Seamus Heaney 'The Redress of Poetry"

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, 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.