Wastelands and Bog People - Part 3

This is part 3 of a three-part series

Robert Lowell called Seamus Heaney "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," and whether you agree or not, he is certainly one of the best poets writing in the English language today. He's also popular, and the work is accessible on a day-to-day level - he paint pictures and talks about situations we can all recognize - while being much more complex when you go deeper.

Blake Morrison wrote:

"One does not have to look very deeply into Heaney's work ... to see that it is rather less comforting and comfortable than has been supposed. Far from being 'whole,' it is tense, torn, divided against itself; far from being straightforward, it is layered with often obscure allusions; far from being archaic, it registers the tremors and turmoils of its age, forcing traditional forms to accept the challenge of harsh, intractable material.... A proper response to Heaney's work requires reference to complex matters of ancestry, nationality, religion, history, and politics."

and another critic, Jack Knoll wrote:

"Like Yeats, Heaney combines all the conflicting poles of the Irish experience into a rich, embattled language: paganism and Christianity, repression and expansion, desire and chastity, country and city, ignorance and enlightenment, hope and despair."

I listened to four audio clips of Heaney speaking to the BBC and gained quite a bit more insight. In one, he speaks about the poems he wrote about the ancient bodies dug up in the peat bogs, many apparently victims of human sacrifice to the fertility goddess who would make the seasons renew each year. Heaney, a Northern Ireland Catholic, wrote those poems during the Troubles, and much was made of them as a political statement. Heaney both agrees and disagrees, and says he find new things in the poems when he re-reads them now - they're some of his favorites - things that have nothing to do with politics. He still isn't quite sure where they came from.

But in another clip I found what I'd been looking for: what did Heaney make of Oxford, and the literary tradition and teaching that came before him? How did it shape him?

"[at Oxford]I was the perfect scholarship boy - I 'did English,'" he said. "This was the accepted way, the Tao, at the time: you read in the English language as a way to better yourself." But he said the giants of British, and Irish, literature loomed very large: ""Joyce allays every anxiety - except the one of coming after him."

In an interview in the Boston Review about his influences, he elaborated, saying that as a schoolboy in a Catholic boarding school in Derry, he was daunted "by T. S. Eliot and all that he stood for."  Nevertheless, when a relative offered to send him some books, it was Eliot he asked for, describing his admiration and dismay as a young man with this great quote: "...as much as I was learning from Eliot about the right way to listen, he could not be the starter-offer of poetry for me. He was more a kind of literary superego than a generator of the poetic libido, and in order for the libidinous lyric voice to get on with its initiations, it had to escape from his overseeing presence."

But later, with his own poet-legs underneath him, he came back to Eliot. Heaney quoted some lines from Ash Wednesday, and remarked, "They are not what I at first mistakenly thought them: constituent parts of some erudite code available to initiates."

He continues, saying that perhaps the most lasting influence on him from this time was not Eliot’s poetry, but his prose, including the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that I quoted in the previous post, which Heaney says he "read and re-read."

"But more important of all, perhaps, was a definition of the faculty that he (Eliot) called 'the auditory imagination.' This was "the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to an origin and bringing something back . . . fusing the most ancient and civilized mentalities."

At the end of the interview, Heaney says:

"Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this: in the realm of  poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final, the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement leads directly to the via negativa.

Many of the things Eliot says about poetic composition are fortifying because they are so authoritatively unconsoling."   

 

And he quotes Eliot:

 

                                       And what there is to conquer
            By strength and submission, has already been discovered
            Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
                                      hope
            To emulate–but there is no competition–
            There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
            And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
            That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
            For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Comments

[Teju]

That concern with the "auditory imagination" weighted against the bardic sense of speaking on behalf of others. The individual talent vs tradition, a theme that Heaney interprets so differently from Eliot. Eliot retreats into his somewhat prim Anglo-Catholicism. Heaney nudges his way towards an open Zen-like delight in the contrariness of things. The same tussle with "responsibility" is there, but how different the results are from one poet to another.

You see what I love so about him?

Eliot, by the way, was my favorite poet in my teens, he and Yeats were. And I think their combined influence was what prepared me for Seamus Heaney.

I'm glad you, too, discovered those audio clips. Another, more recent, Heaney resource is this profile of him by the excellent Adam Kirsch: http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/110639.html

[s.]

"There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying."

Ouch. So beautiful. I really think Eliot initiated us into a new relationship with the simple powere of language. That it could be so spare, and yet so lyrical. There's not a single silver-dollar word in there. (Except "unpropitious" of course!)

[s.]

You mentioned that before, Teju, about Eliot's "religion"--I was under the impression that he and Pound were very involved in Eastern "religion," and that he preserves the rich imagery of the Catholic tradition, but more as a pagan irony? Do dispel any myths, pls.

[Teju]

He migrated from an embrace of esoteric religions (In "the Wasteland") to high-church Anglicanism (it's evident in a lot of his late work, from "Ash Wednesday" to "Four Quartets.")

He was a religious poet, who also happened to be a spiritual one.

I like the spiritual aspect of him, but have (now) little patience for the religion.

[beth]

A correction, courtesy of Teju: Seamus Heaney studied at Queen's in Belfast, and did not
approach Oxford until he was named Professor of Poetry there for the five-year term 1994-99.

I hope we three aren't the only ones who managed to stick this one out through all three parts, but I'm enjoying the discussion! One thing I'd like to explore is Eliot's spirituality; he is sometimes "appropriated" by Anglicans, but the poems aren't comforting expressions of faith and grace for the mass market. Well - there's a lot more to learn. Would anyone like to suggest a Heaney poem to read and talk about together?

[s.]

I'm game--although I received so much criticism about imagery in my writing in workshop, I still stand by the belief that there is much to be gained from poetry--it does all the heavy lifting in writing.

[Teju]

I suggest we start with "Two Lorries."

[rr]

He "migrated from an embrace of esoteric religions"? I'm not sure that Eliot "embraced" Buddhism (Stephen Spender said he "almost" became a Buddhist) but Eliot certainly studied both Pali and Sanskrit at university along with Buddhist philosophers. There's an interesting paper about this influence on his life and writing here and a thought-provoking analysis of his Four Quartets in the light of Buddhist teachings here.

[Fred Garber]

I meant to post this here, but inadvertently posted it in the comments on part 2. I apologize to anyone who has already read it.

This is a great discussion! It has prompted me to recall an old documentary that I watched on PBS....maybe 15 or 20 years ago....about Elliot. The only concrete thing that I recall is that Elliot believed that after he wrote the Four Quartets he no longer needed to write poetry. I cannot remember why.

[Teju]

rr: I meant "embrace" in a loose sense. I don't think he ever converted.

[Poetry]

Squid Sauce and Chopped Gobo

Hairy trees with beared boughs

Roaming the ailes in search of fish eyes.

Why do some lights cast point sources (images, shadows made of light) on the surface of the water and others are search lights bridging the gap from shore to shore.