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

hung onto Heaney’s interview reply. The result is to make the reader question your own honesty, as indeed Swords
[Desmond Swords-another person who responded to Side’s article] did. His approach follows your own example:
he’s making assumptions about your motives just as you did about Heaney’s, the difference being that you were
wearing a scholarly carapace, and he a cap and bells’.
I think when readers compare my article with Swords’s diatribes against me personally a fairer assessment will be
made. Indeed, that you find Swords credible weakens your own credibility slightly.
‘You quote Heaney saying “And yet, limber and absolved as linguistic inventiveness may seem in poetry, it is not
disjunct from or ever entirely manumitted by the critical intelligence”. Like it or not, Heaney has taken pains in the
way he’s expressed this tension (“not disjunct from or ever entirely manumitted by”) only to have you flatly
‘translate’ his argument into a “distrust of linguistic ingenuity” and to claim “he places reason above artifice and
content before form”. This is a travesty of scholarship’.
It is curious that Heaney uses the words “absolved” and “manumitted” in the sentence you quote. The meanings of
these words, as you know, are “Freed from any question of guilt” in the case of “absolved”, and “Free from slavery or
servitude” in the case of “manumitted”. These words are morally charged ones, and not as objective and analytical as
you seem to be suggesting. Why would one need to use them in a sentence that is, as you interpret, merely an
expression of an observed tension? Why shouldn’t ‘linguistic inventiveness’, as Heaney describes poetic language, be
“freed from any question of guilt” (although, something of his real opinion on this is revealed when he slips into the
sentence the word “seem” to suggest its continuing “guilt”)? And why is it necessarily the case that it cannot be “free
from slavery or servitude”? That in the case of the former it is, and in that of the latter (according to Heaney) it is not,
to me, questions Heaney’s objectivity regarding the sentence you quote. It also further demonstrates his frequent
use of slippery critical language. So it is not as clear-cut as you assume when you say: ‘Heaney gives due weight to
both claims and you say he’s dismissing one of them’. With Heaney, his critical language has to be carefully decoded
in order to appreciate its subtleties.
‘Your account of Heaney’s dealings with Clare is similarly garbled, and keeps presuming Heaney is promoting his
own poetry’.
I never used the word “promoting” in relation to Heaney’s use of poetic apologia. It is not my unique opinion that
Heaney in his critical writings of other poets uses it as apologia for his own poetry. In ‘Power and Hiding Places:
Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney’, Hugh Haughton says that Heaney ‘has used critical prose as a powerful
instrument in helping define the terms through which his own work can be understood. In readings, essays,
interviews and lectures, he has proved himself […] an eloquent self-promoter of his own art’. This was quoted in my
article, but you seem not to have noticed it.
‘You accuse him of arguing “disingenuously” when he claims that “there is more than mere description in Clare’s
poetry”. Why should this uncontroversial claim be disingenuous? (Everyone who reads Clare can see there’s a large
freight of description, but most of us easily perceive that the description, at least in his best poems, adds up to
something a great deal more.)’
The quote from Heaney that proceeds my use of the word “disingenuously” is: ‘Just because Clare’s poetry abounds
in actualities, just because it is full of precise delightful detail as a granary is full of grains, does not mean that it is
doomed to pile up and sink down in its own materiality’. Heaney is being disingenuous to the extent that he argues
that Clare’s poetry is more than “photography”, after Heaney has, elsewhere, praised it for its absence of artifice. He
thinks it a good thing of Clare’s ‘Mouse’s Nest’ that ‘there is an unspectacular joy and totally alert love for the onething-after-anotherness
of the world’. This is a small point and I’m surprised you make such a fuss over it.
‘Heaney’s essay is full of praise for Thomas, but there are occasions in which he sees Thomas carried away by the
“extravagance of imagery and diction”. Heaney isn’t saying he doesn’t enjoy that extravagance, he clearly does even
in the quotation you give, but it’s just that he prefers it in certain instances where there’s more undertow or
counter-pressure from the material. This seems to me a fair criticism, and one that many other admirers of Thomas,
myself included, would concede’.
I disagree that Heaney is ‘full of praise for Thomas’. It seems to me that his observations of Thomas’s
“shortcomings” as a descriptive poet tells us that Heaney wishes Thomas were more of an empiricist. He suggests
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