Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

bother, it may well be a fine and private decision but it carries the inconvenience of (even more!) minimal
distribution and coverage. I’m far from sure that these poets would necessarily be accepted but I’m convinced that
some who publish in small presses have, for whatever reasons, chosen that as their preferred mode. (For those with
any interest in a wider readership, not only Bloodaxe but also Carcanet have published a number of poets whose
practices diverge from the “mainstream” and Salt has displayed an eagerness to do so.)
Two other matters remain. Your argument that concertinas the Movement into the Group and then conflates Philip
Hobsbaum with Heaney has certainly been repeated ad nauseam-it’s almost become an article of faith in some
quarters; but repetition isn’t proof, and your article merely parrots these connections. The quotation you do give
from Hobsbaum reveals a clunky, English nationalist agenda in his questioning of Pound and Eliot’s status-and it
doesn’t take much wit to work out why Heaney would dissociate himself from that. In terms of practice, it would
make much more sense to see Heaney learning from, among others, Kavanagh and Yeats at home, and across the
Atlantic from Lowell and (to a lesser extent) Bishop. I intend no disrespect to Hobsbaum in repeating that Heaney,
almost from the outset, had outdistanced this supposed master. (The same is true of Longley and Mahon.) What I
can’t see is why so many critics like Robert Sheppard, who are informed in other areas, invest so deeply in this
bankrupt notion. Do they have to believe Andrew Crozier has the last word when he says ‘The present-day canon has
its roots in the Movement’?
(That quotation appears, as your footnote proclaims, in Antony Easthope’s deeply philistine book Englishness and
National Culture. I suspect he’s the only author you footnote who might just approve of your venture-I’d bet good
money that Morrison, Haughton and even Fenton would be appalled at the uses you’ve put them to.)
Finally, your argument about the connotative aspects of poetry is, I’m afraid, plodding and doctrinaire. Connotation
in language is just one, often, minor aspect of poetic practice and by no means a defining one (in some of Geoffrey Hill,
for example, it can take on an important role, in some of William Carlos Williams it’s narrowed to nothing). There are
many excellent poems that deliberately exclude or minimise connotation. Some types of ambiguity are useful and
enriching in poetry and some not. But even if we were to accept it as a criterion, your insistence that Heaney as a
poet undervalues the connotative aspects of language is refuted by almost every quotation you’ve given from his
prose. Your own prose is dreary and monotonous where Heaney’s is explorative and supple. But the real test would
be his poems and, as I’ve said, you’ve deliberately avoided them. It’s ghastly to excerpt lines as possible targets, and
readers who know Heaney’s work could supply hundreds of better examples, but can anyone imagine a Movement
poet writing lines so full of linguistically self-referential tropes as these typical lines from early Heaney: ‘The tawny
guttural water / spells itself…’ or ‘the shower / gathering in your heelmark / was the black O / in Broagh…’? Or a
line taken at random from late Heaney: ‘Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away’? That Heaney cleaves to the actual
and the physical, and relishes description, is not in the least evidence that his poems deny the linguistically
extravagant and inventive, or that they fail to achieve effects beyond the literal. (Just how connotative and
challenging to literal paraphrase his poems are will be clear to anyone who has tried to translate him into another
language. I suspect quite a few “experimental” poets would be far less problematic.)
You may not care for any of these effects in his poems but your remarks about Heaney’s style illuminate nothing
about his practice. Your view of Heaney’s prose is blinkered and (both historically and geographically) parochialthere’s
just no sense at all of a writer who is having to engage with political turmoil up close and having to think hard
about the responsibility poetry might have both to its own imaginative freedom as well as to the social context-and
for most of Heaney’s writing life that has been one of murderous conflict. The idea that The Movement or the Group
would help Heaney steer his way through any of this is deeply unconvincing. But ultimately it’s the continuous
assumption of bad faith that betrays the ill-motivated and petty-minded rather than the polemical nature of your
article.
Jeffrey Side’s Second Response
April 2009
Jamie, just to respond to a few points you make in your response to my response to your letter about my Heaney
article. I will quote from you and add my comments beneath.
‘No doubt all this looks to you like “academic polemic” but it looks to me more like a grievance-in-waiting you’ve
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