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

this by damning Thomas with faint praise. As I said in the article, for Heaney, Thomas ‘continued to place a too
unenlightened trust in the plasticity of language’.
‘In almost every reference to his essays, you wilfully twist what Heaney writes, and use clumsy prompts like
“opportunistically”, or the above, that are meant to discredit him. These, especially “casuistry”, in the pejorative
sense you intended, describe your own approach far more accurately than Heaney’s’.
I can only say that you, again, have not attempted to look further than my article and to the sources cited in it. I
apologise if you find my vocabulary offensive to Heaney.
‘To turn to the other points that you raise in your reply: the question about whether J. H. Prynne has declined certain
publishing opportunities is something I’m no expert on. I understand, for example, that he chose not to appear in at
least one widely distributed anthology (The Penguin Book from Britain and Ireland from 1945). If I’m right, he may
have all kinds of unimpeachable reasons for doing so. But even if I’m wrong, since I’m not in the least blaming him or
others for such a choice, and you, on the other hand, were blaming the “mainstream”, I’d say the burden of proof for
that claim lies on your shoulders not mine’.
I have to disagree; the burden of proof is still on your shoulders. I have not blamed the mainstream in this matter. I
mentioned nothing of this in my article or in my response to your initial response to the article. You have elevated it
to a contentious issue. Although you now claim not to be ‘blaming […] others for such a choice’ your response to my
article suggested otherwise. You said: ‘Even if Prynne himself has declined to be published in certain commercial
anthologies and other poets affiliated with him have expressed scorn for the larger poetry outlets, that doesn’t let
the mainstream off the hook’. Here, you put words into my mouth by suggesting that my article suggested this, which
it didn’t’. These are entirely your suppositions.
‘The idea that certain poets affiliated with Prynne should expect to receive “overtures” and “offers of publication”
from the larger presses is comic and naïve’.
I was responding to your use of the word “scorn”, which you connected to my article (and which wasn’t in it). In
your response to my article, you said that ‘poets affiliated with him [Prynne] have expressed scorn for the larger
poetry outlets’. My response to this was to question it. I said: ‘If other poets “affiliated with him have expressed
scorn for the larger poetry outlets”, does this mean that such ‘scorn’, as you put it, was born of offers of publication
from such quarters? I seriously doubt it. Such a reaction is likely to be because of a lack of such overtures’. I meant by
this that for these poets to scorn (or reject) the mainstream, as you imply, would require something for them to
practically reject, other than the mere concept of a “mainstream”. The only thing that comes to mind in this regard is
some sort of publishing offer. Given that this would not be forthcoming in most cases, “scorn” would be absent, and
therefore a misappropriation by you of the word “scorn” in this context. Again, I have to stress, this is a straw man of
your own construction; my article didn’t broach the subject.
‘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”?’
All I can say is that Heaney’s poetic aesthetic is influenced by Hobsbaum’s, among others. I make no claim that
Heaney has imbibed Hobsbaum’s poetic xenophobia, but that is mentioned in relation to Hobsbaum’s aesthetic as
applied to what he saw as an inappropriate poetic language as expressed in the poetry of Eliot and Pound.
‘I’d bet good money that Morrison, Haughton and even Fenton would be appalled at the uses you’ve put them to.)’
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