Domhnall

He has rethought the sonnet, the elegy, the historical poem, the archaeological poem, the sequence; he has invented a new vein of phenomenological abstraction in landscape poetry; he has renovated terza ryma in demotic language, and, in his ‘squarings’, explored the potential of the douzain. He has written with an acute sense of the linguistic inheritance, both etymological and syntactic, of English – from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, the Romance languages – and has renovated the English of Irish poetry in consequence. Poems become memorable if and only if they renovate language and symbol and structure and genre; otherwise they fall into the abyss of the forgotten. [p12]

Seamus Heaney found his ideal reader and his ideal interpreter in Helen Vendler. She praises his exceptional ability to find diverse, effective and beautiful ways to express challenging thoughts and this is certainly something that can said of her own writing with the same enthusiasm. This book is the product of substantial investigations on her part, and as such confirms that it would be feasible and entirely satisfying to devote half a lifetime to just this one poet without exhausting the layers of his work, which is only reasonable since it is his life’s work we are examining. However, his work in turn has to be seen within the entire stream of poetry and literature and the topic expands beyond our grasp. As that is not an option for most of us, we can turn instead to this guide.

Vendler builds up her account of Heaney’s work with reference to each volume in turn, from Death of a Naturalist to The Spirit Level, nine books in all, which omits Heaney’s later writing. This is not a simplistic guide, although it does decode a number of obscure poems, but it is virtually a meditation in its own right, exploring what the poems reveal about Heaney’s personal development as a poet, which incorporates his technical development as a writer experimenting with every aspect of his trade, his development as a human passing through life’s stages, and his awareness of and changing views about his role in society. It gives priority to the study of Heaney’s use of language, but even so the exploration of the themes addressed is also thoughtful and fascinating.

Each of his volumes ambitiously sets itself a different task from its predecessors; each takes up a new form of writing; and just when one thinks one knows all of Heaney’s possibilities of style, he unfurls a new one. His readers, even when they do not notice technique in any explicit way, are being persuaded into the poem by words, by syntax, by structures, as well as by themes and symbols. [p3]

I myself regard thematic arguments about poetry as beside the point. Lyric poetry neither stands nor falls on its themes; it stands or falls on the accuracy of the language with which it reports the author’s emotional responses to the life around him. [p6]

Each successful poem presents itself as a unique experiment in language... Each poem says, ‘Viewed from this angle, at this moment, in this year, with this focus, the subject appears to me in this light, and my responses to it spring from this set of feelings.’ [p7]

’To hold in a single thought reality and justice’ – Yeats’s definition in A Vision of Hope of the hope of lyric – is one that Heaney often quoted. Reality is how things are; justice is how things should be. [p10]

Vendler discusses Heaney’s first three collections around the theme of “anonymities.” In Heaney’s early work ‘symbolic figures’, such as those in ‘Seed Cutters’, stand for the poet’s recognition of the immemorial nature of the work done on the family farm... Because such figures are anonymus, his poetic voice will also be anonymous: he will speak both about and for those whose names are lost to history. [p13] She notices that “anonymity is not usually the first choice of a young poet” [p14] and goes on to discuss the many identities available to the young Heaney, identities others wish to impose on him, while he refuses to conform to what is expected.

In framing the collection called “North” around the concept of archaeologies, Vendler argues that Heaney had the idea of exploring violence and death in the distant past as a way to escape “the journalistic clichés” [p52] through which the media insisted on describing the ongoing violence in Nortern Ireland at that time.

The bodies do not want to be beatified (religious language is inadequate to them), nor did they exist to be murdered (the language of violence is inadequate to them). What they claim now, and claimed in life, is what all human being want: existence on the same terms as their fellows. [p48]

Vendler chooses the theme of Anthropologies for the collection called Field Work, a reference to the time spent by an anthropologist among the people who are to be the subject of study, and this is the attitude assumed by Heaney towards the people in his own life. However, the chapter primarily discussed Heaney’s approach to writing elegies, in the context of continuing sectarian violence.

The Heaney style - earlier so apt in conveying the immemorial and the immobile – is now called on to sketch the living as they were before their annihilation and to do justice to the moment of extinction. The problem of elegy is always to revisit death while not forgetting life, and the structure of any given elegy suggests the relation the poet postulates between these two central terms. [p60]

The point of the anthropology metaphor is that Heaney challenges the very language of sectarianism through his “field-work”

Not all the Irish are in Ireland always, and not all those inhabiting Ireland were born there or will die there. These facts are inconvenient to the unitary view of both nationalist propaganda and single-minded mythology, but they are the very stuff of cultural interest for an ethnographer or anthropologist. [p64]

What one chiefly takes away from Field Work is Heaney’s deliberate choice to remain on the human, colloquial, everyday level – to remain there even for elegies, which normally tend towards apotheosis, and even for love-poems, which normally tend towards the elevatingly idealized. [p74]

I won’t summarise the entire book here. The point is that Vendler is continually dipping back and forth between the vocabulary and language used, the poetic form and structure with its history in poetry, and Heaney’s social engagement on many levels, personal and political. It becomes clear that Heaney has invested a lifetime into his craft and placed it at the service of his own wider community, helping them to interpret and cope with the most important social issues of that particular time and place. This brilliant, forensic examination of Heaney’s poetry is capable of being intimidating, but the point is that Vendler has placed her own immense grasp of these matters at our service in this beautiful book. She has the erudition to cope with Heaney at his most challenging, and the grace to present this to us readers in a form that is accessible, often moving, always interesting.

Heaney emerges as a great artist but also as a great thinker - both engaging and relevant. His poetry is important and Vendler explains why.

The rights of discourse seem, alarmingly, to have passed to the untrustworthy: it is ‘the subversives and collaborators’ who are ‘always vying with a fierce possessiveness / for the right to set “the island story” straight’. The importance of these poems of competing discourses lies in the poet’s conviction that the person who owns the language owns the story, and he who wishes to change the story must first change the language. [p126]