Heaney, Seamus: (1939– )
Biographical Introduction.
(Full name Seamus Justin Heaney) Irish poet, critic, essayist, editor, and
translator.
INTRODUCTION
Nobel laureate Heaney is a pastoralist with a strong and critical sense of
history. His rich and earthy poems are about the life of the land of
northern Ireland as well as the evolution of the heavily mythologized
Irish identity. Heaney's lyricism stems from his love of the cycles of
country life, the mystery of the sea, the satisfying rhythm of hard,
physical work.
Heaney is widely considered Ireland's most accomplished contemporary
poet and has often been called the greatest Irish poet since William
Butler Yeats. In his works, Heaney often focuses on the proper roles and
responsibilities of a poet in society, exploring themes of self-discovery
and spiritual growth as well as addressing political and cultural issues
related to Irish history. His poetry is characterized by sensuous
language, sexual metaphors, and nature imagery. Soon after he won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, commentator Helen Vendler praised
Heaney
"The Irish poet whose pen has been the conscience of his
country."
Biographical Information
The eldest of nine children, Heaney was raised a Roman Catholic in
Mossbawn, County Derry, a rural community in Protestant Northern
Ireland. At age eleven he received a scholarship to Saint Columb's
College in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and left his father's farm. At
Queen's University in Belfast, he was introduced to Irish, American, and
English literature and exposed to artists such as Ted Hughes, Patrick
Kavanaugh, and Robert Frost. While at university, Heaney contributed
several poems to literary magazines under the pen name Incertus. After
graduating with honors in 1961, he taught secondary school, later
returning to Queen's University as a lecturer. During this time he also
established himself as a prominent literary figure with the publication of
Death of a Naturalist in 1966, his first volume of poetry. In 1969, when
fighting broke out between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Heaney
began to address the unrest's causes and effects in his poetry. He and his
family moved to a cottage outside Dublin in 1972, where he wrote full-
time until he accepted a teaching position at Caryfort College in Dublin
in 1975. He has also taught at Harvard and Oxford Universities and has
frequently traveled to the United States and England to give poetry
readings and lectures. Having already won numerous awards for his
poetry and translations, Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1995.
Major Works
Heaney's first volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), is imbued with the
colors of his Derry childhood; these early works evince sensuous
memories associated with nature
and with his childhood on his family's farm. Evoking the care with
which his father and ancestors farmed the land, Heaney announces in the
first poem in the collection, "Digging," that he will figuratively "dig"
with his pen. In his next published volume, Door into the Dark (1969),
Heaney also incorporates nature and his childhood as prominent themes.
Much of Heaney's poetry addresses the history of social unrest in
Northern Ireland and considers the relevance of poetry in the face of
violence and political upheaval. In his next collection Wintering Out, for
example, are a series of "bog poems" that were inspired by the
archaeological excavation of Irish peat bogs containing preserved human
bodies that had been ritually slaughtered during the Iron Age. Heaney
depicts the victims of such ancient pagan rites as symbolic of the
bloodshed caused by contemporary violence in Ireland. North (1975)
develops this historical theme further, using myth to widen its
universality. In such poems as "Ocean's Love to Ireland" and "Act of
Union," Heaney portrays the English colonization of Ireland as an act of
violent sexual conquest. Field Work (1979) does not depart from
Heaney's outrage at the violence in Northern Ireland but shifts to a more
personal tone. The collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: love
and marriage, mortality, and the regenerative powers of self-
determination and the poetic imagination.
Critical Reception
Critics of Heaney's early work were immediately impressed by his
freshness of expression and command of detail. He has been praised for
his political poems, especially those that depict the violence between
Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. In these poems, it
has been noted that Heaney also addresses Ireland's cultural tensions and
divisions through the linguistic duality of his poetry, which draws upon
both Irish and English literary traditions. Critical commentary has traced
the thematic development of Heaney's work, contending that as his later
poems continue to address the unrest in Northern Ireland, they also
incorporate a more personal tone as Heaney depicts the loss of friends
and relatives to the violence. As his most recent work diverges from his
previous emphasis on politics and civic responsibility, Heaney returns to
the autobiographical themes of childhood experience and Irish
community ritual. Many critics have lauded these poems for their
imaginative qualities and their focus on visionary transcendence
experienced through ordinary life events. Heaney has been commended
for his experimentation with form and style, in particular in the volumes
Seeing Things and Station Island. His efforts to integrate meaning and
sound often result in vivid descriptions, witty metaphors, and assonant
phrasing. By most critics he is acclaimed as one of the foremost poets of
his generation and is very favorably compared to such poets as Derek
Mahon, Michael Longley, Michael Hartnett, and Ted Hughes.
'The Redress of Poetry" An Introduction
Poetry gains much from its great advocates, and there is no better
advocate for poetry in the English language than Seamus Heaney. 'The
Redress of Poetry' is a collection of lectures delivered at Oxford between
1989 and 1993 which explore the ways in which poetry can be said to
'redress' what is out of balance in the human experience and in society at
large. His sections proceed more or less chronologically, beginning with
an analysis of the 17th-century metaphysical poet-priest George Herbert
and continuing through chapters on Christopher Marlowe, Brian
Merriman, John Clare, Oscar Wilde, Hugh MacDiarmid, Yeats and
Larkin, Dylan Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop. For his understanding of
redress he invokes Simone Weil's If we know in what way society is
unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale
... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready
to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors';
he expands the definition to include George Seferis's comment that
poetry should be strong enough to help, and refers as well to Czeslaw
Milosz, Osip Mandelstam, and Vaclav Havel who, without any
guarantee of success, were drawn by the logic of their work to disobey
the force of gravity, to exercise in their work a far-reaching moral
imperative to hope. If he does not elaborate on these exemplary agents
of redress it is because the English language is Heaney's specific focus,
including the way in which English as an extension of imperial power
has upset the scale and been challenged by Irish and Scottish poets, a
political theme he explores especially well in the chapter on Hugh
MacDiarmid and in the closing essay on the crisis in Northern Ireland in
1981.
The theme of hope is most clearly worked out in the chapter on Yeats
and Larkin, where Yeats is seen to succeed and Larkin to fail in the
business of what can only be called spiritual affirmation. Larkin is
famously immune to the romantic consolations of visionary art. In
classic English fashion he repudiates the very idea of the transcendent,
choosing instead to focus his energies on what Heaney calls the
inexorability of his own physical extinction in poems like the one here
selected, 'Aubade'. For all its technical perfection, 'Aubade' is decried as
an example of its creator's having betrayed the essence of poetry, which
is, according to Milosz, a faith in life everlasting, however that may be
understood. Perhaps we forget too easily, Milosz continues, the
centuries-old mutual hostility between reason, science, and science-
inspired philosophy on the one hand and poetry on the other?
Statements about poetry don't get much more fearless than this, but
Milosz's 'indignant' rejection of Larkin's poem is, I think, misplaced. To
my mind, 'Aubade' is for all its negativity a paradoxically life-affirming
poem of the most subtle order, taking a mood of black despair and
rendering it, through precise transcription, absolutely luminous, which is
a sort of miracle and definitely not an example of going over to the side
of the adversary. It is always a matter of the 'right words in the right
order', and not so much of intention or belief, when a poem succeeds. If
the words are allowed to dictate the meaning, they will subvert reason,
science, and science-inspired philosophy whatever creed they might
espouse in a denotative sense. The poem is too long to quote in full, but
here is the last verse, the summation of Larkin's night of contemplating
the inevitability of death;
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Heaney might not agree that this is transcendent writing, but the chapter
in which 'Aubade' is discussed is occasion for some of the most lucid
and challenging concepts of his own regarding poetry's transcendent
potential. It is for statements like this that I read Heaney's essays: When
language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it
opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In sentences like
these, he is bold, precise, and at the same time ecstatic, Nietzschean,
persuasive in a way only a master of language can be. His chapters on
Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop are even better. We hear of
Thomas' melodramatic apprehension of language as a physical
sensation, as a receiving station for creaturely intimations; of his great
first gift, which enabled him to work instinctively at the deep sound-face
and produce a poetry where the back of the throat and the back of the
mind answered and supported each other. These are esoteric realms for
literary criticism, but natural territory for Heaney, who has probed the
matter of sounding-words and their resonance in the body more
thoroughly in an earlier collection of essays entitled 'Preoccupations',
and whose own poetry, of course, speaks volumes. Thomas' poetry is
criticized, ultimately, for its lack of maturity, its rigid adherence to the
physical as opposed to the spiritual properties of language and therefore
its failure to answer, in the mode of a possible redress, the needs, the
sensibilities, the breadth and scope of a developed enquiry: the poems of
his twenties and thirties pursued a rhetorical magnificence that was in
excess of and posthumous to its original, vindicating impulse. They
mostly stand like elaborately crenellated fabrications, great gazebos
built to the extravagant but finally exhibitionist specifications of their
inventor ...
Elizabeth Bishop fares better - her work achieves in Heaney's opinion a
perfect equilibrium between sadness and delight, detachment and
concern; the poems are both preternaturally immediate and remotely
familiar. His selection of her work is sensitive to what is most delicate in
it. The heartbreaking 'Sestina', my favorite, is quoted in full. All of
Heaney's many selections in this volume reveal his exquisite
understanding of their merits. A poet such as Hugh MacDiarmid, whose
elaborate and highly experimental reclamatory Scottish language/dialect
poems might easily put off an ordinary reader, is rendered accessible by
Heaney's sensitive reading, and we are afforded the delight of his
'Nothing has stirred ...', quoted below, which is a revelation, one among
many. The book teems with allusions to jewels of which I would
otherwise be ignorant - from Eileen O'Connell's lament for her husband
Art O'Leary to Terry Eagleton's play 'Saint Oscar' to Czech poet
Miroslav Holub's wonderful poem 'The Dead'. We might not be able to
go to Oxford or Harvard, but Seamus Heaney, in his generosity, brings
Oxford and Harvard to us; his four books of lectures and assorted prose
pieces are the best education in poetry I have ever had.
Influences on Heaney’s Writings
(1) He was the eldest of the nine brothers and sisters. His father was a
farmer belonging to North Ireland. His father was somewhat traditional
while his mother was at the same a modern lady. In this way his own
personality grew in conflict and tension b/w the two extremes – his
father’s trend towards agriculture & his mother bend towards industrial
revolution. Again his father was a reticent sort of fellow while his
mother was ever ready to talk. So his poetry arises b/w the conflicts –
conflicts b/w assertion & denial, conflict between silence and speech,
conflict between outer and inner assertions, conflict between Urban and
city areas, conflict between rebellion and submission and so on.
(2) At his early age he observed American soldiers having exercises in
the local fields for invasion on Normandy in 1944. That training centre
was quite near to his home. That thing always influenced his mind and
another conflict arose that was between history and ignorance,
consciousness & unconsciousness peace and war.
So most of his poetry is deeply rooted into his own countryside
area where he spent his early life. He won Nobel Prize in Literature in
1995.
(3) Seamus Heaney’s shift from village to city for studies, (“the earth
of farm labour to the heaven of education”) helped him study Latin &
Irish Languages and even his interest in Anglo-Saxon made his dialect
quite a peculiar one. He even studied the translations of virgil’s “The
Aeneid” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy” In this way the Gaelic Heritage
became a source of inspiration, references and allusions for the poet.
(4) Heaney’s poetry balances ‘creative freedom and political
pressure outside’ as in 1960’s his society was greatly polarized into
religious and political lines. His essay “The Redress of Poetry” is a
glaring example of the metaphor of balance. Furthermore, Heaney’s
poetry got influence from the political, social, cultural and religious
turmoils which were all around him.
(5) Heaney got another influence from his wife whom he got married
i-e Marie Devlin who belonged to the family of writers and artists. In
this way she became a source of inspiration, strength, motivation and
imagination for the poet.
(6) Seamus Heaney served as lecturer at various colleges and
universities even including Oxford University and promoted artistic and
educational matters. Even now his services are continuous.
Q. 1: Heaney’s arguments in defence of poetry.
Right from the beginning, poets have been condemned as idle people.
They are
generally considered to be worthless, imaginative, sensual, dreamy, and
so on. Some are of the view that the poets are worthless people and some
consider them an essential need of life. However,
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.
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 idea 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.
Aristotle opposed his teacher and said,
“The poet has 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.”
Aristotle was of the view that poet was essential to keep balance
in society. He insisted that the
poet takes us towards the ideal not away from it. Thus Plato opposed
poetry but Aristotle supported it.
The subject that Seamus Heaney has treated, the redress of poetry, is not
a new
subject. The nature and purpose of poetry has been a subject of practical
importance to everyone who has an interest in poetry.
By redress Heaney means
Reparation, satisfaction and compensation for something wrong.
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 (payback), comfort or reassurance. So
redress of
poetry means to remove or correct those false notions that have been
created in
the mind.
In his easy, “The Redress of Poetry”, Heaney builds different
assumptions (theories) for
the redress of poetry. The questions about the redress of poetry mean;
Whether poetry can give man confidence?
Whether poetry can give man some assurance?
Whether poetry is the useful activity?
Whether poetry is an aesthetic (artistic) work or pragmatic (realistic)
work?
Whether poets and poetry are any use in the complexities and miseries
of life or not?
Answers of all these questions can be found in Heaney’s book “Redress
of Poetry”
Heaney makes a fresh attempt to defend poetry in this age of science and
technology when everyone 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. Therefore,
Heaney thinks that in the present world only poetry can save man. This
he calls ‘redress of poetry.’ There were others also who kept defending
poetry against all kind of objections. For example,
Shelley supported poetry because “they reach the perfection.”
Oscar Wilde said that “life should imitate art because art presents the
perfection.”
Mathew Arnold went to extend 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 in difficulties.”
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 quote is George Herbert’s “Pulley”. It 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. It suggests that
“the mind and aspiration of the human beings turned towards the
heavenly in spite of
all the pleasures and penalties of being upon the earth.”
.
The two above mentioned poems show that there are two
dimensions of reality but there is a relationship between them. They 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.
Heaney is of the opinion that the world of reality and the world of
imagination are two different worlds but they depend upon each other
and they reinforce each other. 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 six sense, which is a mystery to us. We know things
mysteriously.
Heaney keeps moving between the world of matter-of-fact and
the world of imagination. He
quotes from the different critics and poets to support his arguments. He
quotes another writer, Pinsky, in who says that the poet has
responsibilities to answer. He has to answer the question raised by life.
Life raises questions and poets give their answers. This makes Heaney a
very didactic poet. He believes that poetry gives lessons. On the one
hand, he believes in the mystic sixth sense given by poetry, and, on the
other hand, he believes in the didactic responsibilities of the poetry and
poets. This approach of Heaney’s is a blend of the romantic and the
classical.
In this way Heaney has very tactfully pleaded in favour of poetry. Poetry
is the metaphor of balance; balance between imagination and reality,
balance between rational and empirical sides, balance between idealism
and realism, balance between aesthetic and cognitive aspects and so on.
(Words 950)
Pulley (George Herbert Reed)
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
Let us (said He) pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all His treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.
For if I should (said He)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore My gifts instead of Me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that, at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast.
George Herbert is a 17th century poet. He was a priest who wrote
religious poems full of devotion to god. His style is simple and concrete.
This poem is one such example. The poem written simply shows that it's
written by his heart and soul, and words are full of devotion for God "the
creator of world" .In this poem he explains why God has given the peace
of mind to man, but with dissatisfied restlessness. Man’s restlessness is a
pully over which his soul is lifted to God.
'PULLEY’ ASUGGESTS THAT THE MIND AND
ASPIRATIONS Of THE HUMAN BEINGS TURN TOWARDS
THE HEAVEN INSPITE 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 SIX SENSE WHIXH PROVIDES A PASSAGE FROM
THE real world INTO THE world of IMAGINATION .
“Squarings” by Seamus Heaney (Introduction to the poem)
Squarings has four parts, each made of 12 poems. The title shows
balance and order.
The first part Squarings is Lightenings .
The poems in this group revolve around major themes such as:
transparency, light spreading brightness and movement, echoes
spreading out through clay flutes towards sea and air and a sustained
effort of poetic levitation that defines and destroys roofs – poetic ones,
that is.
The second part of Squarings is Settings.
This group of poems is an archaic into memory, in which images of an
early childhood (the father, the surrounding universe) evolve in effigies
of places and sensations from golden, angelic hues to a carmine red
zone, filled with heat and lava, a mini-inferno, and then again towards
an equilibrium of aer and water in a continuous thinning of borders.
The third part of Squarings is Crossings.
The poems in this group talk of a metamorphosis, of a rebirth, of
entrance and exit into deep corridors inside one’s psyche, corridors
explored with a sense of profound loss, on a realm close to the Styx
where we grope in search of a ‘crossing’.
The fourth and last part of Squarings gives its title to the entire cycle of
poems.
This group holds poems which shine under a starry sky and in which the
haunting bogland appears, a fixed axis in a shifting universe.
"All gone into the world of light? Perhaps
As we read the line sheer forms do crowd
The starry vestibule."(a passage)
In short the poems in Squarings, (and most of Seamus Heaney’s poetry
for that matter) bring forth a poignant, deep-seated lyricism that is the
hallmark of memorable poetry.
There are unique traits of Seamus Heaney’s unconventional lyricism.
A brilliance of light, congealed and tempered, as if balanced on square
angles and vaporous stars set beautiful imagery. His childhood
memories and the restrained sorrows give birth to poetry as a second
life.
“I trust contrariness
years and years go past and I do
not move
for I see that when one man
casts, the other gathers.
And then vice versa, without
changing sides.”
(Casting & Gathering)
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”(Digging)
