the thrill, the
almost physical emotion that comes with
each reading.”

Heaney explains that poetry is a joint effort of the

reader and the writer. The poet must be the spokesman of
the reader. The poet echoes the feelings of the reader i.e.
the poet must be integrated with his society.

Jorge Lois Borges explains this ”physical emotion”

and suggests that it fulfils the need we experience to
recover a past or prefigure a future. Hence poetry
incorporates both pleasure and wisdom.

Poetry has the suggestive truth at the communal

level as well as the personal level. It has the power to
satisfy both the spiritual and the physical needs of
mankind. Poetry not only provokes all one’s faculties but it
also satisfies all the desires that it initially awakens.

There is a sensation of both ’arrival’ and ’prospect’ in

poetry that not only recovers a past but also prefigures a
future hence completing the circle of one’s being. We can
very safely borrow a phrase from George Seferis’s ’Note
books’ that poetry is ’strong enough to help’.

Poetry is actually a link between the real and the

ideal. Poetry takes us to the paradise while we stay on the
earth. It builds for us a world of aspirations. We live in a
world which is given to us. We did not choose it. But in
our imagination we create our own world.

Poetry shows us the glimpse of things which we

miss in our lives. Hence we can very safely state that yes
poetry brings hope, consolation, assurance, comfort and
confidence. Poetry plays the most important and vital role
in our lives. Poetry through its combination of wisdom
and delight helps mankind in the complexities of life.

In short, Heaney has defended poetry as useful,

noble and counter weighting. Poetry helps man resolve the
paradoxes of life. Poetry gives the ideal, the perfect form of
the imperfect reality.

That is why Oscar Wilde claimed:

”Nature’s redemption can come only through

art.”
George Herbert: The Perfect
Example of a True Poet

Seamus Heaney considers George Herbert as the

perfect example of a true poet. Herbert is one of the
important metaphysical poets. His lyric is the native lyric
of England and represents that tradition of culture and
faith which the English Empire tried to impose on other
people.

This poetry makes a true paradigm (a complete

pattern) of psychological, political, metaphorical and even
metaphysical mode of English sensibility fully realised in
poetry and juxtaposes the words of imagination and the
world of experience.

George Herbert appears as the perfect balance and

contains all the qualities of Donne, Vaughan, Crashaw
combined into one. George Herbert exemplifies the
balance to see things as they really are. His ’daylight sanity
and vigour’, his ’via-media between preciousness and
vulgarity’ are the characteristics that make him stand
unique and exceptional among all the metaphysical poets.

A few accused that Herbert’s poetry touches the

domains of being a typical representation of English
colonial mindset, Heaney elevates him by saying that even
the most imposed upon colonial wij- discerns in the clear
element of Herbert’s poetry a true example of the shape of

29
things, psychologically, politically, metaphorically and
even metaphysically.

In simpler words, Herbert has the capacity to

envisage things as they really are. Herbert’s work falls
within the coordinates of ’the fully realized poetry’ that
Heaney has attempted to express in his lecture.

Herbert’s poetry is marked with the conflicts and

paradoxes of his religious belief which he beautifully
represents through the use of brilliant but homely wit. His
poems follow a liturgical movement of antithetical
relationships.

The pattern of Herbert’s imagination has an updown,

criss-cross motion with the reversals and symmetry
of such a motion. Tensions lead to relaxations and
dialogues from chimerically opposed premises lead to a
new start. Most abundantly used paradoxes and antithesis
in Herbert’s poetry are creator/creature, heaven/earth,
soul/body, eternity /time, life/death, Christ/man,
grace/guilt, virtue/sin, divine love/courtly love etc.

The beauty of Herbert’s poetry lies in the fact that

the use of these antithetical devices are experienced more
immediately as emotional dilemmas rather than boring
advice.

Herbert’s poems are complex and possess the

conceptual and theological machinery but once
understood and moved across the plains of comprehension
they bring joy, pleasure and relaxation to the reader.

There is a lot of movement in Herbert’s poetry.

During the course of Herbert’s poetry, one can feel the
imbalance and rapid movement in language but in the end
the equilibrium is attained by the reader enjoying these
paradoxes.
Herbert’s poetry not only portrays the truths of
religion but also performs the work of art. His poern ’The
pulley’ can be read as a mimetic rendering of any pulleylike
exchange of forces but equally it presents itself as an
allegory of the relationship between humanity arid the
God head, a humanity whose hearts, in St. Augustine’s
phrase, ’are restless till they rest in Thee’.

In this poem there is a pun on the word ’rest’. In the

beginning it gives the meanings of repose. The word ’rest’
gradually starts it descent and as soon as it reaches the
limit in the reader’s mind, another meaning starts
ascending which is equivalent to ’remainder’ or ’left over’.
At the end, the equilibrium is restored, both by argument
and by the rhythm and rhyme as ’rest’ and ’breast’ come
together is a satisfying closure.

The name ’Pulley’ has deep impact and undercurrent

following throughout the poem. The play of words is
fashioned in a pulley like movement. The word ’rest’
ascends and descends to attain an equilibrium in the end.
But as with any pulley system, the movement of
equilibrium is tentative and capable of a renewed
dynamism The Pulley’ suggests that ’the mind and
aspirations of the human beings are turned towards the
heavenly in spite of al the pleasures and penalties of being
upon the earth.

’The Pulley’ appears are a platform where the

opposites meet where we pull in order to raise. Herbert
explains that God gave everything to man but denied him
rest, because if man gets rest, he will forget God.
Therefore, the moment of rest as in a pulley is also the
moment of next morion. Suffering elevates man. It brings
out the best and brings man closer to God.

By reading the poem, it might not strike us as big

league poetry. Its pitch is low and it appears subdued as a
whole. It generates that compensatory pleasure against the
32 Ofe-George Herbert: The Perfect... Seamns Hea,,fv

surroundings that brings it to stand in the line of ajj

realized works. It contains the coordinates and
contradictions of experience and presents beautifully the
cosmology of Yin and Yang (the opposites attract one
another and they are incomplete without one another).
Hence ’The Pulley’ describes how both thesis and
antithesis together leads towards a synthesis. This poem
helps one realize the quest for the self and the other.

Heaney brings forth another fine example ot

Herbert’s poetry. The Collar’ is yet another example of
Herbert’s excellence and expertise as a poet. The poem
initially generates meaning of collar as an article of clerical
clothing and then shifts it to a fit of anger.

There is a reversal of emotional states from affront to

peace. There is a technical relish of postponing stanzaic
composure until the last four lines. Heaney compliments
Herbert for the dynamic use of structure of the poem to
link with the theme.

The Collar talks about the vocation of priesthood.

Herbert conveys the message that everything is and
happens according to the will of the Lord. The Collar
might be suffocating, binding and strangulating but it also
liberates. Each word acquires a new meaning when the
poet uses it in his poem. Hence the poet is the recycler of
language.

Herbert’s poems exhibit an attractive forthrightness.

His articulation has an exhilarating clarity about it and
gives the reader an airy sensation. But we cannot miss
Herbert’s intelligence which has incorporated itself in all
his poetry.

In ’Love in’ he talks about a country parson who

many not have gone to the Gulag (a source of religious
inspiration) for his faith, but he possesses a certain Russian
down-to-earthnesf. Herbert presents Love as a
t>’

ersonification of God. The beauty with which the

benevolence of love, which encounters the sinner, is
runatchable. The generosity of God is presented in the
touching and heart warming manner. *

Herbert’s poetry best exemplifies the redress of

poetry as the strain of love for human beings animates his
religious poetry.
7

CHAPTER

Heaney’s Prose Style

Heaney, besides being a poet and a critic, is also an

accomplished prose writer. He is a scientific and analytical
thinker but at the same time he also has mystical
tendencies. His comments are logical as well as intuitive.

Heaney’s approach is rational, scientific and it is

imaginative as well. This is a paradox that Heaney K
scientific and imaginative at the same time. But he does
convey his thought in an impressive and convincing way
He seeks balance and does justice to both reality and
imagination. He tries to convey his thought and meaning
through appropriate language and words and he avoids all
superfluous expressions.

His approach is anecdotal. Heaney’s style is that he

begins by giving examples or by telling stories. He
develops an argument with the help of stories, as he begins
his essay The Redress of Poetry with the story of the
fantastic crew from some other world arriving on the
earth.

He also has an intuitive approach. He very much

bases his arguments on the sixth sense though he is a
practical thinker. Thus, like the romantics, he believes in
intuition and like the neo-classics, he believes in reason
and practice. Thus Heaney’s style is a blend of the classical
and the romantic.

34
Heaney’s approach is historical. He sees the issues
, p0etry in the historical perspective. For example, he
0 ^g the essay with Plato’s condemnation of poetry.

He seems to be a controversialist. He challenges the

heckler and talks of him contemptuously.

His style and approach sound very much like those

of the schoolmen when he talks of the metaphysical
elements of poetry. He has a streak of the schoolmen is
him like Donne. He is impressed with the metaphysical
poetry and poets like John Donne and George Herbert. His
tone is challenging and even assertive like the tone of the
metaphysical poets. He can also be flippant like Bacon or
Donne.

He is also didactic. He believes that the poet has a

responsibility, that the poet has to answer certain
questions, that the poet must respond. Life raises certain
questions and poets give their answers. He believes that
poetry gives lessons. This is Heaney’s mysticism.

Heaney is also an idealistic. He believes that poetry

gives an alternative view of life - a view of what life ought
to be. He tries to prove that poetry shows us what is
desirable as well as possible.

Another aspect of his classical approach is that he

believes is authority. He quotes other writers, critics and
poets in his favour, like pinsky, Havel etc. This is a
classical style of argumentation. His arguments are based
upon other views besides his own reason.

There are many inter-textual references in his

writing, such as references to the poems of Robert Frost,
Hardy, George Herbert and his own poetry. There are
references from poetry as well as from prose.

His approach is the approach of a scientist. He is

analytical but his analysis is very much controlled and
jo u/-neaney s rroie aiyie aeumuii neane$ ne&res* vj fveiry u/-rteaneys frose Style 37

dictated by his religious beliefs as we have seen in h^ Heaney’s prose style is also aphoristic.
But his

comments on George Herbert’s The Pulley. aphorisms are not as striking as those of Bacon. Still
there

Heaney is very much conscious of paradoxes, is a glimpse of his terseness of thought. As he

says:
”creators/creature, heaven/earth, soul/bod\ Poetry is comprehensive of events

eternity/time, life/death, Christ/man, grace/guilt but not itself productive of new

virtue/sin, divine love/courtly love.” All these antitheses events,

help Heaney a lot in his defence of poetry. This is Heaney’ Similarly he says that poetry leads
from delight to

antithetical style which had also been very popular amonjwisdom, not from wisdom to delight.
These kinds of
the schoolmen. paradoxes, balances, Counter-balances, comparisons and

Heaney’s prose style has the qualities of precisioi contrasts are typical of Heaney’s prose style.
He also
and conciseness. He tries to convey his thought anc appeals to the common sense and the
everyday practice of
meaning through appropriate language and words. Hi< life to bring a point home, e.g., he says
that as heckler has
use of proper words in proper places is a great help u vision so does the government. The
Government also
conveying his thought clearly and in a straight forwan visualizes the system and the heckler also
does the same,
manner. but the poet gives an alternative to both.

His style is anecdotal. He quotes different critics Heaney talks of ”physical emotion”. That
means the
their opinions and their stories. He develops his argumen emotional force can be physically
expressed as one shaking
through inter-textual references. His prose style is allusive with excitement. Like Eliot Heaney
also believes in a
too and this quality of his style helps him a lot ii personal mind and a communal mind. The two
become
supporting his view-point. one, as in the case of Irish poets, poetry and politics

In short, Heaney defends poetry on the ground o^01”6 one- ^ individual poet has the some
feeling as
utility. He deals with the subject matter of poetry anc*6 whole community and in that case
feeling of liberation
brings examples of many poets and critics in his favour doesn’t become a propaganda.

Definitely, his arguments are strong because they arf Finally, Heaney believes that the dominant
culture
rational and to the point. His language is not only at permeates into the sensibility of the
subjugated people,
artistic device, it is also a vehicle for the conveyance oThis is what Edward said also says, in
Culture and
thought. His style, convincing arguments, lucidity o Imperialism, that culture is never exclusive;
it is affected
expression and precise examples add to the force of hi’by other cultures. T.S. Eliot also says the
same thing when
essay. he asserts that tradition is like a river which carries

His approach is to seek symmetry. It is the classicaeverything that comes in its way. Therefore, it
becomes a
approach of always seeking balance. Heaney is of the vievPr°Wem with the liberation
movements-The subjugated
that poetry seeks equal love for all human being withou P^°ple fight the dominant culture by
using the idiom of
making any distinction between friends and foes. J”3* culture. We condemn English by using the
English

language. Through language and through Media we have

been influenced by what we condemn. This creates
38 07-Heaney’s Prose Style Seamus Heaney

•^”-^^^MMMWMM^^tmmM^V^^MM^^^

another paradox, and it is a cultural paradox. His

approach is scientific; he raises questions like Bacon.
Heaney uses linguistic paradox as well as a cultural
paradox. He wants the poet not to be prejudiced and not to

...

be parochial.

Heaney’s approach is partly religious, partly

intuitive, partly anecdotal and partly rational. Thus it is a
blend of the neo-classic, the scientific, the romantic and the
pragmatic. He is a versatile and practical thinker. He,

unlike the schoolmen, is not dogmatic. He talks, argues, !£.. T/fTV//-//•*,**«

analyses and critically evaluates the commonly held beliefs **J ’ * WWWWIr

and then gives his own philosophy on the basis of the

opinions of different critics, poets and writers and all this The Redress of Poetry began as the
lectures delivered

makes his essay The redress of poetry a literary by Seamus Heaney during his term as
professor of poetry
achievement. at Oxford- ”The election of an Irish poet to this most English

of pots was itself an act awash in political notation; and

Heaney took as his subject the adequacy of poetry in a
world of violence and political crisis. The redress the
proposed was not just a reparation for wrongs sustained,
but a restoration of spirit in the rubble of history.

This might seem a wish foolishly Utopian, wee

Heaney not keen to establish that poetry can only
dangerously aim for political change. Though it may on
occasion intervene in the world, poetry offers instead what
Auden called an ”alirming flame” - an alternate wor.ld
where words have transcendent potential and fulfilling
force.

Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and

who often has been a compelling analyst of the role of a
Private art in a public world, has nervously accepted the
fflantle of T.S. Eliot as the poet designated to pronounce on
Poetry and culture. These notes on the language of poetry
and its purposes in politics are most forceful when furthest
from the intention of the lectures. The poets crucial to
- Marlowe, Clare, Wilde, Hugh Macdiarmid,
39
Dylan Thomas, and other - are, like him, much concerned
with language, whether displaced from natural dialect or
redressing a dialect possessed (in the case of Clare and the
18th - Century Irishman Brian Merriman) or reinvented (in
the case of MacDiarmid).

Heaney - the Irishman

As an Irishman who writes in English, Heaney is

particularly sensitive to the politics and transgressions of
language, his comments only rarely concern his own
practice, but where he deals with his own revisions (on
using ”worked,” for example, rather than the ”wrought” of
his local dialect: ”Once you think twice about a local usage
you have been displaced from it”) or writes on poets
whose influence he wrestled with early on, he offers a
permanent understanding of the art.

Heaney has the most flexible and beautiful lyric

voice of our age, and his prose often answers his poetry in
a run of subtle and subtly resonant phrasing (as well as in
the witty brilliance of his imagery, as when he describes
”the deadpan cloudiness of a word processor”).

Language is often the particular pleasure of these

lectures, and it is therefore disturbing to find them so
permeable and unresistant to the more brutal vocabulary
of contemporary criticism - to ’multivalent’, ”devalorizing”,
”empowered”, ”marginalized”, ”phallocentric”, ”patriarchal”
and ”the other”. Such language urges, in its blind
but coercive way, all the easy political solutions his
irgument otherwise opposes.

The essays in The Redress of Poetry have more

cumulative force than individual character. Though
seldom striking in themselves, they are convincing in their
belief that poetic invention ”represents not a submission to
the conditions of (the) world but a creative victory over
them.” If Heaney does not have the original prose voice of
us-iniroaucuon oy William Logom 41

Auden or Eliot, he has maintained for English poetry a

responsive, gratified and radical ear.

”It is still not understood,” thunders Helen Vendler

in the introduction to The Breaking of Style, ”that in lyric
writing, style in its largest sense is best understood as a
material body.”

The schoolmarm opening to such a sentence, the

unnecessary exaggeration of the two superlatives, the
leaden repetition ,of ”understood,” and finally that
outrageous (but outrageously fashionable) metaphor of the
body: This is rhetoric gone wild with self-esteem. It is odd
that a writer on style can be so insensitive to style herself.

Style is no more a ”material body” than it is a bowl

of soup (we speak of a writer’s ”body of work,” but we
don’t mean one witch myopia, bad breath and an
unpleasant husband). Vendler needs the metaphor to
claim that by changing style the poet ”perpetuates an act
of violence, so to speak, on the self.”

This is to make every change in style a scar or a

suicide; but many changes in poetic style might be called
natural or organic, the residue of mad growth or slow
invention, the sin of wisdom or the virtue of calculation.

Vendler is one of the most acute of contemporary

critics, and her close reading of stylistic changes in the
work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney and
Jorie Graham attends to aspects of style not always given
formal attention - Hopkins’s adoption of sprung rhythm
may be familiar, but not Heaney ’s concentration of parts of
speech or Jorie Graham’s changes in line length.

Vendler wants to establish that ”the first duty of any

poet is to reconfigure felt experience in an analogical
rhythm - prosodic, syntactic, or structural”; and when the
escapes the duties of her metaphor (duties that lead her
into formulations like ”Hopkins’ new zigzag stylistic
42 08-Introduction by William Logom Seamus Heaney

body is more nervous and fluctuating than his younger

stylistic body”) her readings (of, for example, Heaney’s

”inbetweenriess”) have all the force and ingenuity of
which this critic.

Hearey’s Views of Style

These chapters on style began as the Richard Ellman

Memorial Lectures at Emory University and have been
published simultaneously with The Given and the Made,
Vendler’s T.S. Eliot Memorial lectures at the University of
Kent. The latter lectures, on the donnee or ”given” in a
poet’s life that is transfigured into art, pair two older
postwar poets, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, with
two much younger contemporaries, Rita Dove and Jorie
Graham.

The pairing - intriguing, unbalanced, entirely to the

advantage of the older poets - reveals the weakness of
Vendler’s critical vision. She is superb on his ”disloyalty,”
both to family and to art; and her consideration of
Berryman is fond but overstretched, (if she is
unconvincing in arguing that the enclosed form of
Berryman’s Dream songs restages Freud’s analytical hour,
her suggestion that ”successive sessions of psychiatric
therapy may be seen as another form of the ’sessions

of silent thought’ which generated Shakespeare’s

sonnets” is sidesplitting.)

Like all these lectures, The Given and the Made is

limited by its occasion - a lecture requires a specific length
more than a specific subject and becomes a Procrustean
bed for the partial ideas or rambling observations that an
essay might allow precise development.

Vendler has a soft spot for younger poets, though

her taste has been wildly uneven. He close consideration of
Rita Dove cannot conceal the utter dullness of the poetry,
while her critical loyalty to Jorie Graham claims a major
Redress of Poetry OS-Introduction by William Logom 43

0*^^* ---^^^^ .-.

reputation for a poet more interesting to read about than to

read, whose philosophical musings do not yet have the
depth or resonance of Wallace Stevens’s (and whose
trilingual childhood, Vendler’s biographical ”given,” has
little effect on her poems).

Vendler has attempted a higher biographical

criticism that risks being biographically reductive: Her
analysis of the ways the life is transposed or transformed
into art is without insight into the means. We remain
ignorant of why Berryman and Lowell could return as art
the ruins of manic depression or family history.

The stylistic emphasis of the one book and the

biographical concerns of the other avoid judgment on
language - its currents of meaning, ambiguity and
betrayal. Vendler is too susceptible to hall-of-mirrors
notions that poems are mimetic responses to themselves she
is always looking for and applauding a ”structural and
rhythmic enactment” (mimetic accuracy is ”the virtue, the
fundamental ethics, of art”) - but a critic who can write of
Berryman’s ”layer of psychic squalor beneath high artistic
convention” or the ”inescapable social accusation of
blackness” suffered by Dove is worth the attention of close
argument.

Anthony Hecht is our country’s darkest, most brutal

and moral, most magnificent living poet, an heir to
Elizabethan manners. He richly deserves the Nobel Prize
(though, in the way of fallen things, Allen Ginsberg or
John Ashbery is much more likely to receive it). His
Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, now
published as On the Laws of the Poetic Art, are a defense
of certain traditional understandings of poetry - that
poetry is an art most eloquent when impersonal and
complex, full of tension and contradiction, ripe in
mythological and literary relation.
*»•+ ua-iniroauction oy wniiam Logom seamus tteaney

The lectures are informal and discursive affairs, and

in their slapdash desk-learning recall a certain Victorian
mode - a precis of a particularly jumbled half-paragraph
might run: ”Book of Job a sublime poem - imagery drawn
from architecture - architecture the oldest of the arts earth
described as building in Old Testament - God a
builder-architect, embraced by Masons - Haydn a Mason Baron
Gottfried von Swieten, too.”

There are curious facts galore, but facts never

marshaled into argument. Hecht’s method is to support
some entirely uncontentious notion with a list of examples
and quotations, some absurdly long. ”The Laws of the
Poetic Art” seem finally to be that poetry is sometimes
visual, sometimes musical; that sometimes the wilderness
is paradise; that sometimes poetry is public, or private, or
composed of contraries. This is not a distinguished
addition to a series that engendered Kenneth Clark’s The
Nude and E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion.

When Hecht argues that, contrary to much

modernist thinking, poetry does not have to reside in
”things,” or suggests that ”the framed limits of a painting”
may be a rough equivalent to Aristotle’s dramatic ”plot,”
or writes of ”this restless ambition to render the visible
world in words,” you have a sense of how charged with
idea these lectures might have been.

But the mariner is ss often professorial and the prose

occasionally so flyblown (”he had not evinced the normal
attempts at verbal articulation”), if s like watching your
great-aunt dr- tg jp as Dr. Johnson. Poetry will not be
rescued from tK* philistines in this way (and there’s a lot
of tub-thumping about philistines). Hecht’s poems remain
a far more eloquent defense of the art.

Seamus Heaney seems to have led a remarkably

innocent adolescence. Whereas the Irish farming country I
remember was a place, for most of its young people, to
ucv-lliu UUUCUOI1 Ijy William JL^OgOm

experiment with fags arid drink and sex, Heaney’s

initiations are on an altogether higher plane: robbing a
nest, (almost) sticking his hand in frogspawn, stripping
with a friend and bathing naked together in a dark and
weedy bog hole. It may have been that the teenage Heaney
messed about with the rest of us, but he doesn’t find those
episodes worth reconsidering.

Eroticism blooms in the experience of nature, while

violence and the threat of violence come mainly from the
outside, from the public world beyond. It’s hard not to
view this reluctance to be seen to be behaving badly as of a
piece with Heaney’s sense of the writer’s responsibility, his
stress on the duties of reflection and balance.

Heaney’s ability to look from the other side of the

boundary, to have ”second thoughts”, as he calls them, is
evident throughout this hefty selection of his prose from
the past 30 years, including lectures previously published
in his three books of essays, but also newspaper pieces,
essays in journals, and some unpublished lectures. Like its
predecessor, Preoccupations (1980), it brings together
autobiographical essays, including the well-known
”Mossbawn” and ”Feeling into Words” from the early
book, with literary appreciations and reviews.

For all its perceptiveness about other writers, the real

interest of the book lies in its laying out a life in reading:
from its beginnings in the Messenger, the Dandy and the
Beano, to the comforting familiarity of Patrick Kavanagh
(”When I opened is book, I came up against the
windowpane of literature”), and the alien Eliot, send to
him in blue linen covers at boarding school, and perhaps
never fully assimilated. Finders Keepers goes on to record
Heaney’s immersion in the work of modern American
Poets (Lowell, Bishop, Plath), as well as their English
(Auden, Hughes, Larkin), Scottish (Muir, MacDiarmid),
and Central European (Herbert, Milosz) counterparts.
The Irish are here as welt of course. And though he
is never less than insightful, it’s tempting to divine a
special quickening when Heaney writes about his
countrymen. Engaged by Yeats, or his contemporaries,
Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, he is clearly in his element,
whereas encounters with Marlowe, or John Clare, say,
seem the result of a more deliberate process of discovery.

The common thread is a spontaneous, insistent

relating of poetry to his own experience. His profoundest
initiations are fed back through his reading and writing.
As the anthology’s title suggests, the glee of discovery, the
flush of pride in staking a claim, is balanced by the
steadier pleasures of taking possession, of quilting
another’s wisdom into one’s own.

”Fidelity” is a recurrent term in Heaney’s

vocabulary, maybe even one of the hinges of his thought,
and it is central to the way he makes these poets his own.
Fidelity marries an ideal of honesty and accuracy (even in
the case of Bishop - ”good manners”), a readiness to
confront the brute, unadorned facts of existence, with
allegiance to the claims of the imagination. Poetry matters,
because it ”holds the line between the imagined and the
endured.”

One of Heaney’s finest explorations of this tension is

the brilliant and moving essay on ”Last Things” in Larkin
and Yeats. He deeply respects Larkin’s inconsolability in
the face of the surest fact of all, but responds more vividly,
in the end, to Yeats’s visionary transformations. The poet’s
plumbing of ”metaphysical need” may already be a kind
of answer, a promise mat we can, as Yeats puts it, ”hold in
a single thought reality and justice.”

Is this only wish-fulfillment, a flimsy, evasive

consolation? Heaney is alert to that danger. But he remains
confident that ”a good poem allows you to have your feet
on the ground and your head in the air simultaneously”.
No other commentator has so clearly tracked the seesaw
of these conflicting demands in post-war poetry - a
term with more than chronological convenience in his case.
For though Heaney’s take on poetic redress is most readily
construed in terms of the war in Northern Ireland, his
earliest memories date from a time when American troops
manoeuvred in the fields along the road, and returning
bombers groaned in the skies overhead. His first reading
primer was the ration book.

Global conflict and its challenge to the imagination

lie in the background of Heaney’s response to Bishop,
Lowell, Eliot, Auden. And the book ends with Milosz,
witness to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, in whom, Heaney
suggests, ”the felicity of the art was in itself a
heartbreaking reminder of the desolation of the times.”

Heaney agrees with Joseph Brodsky that the only

thing poetry and politics have in common ”are the letters P
and O”. But in a couple of outspoken newspaper articles
on the Troubles, one dating from 1971, the other from the
IRA ceasefire in 1994, he also affirms his conviction that
politics is never self-sufficient.

Unless we can take a leap beyond the present, open

”a space where hope can grow”, the political arena will
always be threatened by deadlock.

Hope, as he outlines it here, sounds very like his

definition of poetry as pitched between things as they are
and things as they should be. It’s the difference, if you like,
between echo’s repetitions and the transformations of
rhyme. And just as, for Heaney, a rhyme ”must be
earned”, so hope grows from ”the conviction that
something is worth working for, however it turns out”.

Heaney never forgets that the generosity of the

imagination may turn out to be too benign. But without a
willingness to venture into the world ”beneath the surface
l UUUllIUIl Uy TT IllIAlli

and just beyond the horizon”, we can expect no escape

from division and stasis. ”Second thoughts” suggests both
wariness or mannerliness and the courage to rethink, to
transcend ingrained conventions. It is this compound of
caution and adventurousness, of dignity and daring,
which makes for Heaney’s spirited some of the poet’s

responsibility Introduction to Redress of

Poetry by Seamus Heaney

The first poem quoted in full in this book is George

Herbert’s The Pulley’; the last is one of my own, a twelveline
section from a sequence called ’Squarings’. The
’Squarings’ poem tells the story of an apparition
experienced by the monastic community in Clonmacnoisie
sometime during the Middle Ages: & crew-man came
down to them out of a visionary boat in the sky but could
not stay and had to be helped back out of the human
element because, as the abbot perceived, he would have
drowned in it if he had remained.

’The Pulley’ is a parable about God devising a way

to keep the minds and aspirations of human beings turned
towards the heavenly in spite of all the pleasures and
penalties of being upon earth.

Both poems are about the way consciousness can be

alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of
reality and still find a way of negotiating between them,
but I did not notice this correspondence between their
thematic and imaginative concerns until the whole book
had been assembled in manuscript.

Once I saw the link, however, I was delighted. It

confirmed my trust-the trust in which the subjects of
these lectures were chosen - that a reliable critical course
could be plotted by following a poetic sixth sense. In fact I

49
SO 09-lntroduction by Searnus Heaney Seamus Hean^ Redress of Poetry
09-Introduction by Seamus Heaney 51

~~> •”

now realize that the overall theme of the pieces collect^ as a borrowed object or a cash debt, is
the

here grew out of poetry I had been writing in the yeais ground where the centaur walks,

preceding the summer of 1989 when my tenure at Oxford j^ perception about the way art
responds (and

S311’ exercises its responsibility) has a special relevance in

Poems and parables about crossing from the dornair relation to the concluding section of
’Directive’ in which

of the matter-of-fact into the domain of the imagined ha« the quester has been led beyond
everything familiar been

among the work that appeared in The Haw Lantern ’Back out of all this now too much for us’-to
a deserted

in 1987, and the Clonmacnoisie poem was only one of farmstead on a mountainside. This site
Frost then presents

several about being transported ’out to an other side’ that as a locus of knowledge, a scene of
instruction and

had surfaced not long afterwards. revelation:

What lay behind these poems was an interest in ’tht First there’s the children’s house of
makefrontier
of writing’ and, in fact, I was explicitly concerned believe,

with this idea in an early lecture (not reprinted here) which Some shattered dishes underneath a
pine,

I gave at the beginning of my second year. . The playthings ^ ^e playhouse of the

There I discussed Robert Frost’s ’Directive’ as an children.

allegorical defence of poetry and since the terms of that Weep for what little things could make

discussion are echoed at various points in the following them glad.

pages, I shall touch upon it again briefly by way of Then ^ ^ house ^ ^ nQ more &

introduction. house/

But before doing so, I want to bring up a passage by But only a belilaced cellar hole,

Robert Pinsky from his essay on ’Responsibilities of the NQW slowly dosing Uke a dent ^ d .

poet’, because it meshes in general very interestingly with

.. ,,., it J.’ 4 u «. ,. Trus was no playhouse but a house in

my own notion of the redress of poetry and corroborates r ’

63TTlGSt

my reading of the Frost poem as being in some oblique but

important way an apologia for all art. An artist, Pinsky Your destination and your destiny’s

writes, A brook that was the water of the house,

needs not so much an audience, as to feel a Coid as a spring as yet so near its source,

need to answer, a promise to respond. The Too lofty and original to rage.

promise may be a contradiction, it may be (We know ^ vaUey streams that wnen

unwanted, it may go unheeded...but it is aroused

owed, and the sense that it is owed is basic ,.,.„ , , . , , , ,

... .. Will leave their tatters hung on barb and

requirement for the poet s good feeling , *

about the art. This need to answer, as firm

I have kept hidden in the instep arch

0fpoetry Q»-lntroductionby Seamus Heaney 53

Of an old cedar at the waterside ^pse of a potential order of things ’beyond confusior’, a

A broken drinking goblet like the Grail glimpse that has to be its own reward.

Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find The poem provides a draught of ^ dear water of

xt/ transformed understanding and fills the reader with a

So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they momentary sense of freedom and wholeness.

mustn’t. „ , ...

Moreover, it is in the space between the farmhouse

(I stole the goblet from the children s ^d me playhouse that one discovers what I’ve called
’the

playhouse.) frontier of writing’, the line mat divides the actual

Heie are your waters and your watering conditions of our daily lives from the
imaginative

place. representation of those conditions in literature, and

Drink and be whole again beyond divides also the world of social speech from the world
of

confusion. poetic language. And that dividing line is the real subject

. . . L t, , of Thomas Hardy’ ; bewitching poem

’Afterwards’. Hardy

What these lines are saying is that the games of . , J ... °- V , .

J

, , ,. ,., , , ., , , , . L, , t may have begun this poem with the intention

of writing

make-believe which the children played in the playhouse u i. u- • • ^ A-

c ±1. c •*•

,, ,r r J . . about his imminent disappearance from the familiar

were a kind of freely invented answer to everything worW/ but his ultimate achievement was to
^^fo^ me

experienced in the house in earnest where (the tone famiUar mto somethmg rich and strange:

makes this clear) life was lived in sorrow and in anger.

When the Present has latched its postern

Frost suggests, in fact, that the life endured by the behind my tremulous stay,

occupants of the actual house finds its best: memorial and ^ ^ month ^

expression in the house of make-believe . He convinces us , ...

*- __ - iCw,Vt-5> IJ.lS.” \V LL ^K.jf

that the playhouse has the measure of the other house, that

the entranced focus of the activity that took place as make- Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk,
will the

believe on one side of the yard was fit to match the neighbours say,

meaning of what happened in earnest on the other side, ’He \N as a man who used to notice such

and in doing so Frost further suggests that the irnaginath e things’?

transformation of human life is the means by which we if jt be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s

can most truly grasp and comprehend it. soundless blink,

What Virgil called lacrimae rerum, the tears of The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the

things, can be absorbed and re-experienced in tht shades to alight

playthings in the playhouse - or in the words of the poerr Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a

Furthermore, the poem is like the broken drinking goblet gazer may think,

stolen fron, the playhouse -and dipped in the mountain TQ him mis must havg been fl familiar

stream because it too offers a danfication, a fleeting sight’

T£ T A • ~v,Q return*! Marknpss For Part of ^e time’ me reader is confined to the

If I pass during some nocturnal DiacKne&s, *

Ju , d company of the neighbours where all that is one offer is

mo y an warm, onventional wisdom in untransfigured phrases. But then

When the hedgehog travels furtively consciousness is given access to a dimension beyond the

over the lawn, frontier where an overbrimming, totally resourceful

One may say, ’He strove that such expressiveness becomes suddenly available; and this entry

innocent creatures should come to no into a condition of illuminated Tightness becomes an entry

harm, into poetry itself.

But he could do little for them; and now /Re wag a ^ who ^ fo ^^ ^ ^^ ^

he is gone.’ ^ neighbours, on this side of the frontier. ’Which things?’

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at asks ^e reader, and from the other side the poem
answers,

last, they stand at the door, ’The May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, /

Watching the full-starred heavens that Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk.’ To him this must have

winter sees, been a familiar sight,’ say the neighbours. ’What must

Will this thought rise on those who will have been a familiar sight?’ asks the reader. ’The Dusk,

meet my face no more, when’1Uce an eveud’s soundless blink, / The dewfall-hawk

, , , „ „,. frir e1irh comes crossing the shades to alight/ Upon the windHe
was one who had an eye tor sucn o t> / f

,? warped upland thorn, says the poem. ’Anything else?

mystenes . 4 says ^ reader ’Blackness, mothy and warm’, says

the

And will any say when my bell or poem /Jhe fall.starred heavens ^ai winter sees-f ^^^

quittance is heard in the gloom, like that.’May God! Says the reader.
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its •£.-..,,,,

” 6 The poem, rn fact, is a showing forth of the way that

outro gs, poetry brings human existence into a fuller life. It is

Till they rise again, as they were a new obviously less extravagant in its rhetoric than, say, Rilk’s

bell’s boom, ’Sonnets to Orpheus’, but it is no less fully alive to the

’He hears it not now, but used to notice excitements and transformations which poetic activity

such things’? promotes.

In one way, this is an expression of solidarity with ^ fac^ wg could eyen ^^ tQ Qur purpose here
the

the ordinary world where people stand around after the Words which conclude Rilk’s first sonnet
in the Orpheus

news of a death, wistful rather than desolate, and repeat sequence; we could say that the opening
lines of each of

the conventional decencies. But in the end, the poem is the five stanzas of ’Afterwards’ ’make a
temple deep inside

more given over the extraordinary than to the ordinary, Our hearing’, a temple which stands on
the other side of

more dedicated to the world-renewing potential of the the divide created by the passage of the
god of poetry
imagined response than to the adequacy of the social one.
Btit poetry does not need to invoke a god to sanction
its workings: its truth, as William Wordsworth asserted,
does not stand upon ’external testimony but [is] carried
live into the heart by passion; truth which is its own
testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the
tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from that
same tribunal/

Admittedly, Wordsworth is not very specific about

the composition of that ultimate tribunal and its seat is
anyhow likely to have been moved nowadays from ’the
heart’ to some more theoretically secure address; but it
nevertheless survives as the tribunal whose reality all
responsible poetry depends upon and the one through
which its redress is mediated.
no

’CHAPTER.

Redress of Poetry
(TEXT)

Professors of poetry, apologists for it, practitioners of

it, from Sir Philip Sidney to Wallace Stevens, all sooner or
later are tempted to show how poetry’s existence as a form
of art relates to our existence as citizens of society - how it
is ’of present use’. Behind such defences and justifications,
at any number of removes, stands Plato, calling into
question whatever special prerogatives or useful
influences poetry would claim for itself within the polls.
Yet Plato’s world of ideal forms also provides the court of
appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress
whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing
conditions. Moreover, ’useful’ or ’practical’ responses to
those same conditions are derived from imagined
standards too: poetic fictions, the dream of alternative
worlds, enable governments and revolutionaries as well.
It’s just that government and revolutionaries would
compel society to take on the shape of their imagining,
whereas poets are typically more concerned to conjure
with their own and their readers’ sense of what is possible
or desirable or, indeed, imaginable. The nobility of poetry,
says Wallace Stevens, ’is a violence from within that
protects us from a violence without’. It is the imagination
pressing back against the pressure of reality.
Stevens, as he reaches this conclusion in his essay
”The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words’, is anxious to
insist that his own words are intended to be more than
merely sonorous, and his anxiety is understandable. It is as
if he were imagining and responding to the outcry of some
disaffected heckler in the crowd of those whom Tony
Harrison calls ”the rhubarbarians’, one crying out against
the mystification of art and its appropriation by the
grandees of aesthetics. ’In our time’, the heckler protests,
echoing something he has read somewhere, ’the destiny of
man presents itself in political terms.’ And in his
understanding, and in the understanding of most people
who protest against the ascription to poetry of any
metaphysical force, those terms are going to derive from
the politics of subversion, of redressal, of affirming that
which is denied voice. Our heckler, in other words, will
want poetry to be more than an imagined response to
conditions in the world; he or she will urgently want to
know why it should not be an applied art, harnessed to
movements which attempt to alleviate those conditions by
direct action.

The heckler, therefore, is going to have little

sympathy with Wallace Stevens when he declares the poet
to be a potent figure because the poet ’creates the world to
which we turn incessantly and without knowing it,

and gives life to the supreme fictions without which we

are unable to conceive of (that world)’ - meaning that if

our given experience is a labyrinth, its mipdssability can
still be countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent
of the labyrinth &, 1 piei^enting himself and us with a vivid
experience of it, S’jch an operation does not intervene in
the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to
recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and
rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it
does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience
alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating
gpd verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I
car» see how such a function would be deemed insufficient
ky a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be
no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of
events but not in itself productive of new events. Engaged
parties are not going to be grateful for a mere image - no
matter how inventive or original - of the field of force of
which they are a part. They will always want the redress of
poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point
of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to
come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during

World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to
the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the
enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916
executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the
executing power. If you are an American poet at the height
of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you
to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the
German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the
British government as a body who might keep faith, to see
the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to
do any of these things is to add a complication where the
general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common

expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force.
Their very power to exacerbate is one guarantee of their
effectiveness. They are particular instances of a law which
Simone Weil announced with typical extremity and
succinctness in her book Gravity and Grace. She writes
there:

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we

tfiust do what we can to add weight to the lighter
scale we must have formed a conception of equilibrium
• jtg*”-” -v ’ ”’”-> *u-*vcuicS!»

and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ’that fugitive Iff practical ineffectiveness. In their
case, the espousal of that

from the camp of conquerors’. which critics used to call ’vision’ on ’moral commitment’

grew exorbitant and carried them beyond the charmed

Clearly, this corresponds to deep structures of circle of artistic space and further,
beyond domestic

thought and feeling derived from centuries of Christian privacy, social conformity, and
minimal ethical

leaching and from Christ’s paradoxical identification with expectation, into the snhiary role
of the witness,

the plight of the wretched. And in so far as poetry is an Characteristically, figures of” such
spiritual stamina incline

extension and refinement of the mind’s extreme to understate the heroic aspect of
their achievement and

recognitions, and of language’s most unexpected insist upon the strictly artistic
discipline at the heart of

apprehensions, it too manifests the workings of Weil’s law. their vocation. Yet the fact remains
that for the writers 1

<m,4- t 1.1. c e. • TI , have mentioned, and others like them -

Osip Mandelstam

Obedience to the force of gravity. The gieatest sin. , - , ,/, t . t ^ / c

^

~ c. „ TAr ., , -,. • ^ •*. , .o, T , and Czeslaw Milosz, for instance -

the redress of poetry

So Simone Weil also writes in Gravity and Grace. Indeed ^- ^^ r *. •^

r.or v,rtTa u i, • •r j u ^ -j 7 comes to represent something like an exercise of

the virtue

her whole book is informed by the idea of counter ,, K. , .JIT/I u TTJJ u

*
, ,Q-J,^ „ f u i . , .1. <• , , , of hope as it is understood by Vaclav
Havel. Indeed, what

weighting, of balancing out the forces, of redress - tilting T I i t. un. IK •

^ u * *-

tv,o c,^iL ( 11 L j , 6 Havel has to say about hope can also

be said about poetry:

the scales of reality towards some transcendent . y

equilibrium. And in the activity of poetry too, there is a **1S

tendency to place a counter-reality in the scales - a reality a state of mind, not a state of the
world. Either we have

which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has hope within us or we don’t; it is a
dimension of the soul,

weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull and it’s not essentially dependent on
some particular

of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance observation of the world or estimate of
the situation.....It is

out against the historical situation. This redressing effect of an orientation of the spirit, an
orientation of the heart; it

poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a transcends the world that is immediately
experienced, and

revelation of potential that is denied or constantly is anchored somewhere beyond its

horizons. I don’t think

threatened by circumstances. And sometimes, of course, it you can explain it as a mere derivative
of something here,

happens that such a revelation, once enshrined in the of some movement, or of some favourable
signs in the

poem, remains as a standard for the poet, so that he or she world. I feel that its deepest roots are
in the transcendental,

must then submit to the strain of bearing witness in his or just as the roots of human
responsibility are.. .It is not the
her own life to the plane of consciousness established in conviction that something will turn out
well, but the

the poem. certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it

In this century, especially, from Wilfred Owen to turns °Ut

Irina Ratushinskaya, there have been many poets who Of course, when a contemporary lifts a
pen or gazes

from principle, in solitude, and without any guarantee of into the dead-pan cloudiness of a
word processor,

success, were drawn by the logic of their work to disobey considerations like these are well in
the background. When

the force of gravity. These figures have become the types Douglas Dunn sits down at his desk
with its view above

of an action that gains value in proportion to its immediate the Tay Estuary or Anne Stevenson
sees one of her chosen«
62 10-Rcdress of Poetry (Text) Seamus Heaney Redress of Poetry 10-Redress of Poetry
(Text) 63

~>

landscapes flash upon her inward eye, neither is and yet can still manage to operate with
the fullest artistic

immediately haunted by the big questions of poetics. All integrity. The history of Irish poetry
over the last 150 years

these accumulated pressures and issues are felt as an is in itself sufficient demonstration that a
motive for poetry

abiding anxiety but they do not enter as guiding factors can be grounded to a greater or
lesser degree in

within the writing process itself. The movement is from programmes with a national purpose.
Obviously, patriotic

delight to wisdom and not vice versa. The felicity of a or propagandist intent is far form being a
guarantee of

cadence, the chain reaction of a rhyme, the pleasuring of poetic success, but in emergent cultures
the struggle of an

an etymology, such things can proceed happily and as it individual consciousness towards
affirmation and

were artistically, in an area of mental operations cordoned distinctness may be analogous, if not
coterminous, with a

off by and from the critical sense. Indeed, if one recalls collective straining towards self-
definition; there is a

W.H. Auden’s famous trinity of poetic faculties - making, mutual susceptibility between the
formation of a new

judging, and knowing - the making faculty seems in this tradition and the self-fashioning of
individual talent. Yeats,

light to a have a kind of free pass that enables it to range for example, began with a desire ’to
write short lyrics or

beyond the jurisdiction of the other two. poetic drama where every speech would be short and
concentrated’, but, typically, he endowed this personal

It is only right that this should be the case. Poetry stylistic ambition with national significance by
relating it

cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting to ’an Irish preference for a swift current’
and contrasting

inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well it with ’the English mind
meditative, rich, deliberate’,

as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W which ’may remember the Thames
valley’.
B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the

imagination. And while this may seem something of a At such moments of redefinition, however,
there are

truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a late- complicating factors at work. What is

involved, after all, is

twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, the replacement of ideas of literary

excellence derived

post-colonial backlash and ’silence-breaking’ writing of all frorn modes of expression originally
taken to be canonical

kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably ^d unquestionable. Writers have to start

out as readers,

pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been and before they put pen to paper,
even the most

denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political disaffected of them will have
internalized the norms and

life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in forms of the tradition from which they
wish to secede,

the first sense - as agent for proclaiming and correcting Whether they are feminists rebelling
against the patriarchy

injustices - is being appealed to constantly. But in of language or nativists in fuU cry with
the local accents of

discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting their vernacular, whether they write
Anglo-Irish or Afroanother

imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to English or Lallans, writers of what has been
called ’nation

set it up as its own category, an eminence established and language’ will have been wrong-footed
by the fact that

a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means. ^^ own literary formation was based upon
models of

excellence taken from the English language and its

Not that it is not possible to have a poetry which literature. They will have been
predisposed to

consciously seeks to promote cultural and political change accommodate themselves to the
consciousness which
04 lu-Kearess Qi roetry tJext; seamus neaney •§
~~”~~ -- -i •^Mgedres5 of Poetry 10-Redress of Poetry (Text) 65

subjugated them. Naturally, black poets from Trinidad or

Lagos and working-class writers from Newcastle or given moment it happens to be a

refraction of some

Glasgow will be found arguing that their education in discredited cultural or political system.
Shakespeare or Keats was little more than an exercise in Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to
an «M

alienating them from their authentic experience, ^uticaJ dispensation or aspires to

express a new one has

devolarizing their vernacular and destabilizing their to be a working model of inclusive

consciousness Tt

instinctual at-homeness in their own non-textual worlds shouid not simplify. Its projections and
inventions should

but the truth of that argument should riot obliterate other ^ a match for the complex reality which
surrounds it and

truths about language and self-valorization which I shall otll of which it is generated. The Divine
Comedy is a great

come to presently. example of this kind of total adequacy, but a haiku may

In any movement towards liberation, it will be f ° cofe a satisfactory comeback by the mind to
the

necessary to deny the normative authority of the dominant fa . ,~f. matter- As long as the
coordinates of the

language or literary tradition. At a special moment in the **&»***** correspond to those of the
world that we

Irish Literary Revival, this was precisely the course fe ^ ere’ Poetry1S fulfilling its
counterweighting

adopted by Thomas MacDonagh, Professor of English at ^^ ”^comes another ^^ to which w* can

have

the Royal University in Dublin, whose book on Literature ^ourse’ ^iore wmch we can know
ourselves in a more
in Ireland was published in 1916, the very year he was ^ emPowered way. In fact, to read poetry
of this totally

executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. With ade<luat^ kmd K to experience
something bracing and

more seismic consequences, it was also the course adopted J”em°rable- something capable of
increasing in value over

u T T c ? A a T^ ui E.U • ._• • j t”6 wn°le course of a lifetime

by James Joyce. But MacDonagh knew the intricacies and

delicacies of the English lyric inheritance which he was, There is nothing exaggerated about such
a claim

calling into question, to the extent of having written a book Jorge Luis Borges, for example,
makes a similar point

on the metrics of Thomas Campion. And Joyce, for all his about what happens between the poem
and the readerhauteur
about the British Empire and the English novel,

was helpless to resist the appeal of, for example, the songs ^e ^ste of the apple (states Berkeley)
lies in the contact of

and airs of the Elizabethans. Neither MacDonagh nor Joyce *e fruit witri me palate, not in the
fruit itself, in a similar

considered it necessary to proscribe within his reader’s Wav U would say) poetry lies in the
meeting of poem and

memory the riches of the Anglophone culture whose !^ac*er’ no* m ^e ””es °f symbols printed
on pages of a

authority each was, in his own way, compelled to **&. What is essential is....the thrill,
the almost physical

challenge. Neither denied his susceptibility to the totally ^otion that comes with each reading.

persuasive word in order to prove the purity of his g.

resistance to an imperial hegemony. Which is why bo* ^6S g°^ °n *° ^ more Predse about ***
nature of that
these figures are instructive when we come to consider the °T P^^al emotion’ and suggests that it
fulfils the

scope and function of poetry in the world. They remind us pj ”^ ^ fPenence to ’recover a
past or

that its integrity is not to be impugned just because at any *8ureff ^fe ~ a f^tion, incidentally,
which has

6 ’Y 6 ) ’ ’^ggesfave truth at the communal as well as at the

level.
I

tO-Redress of Poetry (Text) Seamus Heane,? ****** ”^”^ 10-Redress of Poetry (Text) 67

66

The issue is clarified further if we go back to Borges’s T^S ***? ** a misrepresentation of the
Herbert

first book of poems, and his note of introduction: ^ £ scholars and specialized readers, the poet
whose

V fcckle Points of wit’ were in fact subtle addresses to

If in the following pages there is some successful verse 0, Calvimst divergences of doctrine
within the Church of

other, may the reader forgive me the audacity of having England, but I do not think it
misrepresents the general

written it before him. We are all one; our inconsequential impression of him which a sympathetic
literate audience

minds are much alike, and circumstances so influence us carries around. Herbert’s work,
moreover - so essential to

that it is something of an accident that you are the reader the tradition of English lyric, so
domiciled within a native

and I the writer - the unsure, ardent writer - of my verses culture and voice, so conscripted as a
manifestation of the

, , , desirable English temperament - was lone understood to

Disingenuous as this maybe, it nevertheless touch, embody the ^^ ^ ^ which°^f j°

on something so common that it is int danger of bein? ^ operations of its colonial power, sought
to

ignored. Borges is talking about the fluid, exhilarating upon other peoples. But in the end, my
poinfhas to

moment which lies at the heart of any memorable reading even ^ most ^ d ^^ p

the undisappointed joy of finding that everything holds uf dear dement of Herbert’s poetry a true
paradi
and answers the desire that it awakens. At such moments shape of ^
psychologically, p^

the delight of having all one’s faculties simultaneous!; metaphorically and, if one wants to
proceed that far

provoked and gratified is like gaining an upper hand ove, metaphysically. Even here, between
marginalized reader

all that is contingent and (as Borges says md privileged poet, the Borgesian
circularity applies

’inconsequential’. There is a sensation both of arrival anc Herbert,s WQrk/ ^ ^ ^^ fa ^ ^ J^-

of prospect, so that one does indeed seem to recover« realized poetry j have & ^ tQ d
r y

past’ and ’prefigure a future’, and thereby to complete tfa ^ co.ordinates of ^ ^

correspond to and

circle of one’s being. When this happens, we have. aUow us to contemplate me complex
burdeToTour own

distinct sensation that (to borrow a phrase from Georg. experience.

Seferis’s notebooks) poetry is ’strong enough to help’; iti

then that its redress grows palpable. His. poems are wise and witty transformations of the

•i ui *: ,• Ups and downs of his pulley-like sympathies His wit

I would Hke to spend the rest of the arable to£ ^ d, is as ^ ^ ^ ^ H- -t

celebrating one such undisappointing poet. For toe f ^ AU ^ ^^^ ^.^ ^.^ g

centuries and more, George Herbert exemplified the bod ^ he ^^^ ^ ^ _ U^°n

heat of a healthy Anglican life John Dome migh heaven/earth, soul/body, eternity/time,
ufe/death’

permitted his fever and chiUs Henry Vaughan indulg Christ/man/ grace/guilt, virtue/sin Avine
love/ courtiy

for his Welsh mysticism, and Richard Crashaw condon fove _ ^ ^ ^^ / ’ ^y

in spite of a torrid Catholicism; bu George Herbe ^Ough ^ CQSmol ^ the
Church o^

daylight sanity and vigour, his *,« n**a betj^ Engj^ fa ^ eajl ^venteeRth ce^ ^^

preciousncss and vulgarity, promoted the ideal mental *r ^Herbert’s poems is played out wholly
in terms of Se

emotional climate. ^ttisban story and liturgy. But such antithetical pairings
6h 10-Redress of Poetry (Text) *-.».««».-,.• **•_--• ’ ----- * •-«~..~avii-ut!uy

,.•

are experienced more immediately as emotional dilemmas , ^ Hfrbert’s /They Pulley’, for
example, a pun on the

than as doctrinal cruces: they are functions of the poet’s *°r „ B executed m slow motion. As
in the operation

mind as it moves across the frontier of writing, out of oi a pUfy’ °ne °f me word/s semantic loads
- ’rest’ in the

homiletics and apologetics into poetry, upon the impulses seasf. reP°se ~ B gradually let
down, but as it reaches

and reflexes of awakened language. At an elementary *« T* °f lts descent into the reader’s
understanding,

level, some grasp of the poems’ basic conceptual and another meaning - rest’ in the sense of
’remainder’ or ’lefttheological

machinery is, of course, necessary, but what °ver ” tegins to nse’ At me end’ equilibrium has
been

Borges calls ’the almost physical emotion that comes with ’est°red to ^ system, both by the
argument and by the

each reading’ derives from the superfluity of the poems’ W* and rhyme, as ’rest’ and ’breast’
come together in a

language-life and their structural animation. What might ff**?* fclosure’ But M & ^Y Pulley
system, the

be called the DNA pattern of Herbert’s imagination «, momen* °f equilibrium is tentative and
capable of a

fundamentally a matter of up-down, criss-cross motion, ren^wed dvnami^- The poem can be read
as a mimetic

reversals effected with such symmetry that they are ^””g °f any pulley-like exchange of
forces, but

experienced as culminations, tensions so thoroughly ”P**1? rt P«*nts itself as an allegory

of the relationship
exercised and traced home that they return the system to between humamty and the Godhead, a
humanity whose

relaxation, dialogues so sinuous that they end with he^- m St Augustine’s phrase, ’are restless
till they rest

speakers ready to start again, sometimes from m ee ’

diametrically opposed premises. The wonder is that poems
which seem so perfectly set to become perpetual-motion

machines can find ways of closure and escape from their e u ey

own unfaltering kinesis. When God at first made man,

Having a glasse of blessings standing by;

It is tempting to use the word ’balance’ here, but to T , ., ,

. ¥ & ., , , u. . . Let us (said he) poure on him all we can:

use it too soon would preclude sufficient r

acknowledgement of the volatile aspect of the Herbertian Let me worlds riches- which dispersed
lie,

scales, the fluidity of all about the fulcrum, and the Contract into a span.

sensitivity of the arms to leverage by wit or wisdom So strength first made a way;

equally. In fact, wit/ wisdom may turn out to be the central Then* beauty flow’d, then
wisdome, honour

antithesis, because it is in the delights of Herbert’s witty pleasure: ’

making that the gravitv of his judging and knowing works

itself in - and thin works itself out. At its best, this play of ^^ almost ^ was out’ God »”* a stay,

mind is heuristic. It may have illustrative force in relation Perceiving that alone of all his treasure

to the truths of religion, but is also doing the wok of art: Rest in the bottome lay.

personal force is being moved through an aesthetic For it I should (said he)

distance, and in a space where anything can happen the p~.*~«, «.u- • « i
. ,, r, f*_ t i_ Bestow this jewell also on my creature,

longed-for may occur by way of the unforeseen, or may be J

balked by the limitations of the usual. . He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
Perhaps this poem does not immediately strike us as gut as j rav’d ^d grew more fierce and wilde

what has been called ’big-league poetry’. Its pitch is low it At wor^

proceeds about its business w^^°^e” Methoughts I heard one calhng, Cfalfc

sureness of its progress invests it with an underplayed a 8/

self-containment. It is, in fact, a little more sober than Andlrepl: d, My Lord.

many of Herbert’s poems. Nowhere does it evince the ^ pQem ^ g wonderfu] } and Q

catch in the breath that occurs with happy frequency se]f_sufficiency It is SQ formall ^ ^ /t
t°me

elsewhere in his work. It does not have those surprising ^ ^^ ffom ^^ ^^ ^ ^^ ^ rf

local effects of lyric joy which reminds us how available ^^ ^ do ^ ^ ^^ ^ ^^ , ^ ^

this poet once felt himself to be to a more erotic genre, how Collar/ ^ ^ applkabmty beyond ife
Qwn vivid Qccasion/

capable he would have been of a delicious squandering ^ couM bg ^ ^ ^^ historical moments as a

vocation. But 11

capae e wou cou g ^ ^^ historical moments as a

had he not made sacred poetry his whole vocation. But 11 Q{ comprehending ironies and
reversals more extensive

’The Pulley’ is subdued to its demure purpose, it does ^ ^ persona crig.s ^^ .t ^^ ^.^ ^ ^

contain within itself the co-ordiantes and contradicboas ot ^ as & ^ rf ^ .t ^ ^^ ^^ def ^ tQ ^

experience, and would be as comprehensible within the existence gs dtizens Q£ goa men ^
terrorists ^

cosmolo^ of Yin and Yang as it is amenable to the down ^ ^ ^^^^^ when ^ ngwly

dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. independent state enters history still being
administered

Herbert’s most celebrated poem, ’The Collar’, by the old colonial civil service, then the
reversal which the
illustrates much more dramatically than ’The Pulley’ all poem traces is merely being projected
upon a more

that I have been claiming for him. The dance of lexical extensive and populous screen.

possibilities in the title; the way in which the poem ^ .g wRy references to Herberfs simplidty
can

changes partners with the meanings of collar , as an article Qften come ^^ ^ ^ ^^ themselves His
poems/ of

of clerical clothing and a fit of anger; the reversal o Courg^ exhibii ^ attractive forthrighmess; his
articulation

emotional states from affront to assuagement; the tecnnica hag ^ exhilarating darity about it and
giveg ^ rgader ^

relish of postponing stanzaic composure until the las ^loui airy sematlon of mvigilating from a
superior plane But

lines - it is all as Seferis wants poetry to be, strong ^^ ^ luddjty of presentation nor ^ even tenor
of
enough’, and can be hung out on the imaginative arm of
voice should diminish our respect for the tried quality of
Herbert’s intelligence. Even that immaculate ballet of
courtesy and equilibrium in ’Love in’ represents a
grounded strength as well as a perfect tact. This country
parson may not have gone to the Gulag for his faith, but he
possesses a sort of Russian down-to-earthness, a readiness
that would not be found wanting:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?

My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, Love, and taste my meat

So I did sit and eat.

The OED has four entries for ’redress’ as a noun, and I

began by calling upon the first sense which it provides:
’Reparation of, satisfaction or compensation for, a wrong
sustained or the loss resulting from this.’ For ’redress’ as a
verb the dictionary gives fifteen separate entries, all of
them subdivided two or three times, and almost all of the
usages noted as obsolete. I have also taken account of the
first of these obsolete meanings, which is given as, ’To set
(a person or a thing) upright again; to raise again to an
erect position. Also fig. to set up again, restore, reestablish.’

But in following these rather sober extensions of the

word, in considering poetry’s possible service to
programmes of cultural and political realignment, or in
reaffirming poetry as an upright, resistant, and self-bracing
entity within the general flux and flex of language, I don’t
want to give the impression that its force must always be
exercised in earnest, morally premeditated ways. On the
contrary, I want to profess the surprise of poetry as well as
its reliability; I want to celebrate its given, unforeseeable
thereness, the way it enters our field of vision and
animates our physical and intelligent being in much the
same way as those bird-shapes stenciled on the
transparent surfaces of glass walls or windows must
suddenly enter the vision and change the direction of the
real birds’ flight. In a flash the shapes register and transmit
their unmistakable presence, so the birds veer off
instinctively. An image of the living creatures has induced
a totally salubrious swerve in the creatures themselves.
And this natural, heady diversion is also something
induced by poetry and reminds me of a further (obsolete)
meaning of ’redress’, with which I would conclude, a
meaning which comes in entry four of the verb, subsection
(b): ’Hunting. To bring back (the hounds or deer) to the
proper course.’ In mis ’redress’ there is no hint of ethical
obligation; it is more a matter of finding a course for the
breakaway of innate capacity, a course where something
unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full
potential.

Herbert, for all his inclination to hold to the via

media -at the line between exhaustion and
unappeasability ’- provides us constantly with those
unforeseen images and stanzas that send our reader’s
mind sweeping and veering away in delighted reflex:

Lovely enchanting language, sugarcane,

Honey of roses, whither wilt thou

flie?

Such an apostrophe, from his poem ”The Forerunners’, is

surely just the kind of apostrophe we would like poetry to
call from us. That impulsive straining towards felicity which
we get in the ’window-songs’ line of ’Dullness’, for
example - is a sine qua non of lyric power:

Where are my lines then? My approaches? views?

Where are my window-songs?

Lovers are still pretending, and ev’n wrongs

Sharpen their Muse.

For all his sacerdotal fragrance, Herbert never fully

quelled this more profane tendresse in himself and his
idiom, and the traces of that older, amorous, dandyish self
are among the best rewards of his work. The confirmation
bestowed by proportion and pace and measure are
undeniably essential to his achievement, and there is a
fundamental strength about the way his winding forms
and woven metaphors match the toils of consciousness;
but it is when the spirit is called extravagantly beyond the
course that the usual life plots for it, when outcry or
rhapsody is wrung from it as it flies in upon some
unexpected image of its own solitude and distinctness, it is
then that Herbert’s work exemplifies the redress of poetry
at its most exquisite.

24 October 1989
Glossary

CHAPTER

Note:

This glossary has been given in an alphabetical order

to help the students to have consultation for the difficult
words or phrases in a facilitated way.

_Sr.#_ Words/Phrases Meanings/Explanations

1 1916 executions Killing; Irish reference to

killings in 1916.

2 a pun on A clever remark or witticism

on

3 adore Love intensely.

4 aesthetic distance The gap or difference

between the artistic or visual

views or trends.

5 allegory A play or a tale in which each

character or event is a symbol

of any idea or a quality such
as truth, evil, death etc

__ 6 amenable Easy to be led or controlled.

__ 7 analogous Similar; parallel.

8 anchored Source of stability or security;

fastened by.

75
9 Anglophone The culture of English
culture speaking persons or

communities.

10 antitheses Direct; opposite; contrast;

opposition of ideas.

11 antithesis Direct opposition.

12 antithetical Opposition of ideas; set of

pairings opposite ideas.

13 apologetics Branch of theology charged

with defence of Christianity.

14 apologists A person who apologises or

’ tries to defend something.

15 apprehensions Conceptions.

16 artistic integrity Quality of a person having

strong moral and ethical

beliefs concerning art.

17 ascription Attribute; assign.

18 assuagement Ease or satisfy.

19 audacity Bojdness^

20 autistically ii« a mental state of daydreaming

disregarding all the

_____ life realities.

21 betrayal Disloyal to; showings of

22 big-league poetry Highest level of poetry.

23 bracing Pair; couple; support.

24 cadence Fall or modulation of voice in

Kearess oj Poetry 11 -Glossa ry 77

verse.

25 Calvinist Get farther apart; separate.

divergences

26 condoned Overlook.

27 conscripted Enrol for compulsory

(military) service.

28 contemplate Meditate on, gaze upon.

29 contingent Depending.

30 conviction Be convinced, firm belief.

31 cordoned off To block the entry of people

into any area with the help of

police, torce etc.

32 cosmology The science or study of the

universe.

33 coterminous Of the same context; meeting

end to end.

34 counter weighting Counter-balancing influence.

35 countervailing Acting or adding against

with equal power or force.

36 culminations Reach highest point; come to

climax.

37 dandyish Smartness; excellent informal.

38 dead-pan Expressionless; overcloudiness

shadowed; dim; darken.

__39__ _demure Reserved; quiet.

^ 40 derivative Be descended from; deduced

78 11-Glossary Seamus Heaney

i I from. 1

__£L_ devalorizing Weakening; Enfeebling.

42 diametrically Total opposite; different;

opposed premises contrast.

43 disingenuous Lacking in candour or ’

outspokenness.

44 DNA pattern of True copy of Herbert’s

j Herbert’s imagination.

imagination

45 doctrinal cruces Dogma; belief; puzzling

doctrine.

46 dynamism Philosophy; theory that

attempts to explain
i phenomena in terms of |

! . immanent force or energy.

i 47 Easter Rising A movement against the

British government in Dublin

on Easter Monday, 1916
which subsequently led to the
establishment of the Irish

Free State in 1922.

1 48 enshrined Preserve with great care and

sacred affection.

49 erotic genre Sexually arousing; category

especially of literary
composition.
50 etymology Formation of words; origin

development.

I”

51 j exacerbating Aggravate; make worse;

Redress of Poetry 11-Glossary 79

embitter.

52 exhilarating Exciting; giving pleasure.

53 exorbitant Very excessive, inordinate or

immoderate.

54 felicity Great happiness; appropriate

expression or style.

55 fugitive Fleeing; elusive, deceptive.

56 Godhead . Divine nature or deity.

57 Gravity and Grace A book by Simone Weil.

58 Gulag A prison or forced-labour

camp particularly for political

prisoners as in Russia.

59 haiku Epigrammatic Japanese verse

form in 17 syllables.

60 harnessed Put on; in harness. !

61 hauteur I Haughty spirit.

62 heckler One who interrupts or

annoys a speaker by j
forwarding odd and
awkward questions.

63 heuristic Sewing to find out or to

stimulate mvestigajjon.

64 hitherto Up to now or to this time.

65 homiletics Art of preaching.

66 immaculate Without stain or blemish.

67 impassability Immobility; atrociousness.

80 11-Glossary Seamus Heaney

68 imperial Colonial empire; imperialism.

69 imperial hegemony Colonial preponderant

influence of one nation on

other.

70 inconsequential Unimportant; Negligible.

71 incortsequentiality Unimportance.

72 instinctual at- Natural or inborn skill.

homeness

73 inventiveness Novelty or innovation.

74 jurisdiction Authority.

75 labyrinth Perplexity.

76 Lallans The English dialect of the

Scotch Lowlands particularly

in its written form.

77 leverage Influence.

78 lexical Related to dictionary;

connected with the words of

a language.

79 liturgy Prescribed form of public

worship.

80 lucidity Clear minded; easily

understood.

81 marr’d Damage.

82 metaphysical force A force which is beyond

material or physical
I perception.
.^j.^^.y ii-oiossary . 81

’83 metrics Measurement of poetic metre.

84 mimetic rendering Resembling portrayal or

representation.

85 mutual Mutual receptiveness or

susceptibility acceptance.

86 nativists Persons who practise the

policy of favouring nativeborn

citizens as against
immigrants; nepotists

87 obliterate Completely removed or

destroyed.

88 orientation Rising.

89 palate Sense of taste.

90 paradigm Example, model.

91 paradoxical Statement that seems absurd

identification or self-contradictory but may

not be true.

92 patriarchy A race, community, system or

a country that is ruled or

administered by men;
authority of males.

93 perpetual-motion Continuous or ever lasting

motion.

_94 pitch Set at a particular level.

_J)5 polis A city-state in ancient Greece.

96 post-colonial Before Imperialism. Sudden

backlash and adverse reaction.
I1;j1

97 practitioners Persons engaged in a

profession.

98 preclude Introductory movement,

event or music.

99 predicaments Perplexing; difficult or

embarrassing. j

100 prerogatives Peculiar power or right |

especially as vested in
sovereign; privileged.

101 proclaiming Declaring.

102 proscribe Prohibit. _____

103 pulley-like Volatile, changing or nonsympathies

persistent affection. Countereffects.
Sympathies pressing
down a person on one hand

but raising on the other.

104 quelled Crush; put down; pacify.

105 recover a past or To regain the glory of past

prefigure a future and to predict or plan about

the brilliance of forthcoming

days.

106 redress Set right; make amends for;

to raise something; to support

or to recover.

107 repining Fret; complain.

108 revile Abuse. ___J

109 revolutionaries Those who bring about |

revolutions.
s

110 rhapsody Enthusiastic or high-flown

composition or utterance.

111 rhetorically Art of effective speaking or

writing; artificial or
exaggerated language.

112 sacerdotal Of priests.

113 salubrious Beneficial.

114 secede Withdraw from a body (as a

nation). •

115 seismic • Relating to an earth-quack.

consequences

116 self-containment Self Enclosing or include;

hold within.

117 self-delighting Self-pleasing; taking great

pleasure.

118 self-valorization Self-support.

119 semantic loads Relating to meaning of words

or symbols.

120 sonorous Giving out sound; resonant.

121 span Extent; space.

122 spiritual stamina Immaterial or incorporeal

resistance to fatigue; illness

or hardships.

123 squandering Wasting.

124 stencilled Marked

125 subjugated Bring under one’s control.

126 succinctness Terseness; Concise.

127 swerve Swing around; change

direction.

128 tenor General course; meaning.

129 tentative Done as a trial experimental.

130 The Divine A poem by Dante

Comedy

131 the espousal Support; embrace.

132 tickle points of wit Amuse, please points of

humour.

133 to conjure Produce magic effects;

implore earnestly.

134 torrid Catholicism Emotional.

135 transcendent Surpassing; exceed; abstruse.

136 truism Self-evident truth.

137 unfaltering kinesis Hesitate; stumble.

138 usurp Seize wrongfully.

139 veer off Change direction; change

one’s mind.

140 vernacular Relating to a native language

or dialect.

141 via media (Latin Phrase) A medial way;

course of action between two

extremes.

142 volatile aspect of Lively, changeable.

Herbertian scales
Redress of Poetry 11-Glossary 85

143 Welsh mysticism Spiritualism & meditation of

the people of Wales.

144 Yin and Yang In Chinese philosophy, Yin is

the passive, negative and

feminine force while Yang is
the active, positive and
masculine force in the
universe. Both of these forces
are contrasted with and
complementary to each other.
rn

VCHAPTERj

Values And Literature:

A Contemporary Essay to Understand

Heaney’s Approach

Note: This essay may help the students in appreciating

much that Heaney has tried to express in ”The
Redress of Poetry”.

In any society values are the standards of right and

wrong or true and false. These values are based on beliefs,
customs conventions and traditions of the society. For
example, some values are religious and some are based on
the laws made by the society while some are the creation
of custom and convention.

Religious rites are also included in the values. To

stop on red light and walk on the left side of the road are
also the values of a society. Ceremonies associated with
marriages and the tradition of dowry also belong to our
values.

There is no doubt that traditions dominate the

whole life and we cannot live without mem. These are our
values. But it is a fact that neither are values universal nor
absolute. For example, the dress of a woman, which is
regarded as decent in the west, will be regarded vulgar In
our society. Similarly petting and kissing in public is not
considered vulgar in the west where the parents do not
feel any shame in expressing love before their children. We
can not even think of it. Values also depend on geography.

86
Redress of Poetry 12-Values and Literature 87

For example, in the deserts of Arabia where the

rays of the sun burn the faces and hot winds blow hard,
the people have to fully cover themselves in the day and at
night they do the same to keep themselves safe from cold.
In old tales we read that women and men covered their
faces with veils while travelling on horses and camels.

As against this, in Indonesia, where the climate is

so hot and humid that because of excessive perspiration
the clothes dig into the body, there the women do not use
dress above the waist.

Bertrand Russell has gone to the extent of saying

that if one woman in <Tibet has four husbands, its reason is
also geographical. There very little land is available for
cultivation on the hill -side. Such a scanty land cannot
support one whole family. Therefore a woman marries
four men and combines their lands. In this way there is
sufficient land for the subsistence of a family.

Then, values may also be relative. For example,

truth is considered universal and absolute. But in our
society there are different criteria of truth for the children
and the elders.

For example, the children often ask how they were

born. How much trulh can be told to them? Not only this
there is a truth that is meant to scandalize others, which is
called backbiting (gheebat), and is included in deadly sins;
if false, it is called calumny (bohtan). In the same way we
never tell our defense secrets to the enemy.

In this case it will be treason. Can we tell the truth

to a person who is suffering from a fatal disease. Should
we tell him that he has only a few days to live? Actually
we console him saying that he will be soon recovered. In
other words, even such a great value, as truth may
oo 14-values ana Literature jeumua ncuney

sometimes be vulgarity, sometimes immorality, sometimes

a crime, or sometimes even a sin.

The fact is that no value is absolute or final; all

values are relative. Moreover, telling of a truth depends
more on the capacity of the speaker, than on the truth
itself. A child is told the truth according to his capacity.
Beyond that it could be harmful to him. Perhaps it was in
our book of class five, there was a story. A monkey was
sitting on a branch of a tree. It was raining in torrents. He
was feeling extremely uneasy.

A weaver-bird (baya) was sitting in his nest nearby.

The weaver-bird said to the monkey that if he had not
wasted his time when the weather was good and made a
home, he would not have been so worried. The monkey,
who was already irritated, reacted rashly and smashed the
nest with a blow of the hand. In the end of the story there
was a Hindi couplet which said:

Instruct only him who is capable of being

instructed.

Do not instruct a monkey which may

result in the loss of the home of bay a

Thus, values are not the same for all nor

are they for all times.

Francis Bacon identified four Idolas or false notions

that have been created by man and which erect a screen
between the mind and the reality. He has elaborated this
theory at some length. The first of these he calls Idola
Tribus.

These are certain misconceptions that are common

to all human beings. The biggest of these fallacies is that
everything falls within the orbit of reason, while the fact is
that human reason is very limited. We can comprehend
«t«f ^j vj f ueiry i,i-vaiues and Literature 89

only tthose things that come into our experience, and our
experience and knowledge are extremely limited.
Therefore man can never comprehend reality. His
knowledge of reality will thus be limited and relative
depending upon his mental capacity.

The next misconception he calls Idala Specus. These

are the fallacies that are created by a particular society or
belief giving an impression that we are the best and the
only honest people. Others are all liars or fools. As stated
earlier, values are relative and temporal. These are the
misconceptions which cause sectarian and ethnic
prejudices.

The third is Idola Fori. Fori is the plural of forum

that stands for a square or a platform. Almost all ancient
cities had a similar town planning. There used to be a
forum in the middle of the cities which was used as the
meeting place for the people to discuss social, academic or
political issues.

All issues were thoroughly debated. Those who

had the gift of the gab carried the day. This led to the
conclusion that speech is the perfect means of
communication. But this is a big mistake, since speech is
usually unable to communicate what one feels.

Speech is often misconstrued. This causes lots of

confusions and misgivings. It was due to this handicap of
the language that the fine arts came into being. They can
much better express feelings and thoughts.

The last of these Bacon calls Idola Theatri. Here

theatre stands for the lecture theatre. It means that on one
side life is already too complex while, on the other,
philosophers and intellectuals make it more complex.
Philosophers have long thought about life and are still
speculating about it. This is a reality mat there are many
90 12-VaIues and Literature Seamus Heaney

philosophies of life but there is no philosophy of life.

When there is no consensus about life how there can be
consensus about the values of life.

The result of all this confusion is that every one

makes his own values and imposes them on life and when
opposite values clash, violence is created.

Value is given precedence over life and so value for

the sake of value throws the reality of life behind and
becomes itself a dogma. People shut their eyes and
mutilate the face of life in the names of values. Sometimes
values become ridiculous and sometimes horrible when
they are detached from life.

You have heard a common joke that the pensioners

have to submit their life certificate for getting their
pension. The government’s point of view is that a man dies
when he retires. He should not become a burden on the
government.

A man did not draw his pension for many months

and when he went to draw the same he also took his life
certificate with him. The clerk gave him the pension for
that month. When he demanded the pension of the
previous months, the clerk asked him to bring life
certificates for those months also. This is ridiculous but
such jokes are common in courts and offices, as courts do
not provide justice because they are only the courts of law
and give decisions according to laws.

However, personal values become very dangerous

when they take the form of ideology. It is very difficult for
a man to kill a man but it is easy for a Jew to kill a
Palestinian and for a non-communist to kill a communist.
In war and daily life, innumerable people are killed in the
name of nationality, religion and ideology.
Redress of Poetry 12-Values and Literature 91

Values are for life; life is not for values. If the dress
does not a fit one, then dress should be cut not the body,
Life is the real value and literature accepts only this value.
Anything that helps life is right, otherwise it is wrong.

Life is the only reality. In a Greek play, tiie Bacdwe,

Euripides discussed the point very effectively. In Greek
mythology, Bacchus is the god of passion. His festival was
celebrated regularly.

Dramatic competitions were also ”held on this

festival. People danced on this festival. There were a large
number of women who were the devotees of Bacchus.
They are called Bacchae. In present terminology, they may
be called Malangnian. Once on this festival, Agave was
busy dancing when her son, Pereus, who wa.s the king at
that time, came to her and told her that her behavior was
unbecoming. She was in such an ecstasy that she paid no
heed to her son and in her rapture held her son by the legs
and tore him into two pieces. When she came back to her
own, she exclaimed in great pain,

I had given up the spindle and the loom and

thought of higher things.

This is what may happen when one tries to fly too

high.

In the same way (J Casy wrote a play Juno and the

| Pay cock in the backdrop of the civil war in Ireland. There is
! a widow whose only son is killed in the war. People try to
I console her by saying that he has sacrificed himself for the

country. She says that she had only one son. He was her
i whole universe. Now when he is dead what difference will

it make to her whether Ireland gets freedom or not.

Sacrifices may be good, but one must not sacrifice even

that for which the sacrifice is made. What is the use of

92 12-Values and Literature Seam us Heaney

saving a country if the countrymen do not survive7

Besides, this is also a fact that war spares nothing.

Whatever the objective, whatever the ideology, war

only means killing and getting killed. War does not save
life. In Shaw’s Arms and the Man a soldier goes to war with
an empty pistol which he fills with chocolates instead of
bullets. He says that the bullet only destroys life while
chocolate saves life. The bullet is not a defense. T.S. Eliot
wrote that the war only raises the crop of death,

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Mir Taqi Mir also made a similar observation,

When the season came, on the tree of the cross, Mir,

Only the head of Mansoor sprouted.

Here Eliot is describing that anxiety which the aftermath of

World War I, and the excruciating suspense before World
War II created in the West. Literature always supports
values.

hi our own literature, if Aag ka Darya leaves a

feeling of despair and disenchantment, there is also
Champa who belongs to a middle class family. She has the
courage to revolt against outward traditions and embrace
new values.

In Gardish-e-Rang-e-Chaman, Qura’tul Ain Haider

says with full a$i.urance that the future now belongs to the
middle class. Though there emerges no clear vision of the
complexities of life in the novels of Intezar Husain* there is
a relentless struggle to apprehend them.

Literature always emphasizes upon values and in

this way asserts its commitment to life and keeps the hope
alive. Pick up any piece of literature, you will find two
clear beliefs in it. One, the oppressor is always humiliated,
and second, the oppressed is always compensated. Truth
triumphs and false- hood is exposed. If nothing more, at
least there emerges a clear perception of the complexities
of life. Sometimes their solutions also” seem to be visible.
Aristotle calls it Catharsis, which is the main function of
literature.

The real value is life itself. Ancient Greeks fully

appreciated that. They knew that life means freedom. In
their society everyone was free to express his feelings.
They listened to everyone. Most philosophies were
mutually conflicting. Every philosopher had his own
platform.

Not only the scholars, even the common people

had the courage to listen things opposed to their beliefs.
They never allowed any ideology, any faith, and any
philosophy to become a dogma. They never allowed it to
over ride life. They knew the value of life.

Life also laid bare its mysteries to them. However

secretive of its mysteries life may be, it is not beyond the
grasp of a free mind. This was the secret of Greek
achievements in all departments of life. There was no
restriction on expression. They were free to think and
speak, and when a whole nation thinks, for thought the
limit will be the sky.

However erroneous a thought may be, it must not

be suppressed People will come to right thinking only
when they are allowed to think wrong. I am a teacher of
English. My students make howlers in writing. I do not
throw away their exercise books.

Rather I encourage them to make more mistakes so

that these are corrected and they acquire proficiency in the
English language. If mistakes are frowned at, these will
never be eradicated.

Mistakes are allowed but not falsehood It was

Matthew Arnold who asserted that there is no room for
Charlatanism in literature. It means that a reformer, a
leader or even a prophet may prove false and people
continue debating his authenticity for long but such a
deception is not possible in literature.

Only genuine literature survives. This is because

the writer’s commitment is to life. He has no vested
interests. He is only a devotee of beauty and his love for
beauty is never satiated.

Only true writers live; charlatans have a very short

life. It is quite possible that one may succeed in making
himself popular on the force of his wealth or status. But
this reputation does not last long.

A writer only wants to create beauty and he loves

beauty. In the search of beauty he will not stand any
hurdles. In the love of beauty and for the creation of
beauty he seeks full freedom. Thus politics also becomes a
value for literature. This is because when he does not find
beauty in life, he tries to look for those forces which have
mutilated the face of life.

A writer’s only object is not just to write tragedies

of life. In our society those writers, who believe in
literature for the sake of literature, bitterly cry on the
injustices of life and write elegies on them, but any attempt
to remove these injustices is considered politics and they
do not allow politics in literature. Thus they seek the way
of escape by branding revolutionary struggles as politics.
Literature can not be detached from life. Real literature is
in fact life.
I

The writer has to take a clear position. He is either

for or against beauty. Lack of commitment could mean

hypocrisy or escape. To remain detached in this situation
will amount to the support of the cruel.

This is also a fact that whenever there is a clash

between the values of society and the values of nature, the
writer is always on the side of nature because social values
are created by vested interests.

A similar protest was voiced by Thomas Hardy. He

wrote less on the subject of rape. He protested that it is a
great injustice that the victim should be treated as the
criminal and punished for that. People generally have
sympathy for the victim. But the fear of the society forces
them to take the side of the transgressor.

Hardy also raised the question whether the laws of

the society have precedence over the laws of nature. Tess
had violated a law of the society, and the laws of the
society keep changing. She had not broken any law of
nature.

Similarly Manto wrote a story Sarak ke Kanaray.

This is the story of a girl who is condemned by the people
when she becomes pregnant. They advise her for abortion
and, if the illegitimate child is born, she should kill it. The
society does not tolerate that but nature is making
preparations to receive the new comer. The woman feels
strange changes within her body. Milk is being prepared
for the new guest and the woman’s body is developing soft
cushions for the new arrival. Her complexion is
brightening up.

Literature has always been at loggerheads with the

society. The writer always protests against values opposed
to nature. That is why the writer is considered a rebel.
Plato had also banned tRe poet from his Republic while for
- v aiuca anu

the same reason Aristotle considered him very important

for a healthy society. He believed that literature created
ideal pictures of life. Thus Oscar Wilde said that life
should imitate literature. Literature does not imitate life. It
projects ideal reality. Therefore, if the values of the society
clash with the values of nature, values of the society must
be changed. Mutilation of nature will be cruel.

This is also a fact that values are indispensable for

life and no society can exist without them. But sometimes
values are hopelessly mixed up.

Such a situation appeared in the reign of Elizabeth I

and this chaos was the subject of the plays of Shakespeare.
Hamlet fell a victim to these confusions. In our literature
its example Is Aag ka Darya of Qurat-ul-Ain Haider.
Pakistan movement had highlighted the problem of
values.

There appeared the question of the identity of

Indian Muslims, that if they are not Indians what they are.
If they cannot be identified with the Hindus, could they be
identified with the Iranians, the Arabs or the Indonesians?
This also shows that one function of literature is to explore
and assess values.

We are often asked why Shakespeare is so praised.

Is it because he is English therefore he is so much
eulogised. The fact is that Shakespeare is great because he
has the capability and courage to raise appropriate
questions, In his days the clash between faith and reason
had become very serious and he tried to comprehend this
clash and write about it.

The greatness of Shakespeare can be gauged from

the fact that we are also faced with many contradictions.
But our intellectuals have never bothered to think about
them. Its reason may be lack of vision but it surely shows
Redress of Poetry 12-VaIues and Literature 97

lack of courage. For example, we believe that interest is

haram. This is also known to everyone that our entire
economic system is based on interest. Our salaries are paid
from interest. Foreign loans are also interest based.

But nobody seems to be bothered about this. In the

same way we have coined the term of ideology. For the
last half a century we have been caught in this confusion.
Still no intellectual and no writer has given any thought to
it .We do not know whether it has benefited us or has been
harmful to us morally and politically. We consider
Shakespeare great because he never hesitates raising
questions.

Literature is the laboratory of values. The literary

writer shows values as living and active realities. Aristotle
had said that history relates mere facts and philosophy
gives only precepts.

Literature presents precepts as facts. It gives body

to emotion, feeling and thought. It tries to understand the
practical significance of values. It shows where it is
appropriate to show patience where it is misplaced, where
expediency is proper and where truth must be asserted.
Value means nothing by itself. It gets its meaning from the
context .At one place it is the value to give life, at another
to take life.

We can look at values in two ways. We can see

them with reference to logic and philosophy. We can also
look at them with reference to emotion and feeling. These
are two dimensions of reality. On the one side there is the
everyday life of profit and loss. Man makes great plans for
that. He develops big formulas but ultimately reason
arrives at the conclusion that neither is there a pattern of
life nor can a map of it be drawn. No philosophy of life has
yet been established. It was the reason that Plato denied
98 12-V allies and Literature Seamus Heaney

the reality of life and advised people not to fall a prey to its
illusion.

The present thinkers are perhaps closer to reality. If

today’s man has become more savage and more callous
than the man of the past, if the result of all progress is two
world wars, the atrocities of the atomic bomb, violence in
Bosnia, Palestine and Kashmir, it leads to the conclusion
that neither man has understood the meaning of progress
nor the object of life. All progress has been counter
progress. It leads to only one conclusion, that either man
thought wrong or that life follows no thought at all. It is
simply absurd.

In short, viewed from the point of view of reason 01

logic, life appears to be a meaningless stupidity. There is
only one value of life and that is power and the onl}
principle of life is the principle of might is right. But this
has also been observed that sometimes powerlessness
defeats power. Many great dictators and ruthless rulers
left the world in absolute despair. We call it miracle.

The creation of Pakistan was such a miracle

Another miracle was the dismemberment of the Soviet
Union that had in fact excluded Pakistan from the world
map by 2020. And when we were being declared a rogue
nation and when we were thought to have gone bankrupt
and when it was quite possible that we may be branded as
terrorists, the miracle of 9/11 happened. It means that
miracles still happen. This is the other face of reality.
Literature gives it more importance.

A delicate beauty overpowers a great giant, a man

about to be executed receives help at trie last minute, a
dying man suddenly takes a new life, those separated for
long suddenly meet, problems are resolved without any
effort. These are the facts of every day life. These too have
Redress of Poetry 12-Values and Literature 99

some reasons behind them but these are not immediately

visible to us.

Towers are attacked in New York and the impact is

felt in Pakistan. Whatever man knows is extremely limited.
What he does not know is enormous, and what he does
not know actually comes to his help. This is miracle.

Joseph Conrad, who was a sailor by profession, has

described this fact in a different way. A ship is smoothly
sailing on the peaceful waves of the sea. A mild breeze is
blowing. The whole atmosphere is pleasant. But no one
knows that there may be the skeleton of some wreckage or
some ghoul waiting for the ship under the calm surf ace.of
the water. Such unforeseen calamities may sometimes be
averted also.

A passenger in a bus is sitting on the front seat. The

bus has a short stop. People come out of it for strolling or
for grub. When the people board the bus again, the man
who was sitting on the front seat goes on a back seat. After
a short distance the bus meets an accident. Those on the
front seat are killed. This man is saved.

Life has itself saved him. This is miracle. If the

incident is unpleasant we call it accident, if pleasant, this is
miracle. Literature gives more importance to miracles than
to accidents. This is the reason that whether it is a novel or
a film, it always ends on poetic justice. It is not less than a
miracle to find justice in life. In Literature, the villain is
always punished while the sufferer triumphs.

These are the values of literature which are

different from the values of life. Life is full of accidents and
literature is the world of miracles. The biggest proof of it is
that man has made every attempt to destroy himself. Many
nations and races have been totally eliminated. But life still
100 _ 12-Values and Literature ____ Seamus Heaney

flourishes arVd ever grows. From rational point of view, lift?

should have been destroyed long ago.

literature tells us that even atomic bomb cannot

destroy it- Life is invincible. Life will prevail. Literature
accepts this value. It does not give importance to reason
According to reason, life is absurd.

pr0m the point of view of literature, life is love,

beauty and trust. That is why Oscar Wilde says, life should
follow literature. Literature is not an imitation of life
because tfe ^ ugty and confusing. Literature seeks and
presents Beauty in life. That is why life should follow
literature.

Literature enlightens life with hope and trust. We

are told tftat life is absurd and literature is fantasy. Both
are irraU°nal but life disappoints while literature
encourages- Here it will be appropriate to quote from the
autobiography of J.S. Mill. His father, James Mill, was a
great utilitarian- He only Accepted reason and considered
the world °f feelings and ideas immature and childish. So
he taught J-s- Mill classical literature and philosophy in his
early chil^00^ and when they went for a walk, J.S. Mill
used to repeat the lessons to his father. He was not
interested ^ games, childish hobbies and stories of giants
and fairies As a result of it, he had a nervous breakdown
when he was 21. Then, by chance, he happened to read
Wordsworth which restore*! his mental balance.

Nietzsche has obsej-ved, while discussing tragedy,

that when there is an atterr^pt to put emotion and vision in
the mould of reason, tragedy is created.

Nitezsche has divided human faculties into two

categories Apollonian, relating to reason and Dionysian,
relating to emotion.
According to Schopenhauer, tragedy shows
excruciating suffering, humiliation of man, the triumph of
evil and the disgusting accidents of life which destroy and
humiliate innocent people. It means that any attempt to
confuse reason and emotion always leads to horrible
consequences. Thus man has been left with only two
alternatives: reality or dream. Literature creates a paradise
of dreams and gives the hope of peace and prosperity.
And the world of dreams is not more absurd than the
world of sufferings.

Thus, it is quite clear that life makes man mad and

only literature can save him from this madness as it asserts
the right values. Literature gives preference to this belief:
innocent wishes and hopes and beautiful dreams are the
real life.

March 2003

I
fI3]

(.CHAPTER J

Important Questions with

Comprehensive Answers

*
Question 1:

What are the various interpretations of the word

redress as, Heaney uses it in his essay and how are all
these meanings qualified by Poetry?

Or

How according to Heaney does poetry have a

redressing effect?

Or

What does Heaney mean by ’redress of poetry’? How

far is he successful in defending the poetry in his essay,
The Redress of Poetry’? Discuss.

Or

What is ’redress of poetry’? Is Heaney successful in his

attempt to justify the role of poetry in the Modern context?

Or

”Heaney is a defender of poetry and gives some lively

ideas to prove his view-point.” Discuss with reference to
his essay The Redress of Poetry’.

Answer:

The subject that Seamus Heaney has treated, the

redress of poetry, is not a new subject. The nature and

102
a suDject or practical
importance to everyone who has an interest in poetry.

By redress Heaney means ”Reparation, satisfaction

and compensation for a wrong sustained or our loss
resulting against; to raise again to an upright position.”
This is the dictionary definition of what he proposes to say
about poetry.

The word ’redress’ means to correct something that

is unfair or wrong. By redress we also mean consolation,
compensation, comfort or reassurance. So redress of poetry
means to remove or correct those false notions that have
been created in the mind. In his essay, The Redress of
Poetry, Heaney builds different assumptions for the
redress of poetry. The question about the redress of poetry
means whether poetry can give man confidence, whether
poetry can give man some assurance. The question is
whether poetry is a useful activity in the present situation;
the question is whether poetry is an aesthetic work or
pragmatic work.

There have been a lot of discussions whether poets

and poetry are of any use in the complexities and miseries
of life or not. Some are of the view that the poets are
worthless people ard some consider them an essential
need of life. Howevei, Heaney is a defender of poetry and
he gives some Lively ideas to prove his view-point and he
has been quite successful in defending poetry.

Right from the beginning, poets have been

condemned as idle people. They are generally considered
to be worthless. To demand a utilitarian and a pragmatic
approach from poetry has been as old as Plato. Plato had
banished the poets from his Republic. But ironically, his
argument was that poetry took us away from the idea,
while poetry in fact is the world of the ideal. He is among
the haters of poets and the poetry.
Plato conceived this world as a world of illusions.
This is not the real world. It is an imperfect copy of an
ideal world. That ideal world exists in our ideas. That is
why it is called ideal, belonging to the idea. In his ideal
Republic, Plato would allow only those people who may
take us to perfection.

The poet takes us away from the ideal, so he does

not allow the poets to enter his Republic. Aristotle
opposed his teacher and he said that the poet had a vision
and in our appearance he saw our ideal. When he makes
our portrait, he does not simply copy the features. He
actually draws the character. So Aristotle insisted that the
poet takes us towards the ideal not away from it. Thus
Plato opposed poetry but Aristotle supported it.

Aristotle was of the view that the poet was

essential to keep balance in the society Aristotle insisted
that the poet took us towards the ideal, not away from the
ideal.

There were others also who kept defending poetry

against all kinds of objections. For example, Sydney
asserted that ”the poet takes us to the ideal”. So did
Shelley support poetry because they reach the perfect.
Oscar Wilde said that life should imitate art because art
presents the perfect.

Matthew Arnold went to the extent of saying that

all that now goes in the name of religion or philosophy
will be replaced by poetry. Poetry will perform the role of
religion. It will show man the right path and it will bring
consolation to man. Poetry has a power of sustaining man
ir difficulties. This is the thesis of Heaney that in the
present world only poetry can save man. This he calls
’redress of poetry’.
Others have said the same thing in a more
straightforward way.

Sydney wrote in ”Apology For Poetry”

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness

and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet
songs; his auditors are axmen and tranced by
the melody of unseen musician who feel that
they are moved and softened, yet know not
whence or why.

Heaney makes a fresh attempt to defend poetry in

this age of science and technology when every one is
becoming a utilitarian and even education has been
commercialized. Poetry and philosophy are now
considered idle mental luxuries while commerce computer
and business administration have been given the name of
education. Heaney starts his thesis by distinguishing two
planes of existence.

He refers to his own poem, ”Squarings”, which tells

the story of an apparition that comes on the earth but
could not stay here because it would have been drowned
in the human element. The world of apparitions is one
plane of existence, while the human element is the other
plane of it.

The next poem he quotes is George Herbert’s Pulley

which suggests that ”the mind and aspirations of the
human beings turned towards the heavenly in spite of all
the pleasures and penalties of being upon the earth. These
two dimensions of reality can be brought to reconcile with
each other. This can be done by poetic sixth sense which
provides a passage from ”the domain of the matter-of-fact
into the domain of the imagination.
xriecuiey io ui urie opinion inai me wona or reaury ana
the world of imagination are two different worlds but they
depend upon each other and they reinforce each other.

This is the subject of his poem Squarings. He further

adds that there are two worlds, our every day world and
the world of the visionary crew. Then he gives the example
of pulley. The pulley is a parable, a moral story. There is a
mystic and religious touch in this story. God created
restlessness in the mind of man in spite of all the pleasures
and pains of life.

The two above mentioned poems show that there are

two dimensions of reality but there is a relationship
between them. We also see Heaney’s mysticism when he
talks of the sixth sense. He believes that beyond the five
senses that we have, there is also a sixth sense, which is a
mystery to us. We know things mysteriously.

Heaney keeps moving between the world of matterof-fact

and the world of imagination. He quotes from
different critics and poets to support his arguments. He
brings an example from Robert Frost and then he quotes
another writer, Pinsky. Pinsky in Responsibilities of The
Poet, says that the poet has a responsibility to answer. He
is to answer the questions raised by life.

Life raises questions and poets give their answers.

This makes Heaney a didactic poet. He believes that poetry
gives lesions. On the one hand, he believes in the mystic
sixth sense given by poetry and, on the other, he believes
in the didactic responsibilities of poetry and of the poets.
This approach of Heaney is a blend of the romantic and the
classical.

Seamus Heaney defends poetry on the ground of its

utility. He says that the world of imagination and the
world of fact are two aspects of reality and both are
die tumpiemeiiuuy, i.e., eaun is
incomplete without the other. Poetry cannot be reduced to
bare facts.

Poetry focuses from delight to wisdom not from

wisdom to delight. The world of poetry is an answer to the
world of facts. Poetry answers the questions that life raises.
When children make a play house, it is their ajiswer to the
question what a house should be. Art shows what life
ought to be.

Heaney gives precise examples to support his

statement. Here he gives an example from Thomas
Hardy’s Poem, Afterwards. He says that thf poet tries to
answer the questions raised by life. Life creates anxieties;
poetry tries to relieve them.

Life disturbs but poetry consoles. The frontier of

writing is the state in which art is created. It is when the
poet is in between the outer world (fact) and the inner
world (imagination). The poet becomes creative when he is
half asleep and half awake. This state of mind is called the
hypnologic state of the mind. In this state of mind the poet
is aware of the facts and at the same time he is aware of the
ideal things.

A work of art is created when man is neither fully

awake nor fully asleep. This is a creative state and is also
known as ecstasy. Neither he is too much bound with
reality nor too much detached from it. This is what
Richard Wilbur, an American poet, called the marginal
area of creative mood. In his poem Marginalia, he
describes that the best things can be perceived in a
hypnologic state of mind. Imagination actually colours the
reality and gives it an artistic vision. Therefore, the best art
will be both full of life as well as embellished of with
imagination.
Heaney says that poetry is comprehensive, that it is
not merely a product of events. Poetry gives an
understanding of life. Poetry doesn’t charge life. It only
shows what should be changed. It shows what changes
should be brought in life. It tells that man is savage, cruel
good or bad but it does not tell how these qualities can be
removed or controlled. In simple words, poetry shows the
way.

Moreover, poetry is about man. Poetry promotes,

love of man. Politics divides men. Poetry shows that all
men are human beings and they deserve sympathy. But
politics tells us that some people deserve our sympathy
and some deserve our wrath. Poetry speaks of love for all
people; politics forces people to kill other people. If poetry
becomes politics then it will not remain poetry, it will
become propaganda and in this way it will divide
humanity into friends and foes.

Heaney defends poetry by describing its advantages.

Beside a number of advantages of poetry, it also has
another advantage because of its rhyme and rhythm and a
pleasurable art of words. Man comes to wisdom through
delight, not to delight through wisdom. Man studies
poetry to amuse himself and to satisfy his soul but in this
psychological state he gets wisdom as well. Thus poetry is
a pleasurable study of Bfe.

To defend poetry, Heane} makes another point

which appeals to us. He says that poetry is a joint effort of
the reader and the write?, If means that the poet must be
the spokesman of fhe reader; he should feel and say what
the reader feels and wants lo say. The poet echoes the
feelings of the reader, i.e., the poet must be integrated with
his society. He must feel what others feel. Heaney here
quotes Jorge Luis Borges who says ”the taste of the apple
lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate”. Sweetness of
Redress of Poetry 13-Questions with Answer? 109

the fruit depends upon the fruit as well as upon the palate.
The beauty of poetry depends upon the poet as well as
upon the reader.

To conclude, Heaney tries to demonstrate that

poetry has a function in life, though not ostentatious. The
poet does nothing on purpose, but poetry is a medium
which by its very nature serves a purpose.

This can be understood with reference to a

statement by Wordsworth that his poetry has a purpose. It
is not meaningless activity. But this purpose is not
imposed on poetry. Since Wordsworth lives a purposeful
life, therefore whatever he does has a purpose in it.
Heaney follows a similar line. He believes that redress of
poetry is inherent in poetry. Redress emerges from poetry
as purpose emerges from the heart of Wordsworth and
informs his poetry.

• Also read articles of this book: ”The Redressing Effects

of Poetry” and ”The Introduction”.

Question 2:

What, according to Seamus Heaney, are the

functions of poetry? Elaborate your answer with reference
to ’The Redress of Poetry’ by Seamus Heaney.

Or

In The Redress of Poetry’, Heaney’s main subject is ’the

utility of poetry or what poetry means to life’. Discuss.

Answer:

In his thesis ’’Die Redress of Poetry’, Heaney’s main

subject is the utility of poetry or what poetry means to life.
He finds support for his viewi about imaginative
literature, which poetry is, in Plato’s theory of ideas.
110 13-Questions with Answers Seam us Heaney

The world of ideas removes the defects of the world

of fact, since the ideal is the perfect form of the imperfect
existence. He goes on to say that the imagined standards
and poetic fiction provide the dream of an alternative
world to both the government and the revolutionary. Both
try to make the society as they imagine it to be the best.

Poets suggest what is possible or desirable or, in

deed, imaginable. In the words of Wallace Stevens, poetry
”is a violence from within that protects us from a violence
without”. Aristotle could have called it Catharsis. The
heckler or the rhubarbian (one who makes disturbance or
noise) protests against the obscurity of art or its staying
neutral in the fight between the just and the unjust.

Heaney has no sympathy with this view of the

heckler which is ideological and parochial. Like any poet,
Heaney is humanitarian. He would not divide humanity
into antagonistic factions. In a nationalistic war, for
example, the poet is asked to ”contribute to the war effort
preferably dehumanizing the face of the enemy”. You are
angels and others are devils. A poet will never accept that.
W.B. Yeats, another Irisri^oet, in ”Easter 1916”. sings in
praise of those Irish^ who lost their lives in the horrible civil
war. But he also paysJaomage to the English who too were
fighting for their ideals.

The idea of justice in some people’s minds is the idea

of balance. If you condemn one side you must condemn
. the other too. Our Muslim and Hindu writers tried to keep
this balance while writing about the communal rights at
the time of Partition. If they showed Hindu murders, they
also showed Muslim murders. This is too artificial a
concept of balance. Heaney also does not approve of
supporting the weaker side. He quotes Simon Will,
Redress of Poetry 13-Questions with Answers 111

”If we know in what way society is unbalanced

we must do what we can to add weight to the
lighter scale.”

Heaney rejects this ”Obedience to the force of

gravity. This is also wrong. Demands of justice must be
met irrespective of who is strong and who is weak. He
quotes Voclave Havel that poetry is a ”state of mind not a
state of the world...it is an orientation of the spirit, an
orientation of the art”. It creates a state of mind, not a
political situation. It means that the poet should think of
redress where redress is needed. It is not a counter
weighing force; Poetry offers a counter-reality.

Havel proceeds to say,

”It is not the conviction that something will

turn out well, but the certainty that something
makes sense regardless of how it turns out”.

Heaney is speculating whether poetry has a role to

play, whether poetry can •-( -nsole man, whether poetry can
redress the injuries dor.e to man.

Everybody believes that poetry has the power of

sustaining man in difficulties.

Heaney concluded that in the present world only

poetry can save man. This he calls redress of poetry.

Heaney starts by quoting the poem The Pulley by

George Herbert. This poem is a parable, a moral story. In a
pulley you pull down in order to raise up. There are forces
in life which are pulling you down but the same forces are
raising you up. Sufferings also alleviate you. They bring
out the best in man as it is said, adversity brings out the
best in man. This is the alleviating function of tragedy.
112 13-Questions with Answers Seamus Heaney

Then Heaney quotes a statement of Pinsky, who

says that life raises some question which poetry answers.
For example, he quotes a poem by Robert Frost. The poem
is Directive. In this poem Frost presents a toy house that
children build. It is not a real house.

But they try to provide in it what a real house

demands. It is the house of their imagination which is the
ideal of their perfect house. Poetry gives us the picture of a
perfect house but it is an ideal form of a real house. It is not
a real house. In this way poetry help us to answer the
questions.

The main function of poetry is to show us that

perfection which we want to achieve. It shows us the
difference between what is and what ought to be. Actually
poetry is a link between the real and the ideal. Poetry takes
us to the paradise while we stay on the earth.

Poetry builds for us our world of aspirations. We

live in the world which is given to us. We did not chose it.
But in our imagination we create our own world. That is
the world of poetry. Poetry shows us the glimpse of those
things which we miss in our life. This is the glimpse of
redress. It is a consolation. Life worries man, poetry
relieves man.

The propagandist wants poetry to be practical

People demand that poetry should become propaganda.
But this is not the function of poetry. Poetry presents
before us an alternative world which gives us consolation.
Poetry does not create the ideal world but it shows the
possibility of creating that world and this is very
reassuring. This gives us confidence that a better world
can be created. This world is a labyrinth where man is lost.
Poetry shows us the right way.
,,t»,tJJ VJ i uKiry lj-yuestions with Answers 113

Keats showed in the Ode to a Nightingale, that

man passes through the magic casement of poetry into the
fairy lands. That magic casement is art. Man loses his
energy in the suffering of life. This energy is restored in the
paradise of imagination, fie comes back reassured.

Heaney is of the opinion that poetry gives beautiful

expressions to our feelings. It gives rhyme and diction. It
gives pleasure to us and inspired hope in us.

W.H, Auden is an English poet. He says that poetry

has three functions; making, judging and knowing. Poets
create in order to judge and that brings awareness.
Shakespeare writes Hamlet and O’Neill writes Mourning
Becomes Electra, not so much to give a judgement as to
make. Poetry’s delight lies fundamentaily in inventiveness.
As Sophocles writes Oedipus Rex and puts him into the
laboratory of drama and concludes that his fall was his
pride. Literature shows as the possibilities of man’s action.

There are four basic functions which poetry

performs:

1) Poetry takes us from the world of suffering into the

world of happiness.

2) Poetry consoles us and gives us Hope.

3) Poetry is the world of possibilities. We know from

our experience that dreams are ultimately realized:
our forefathers thought that it was impossible to
fly, though the poets created flying carpets. The
fact is that we are flying.

4) Now we thin^ Tiat it is impossible that human

sufferings vritf AVr be removed, but one day they
will be rei*10 ^. What the mind conceives as
poetry is a $°6 lity - that can be realised.
The fairy world, or the ideal world, that poetry
shows to us, is not meaningless. It inspires us, consoles us
and reassures us.

Heaney is conscious of the fact that poetry may lose

its purity and artistic integrity if it serves to promote
culture and revolution. But if this feeling finds deeper
roots in the psyche of the poets then it may become a
genuine poetic emotion without becoming propaganda. If
a feeling becomes a part of the sensibility ”of the poet, if it
penetrates into his bones, then its expression will create
genuine poetry. It will not be propaganda.

Heaney believes that art can help life while

remaining within its own domain. It does not have to be
propaganda in order to make life more tolerable than it is.
He thinks poetry is comprehensive of events, but it cannot
create the event. However, this comprehension, this
awareness of reality, is in itself, a redress. It is a denial of
the soul independent of the fact.

It is not the conviction that sometimes will turn out

well, but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out. Will must not usurp the
work of imagination; that is, feasibility and practicality are
not the objects of poetry. Its object is delight, not so much
judging or knowing a making. It gives voice of ethnic,
social, sexual, and political Life hitherto denied.

Heaney tries to demonstrate that poetry has a

function in life, though not ostentatious. The poet does
nothing on purpose, but poetry is a medium which by its
very nature serves a purpose. Heaney believes that redress
of poetry is inherent in poetry.

To sum up, we say that redress of poetry lies in

providing an alternate world to the world of actual living.
The world in which we live, is full of confusions and
Kearess oj roetry 13-guestions with Answers 115

sufferings, poetry opens the doors of a world to us which

is reassuring and consoling. Secondly, poetry shows us
what is possible and desirable. It gives us the world of our
aspirations, and human aspirations are not idle or futile.
These can be realised. It is poetry which is the real motive
power in life.

Question 3:

Write a note on Heaney’s prose style.

Or

Heaney’s style is aphoristic, his approach is

scientific, analytical and rational. Discuss.

Answer:

Heaney, besides being a poet and a critic, is also an

accomplished prose writer. He is a scientific and analytical
thinker but at the same time he also has mystical
tendencies. His comments are logical as well as intuitive.

Heaney’s approach is rational, scientific and it is

imaginative as well. This is a paradox that Heaney is
scientific and imaginative at the same time. But he does
convey his thought in an impressive and convincing way.
He seeks balance and does justice to both reality and
imagination. He tries to convey his thought and meaning
through appropriate language and words and he avoids all
superfluous expressions.

His approach is anecdotal. Heaney’s style is that he

begins by giving examples or by telling stories. He
develops an argument with the help of stories, as he begins
his essay The Redress of Poetry with the story of the
fantastic crew from some other world arriving on the
earth.
He also has an intuitive approach. He very much
bases his arguments on the sixth sense though he is a
practical thinker. Thus, like the romantics, he believes in
intuition and like the neo-classics, he believes in reason
and practice. Thus Heaney’s style is a blend of the classical
and the romantic.

Heaney’s approach is historical. He sees the issues

of poetry in the historical perspective. For example, he
starts the essay with Plato’s condemnation of poetry.

He seems to be a controversialist. He challenges the

heckler and talks of him contemptuously.

His style and approach sound very much like those

of the schoolmen when he talks of the metaphysical
elements of poetry. He has a streak of the schoolmen is
him like Donne. He is impressed with the metaphysical
poetry and poets like John Donne and George Herbert. His
tone is challenging and even assertive like the tone of the
metaphysical poets. He can also be flippant like Bacon or
Donne.

He is also didactic. He believes that the poet has a

responsibility, that the poet has to answer certain
questions, that the poet must respond. Life raises certain
questions and poets give their answers. He believes that
poetry gives lessons. This is Heaney’s mysticism.

Heaney is also an idealistic. He believes that poetry

gives an alternative view of life - a view of what life ought
to be. He tries to prove that poetry shows us what is
desirable as well as possible.

Another aspect of his classical approach is that he

believes is authority. He quotes other writers, critics and
poets in his favour, like Pinsky, Havel etc. This is a
niin Answers 117

classical style of argumentation. His arguments are based

upon other views besides his own reason.

There are many inter-textual references in his

writing, such as references to the poems of Robert
Hardy, George Herbert and his own poetry. Ther^
references from poetry as well as from prose.

His approach is the approach of a scientist. He is

analytical but his analysis is very much controlled and
dictated by his religious beliefs as we have seen in his
comments on George Herbert’s The Pulley^

Heaney is very much conscious of paradoxes ”creators/creature,

heaven/earth, soul/body,

eternity/ time, life/death, Christ/man, grace/guilt,

virtue/sin, divine love/courtly love.” All these antitheses
help Heaney a lot in his defence of poetry. This is Heaney’s
antithetical style which had also been very popular among
the schoolmen.

Heaney’s prose style has the qualities of precision

and conciseness. He tries to convey his thought and
meaning through appropriate language and words. His
use of proper words in proper places is a great help in
conveying his thought clearly and in a straight forward
manner.

In short, Heaney defends poetry on the ground of

utility. He deals with the subject matter of poetry and
brings examples of many poets and critics in his favour.
Definitely, his arguments are strong because they are
rational and to the point. His language is not only an
artistic device, it is also a vehicle for the conveyance of
thought. His style, convincing arguments, lucidity of
expression and precise examples add to the force of his
essay.
n« U-Questions with Answers Seam us Heaney

His approach is to seek symmetry. It is the classical

approach of always seeking balance. Heaney is of the view
that poetry seeks equal love for all human being without
making any distinction between friends and foes.

Heaney’s prose style is also aphoristic. But his

aphorisms are not as striking as those of Bacon. Still mere
is a glimpse of his terseness of thought. As he says:

Poetry is comprehensive of events but

not itself productive of new events.

Similarly he says that poetry leads from delight to

wisdom, not from wisdom to delight. These kinds of
paradoxes, balances, counter-balances, comparisons and
contrasts are typical of Heaney’s prose style. He also
appeals to the common sense and the everyday practice of
life to bring a point home, e.g., he says that as heckler has
vision so does the government. The Government also
visualizes the system and the heckler also does the same,
but the poet gives an alternative to both.

Heaney talks of ”physical emotion”. That means the

emotional force can be physically expressed as one shaking
with excitement. Like Eliot, Heaney also believes in a
personal mind and a communal mind. The two become
one, as in the case of Irish poets, poetry and politics
become one. The individual poet has the some feeling as
the whole community and in that case feeling of liberation
doesn’t become a propaganda.

Finally, Heaney believes that the dominant culture

permeates into the sensibility of the subjugated people.
This is what Edward said also says, in Culture and
Imperialism, that culture is never exclusive; it is affected
by other cultures. T.S. Eliot also says the same thing when
he asserts that tradition is like a river which carries
everything that comes in its way.
A.j-V”e»uons wiin Answers

Therefore, it becomes a problem with the liberation

movements-The subjugated people fight the domiru,nt
culture by using the idiom of that culture. We conderiui
English by using the English language. Through language
and through media we have already been influenced by
what we condemn. This creates another paradox, and it is
a cultural paradox. His approach is scientific; he raises
questions like Bacon. Heaney uses linguistic paradox as
well as a cultural paradox. He wants the poet not to be
prejudiced and not to be parochial.

Heaney’s approach is partly religious, partly

intuitive, partly anecdotal and partly rational. Thus it is a
blend of the neo-classic, the scientific, the romantic and the
pragmatic. He is a versatile and practical thinker. He,
unlike the schoolmen, is not dogmatic. He talks, argues,
analyses and critically evaluates the commonly held beliefs
and then gives his own philosophy on the basis of the
opinions of different critics, poets and writers and all this
makes his essay The Redress of Poetry a literary
achievement.
I?)

CHAPTER]

Select Bibliography

Blake Morrison Seamus Heaney / Methuen

1982

Tony Curtis (ed.) The Art of Seamus Poetry

Wales

Heaney. 1982

Neil Corcoran Seamus Heaney Faber 1986

Neil Corcoran (ed.) The Chosen Ground

Essays on the

Contemporary Poetry

of Northern Ireland. Dufour

1992

Harold Bloom (ed.) Seamus Heaney. Chelsea

House
1986

Thomas Foster Seamus Heaney Twayne

1989

Henry Hart Seamus Heaney, Syracuse

Poet of Contrary U.P.

Progressions. 1992

Michael Parker Seamus Heaney,

The Making of the Macmillan

Poet. 1993

Robert F. Garrat (ed.) Critical Essays on

Seamus Heaney. Hall 1995