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

process in service to humanistic and ethical concerns. In his 1989 inaugural lecture on having been elected Professor
of Poetry at Oxford University he says:
Professors of poetry, apologists for it, practitioners of it, from Sir Philip Sidney to Wallace Stevens, all
sooner or later have to attempt to show how poetry’s existence at the level of art relates to our
existence as citizens of society-how it is “of presentuse”. 85
This “present use” is closely associated with politics:
The truth is, the purer and more concentrated a poet’s faculties and the more aligned within his
sensibility the poles of politics and transcendence, then the simpler and more distinct will be something
that we might call the poetic DNA pattern. 86
Moreover, Heaney readily admits to humanist leanings when he says, ‘I am still enough of a humanist to believe that
poetry arises from the same source as that ideal future which Derek Mahon, in his poem ‘The Sea in Winter’,
envisages’. 87 Additionally, he shows his deference to Wordsworth’s emphasis on poetry as a vehicle for
unambiguous content by saying that, ‘as Wordsworth once said, our subject is indeed important’. 88 He also alludes
(via Emerson-a “pupil” of Wordsworth) to the Wordsworthian ideal that poetry should comprise self-reflection:
The poet-as representative man, as representative woman-this Emersonian figure then comes under
the strain of bearing witness in his or her own life to the plane of consciousness established in the
poem. 89
Turning to Heaney’s poetry, we can see that it is characterised by his use of accurate descriptions (Ciarán Carson
refers to him as ‘a writer with the gift of precision’) of the quotidian in rural settings. 90 This, he has in common with
Georgian poetry with its, ‘country cottages, old furniture, moss-covered barns, rose-scented lanes, apples and cherry
orchards’. 91 Such is the accuracy of Heaney’s descriptiveness that it prompts J. W. Foster to write in The Achievement
of Seamus Heaney:
Not only are Heaney’s poems about manual work on the farm-ploughing, planting, harvesting, horseshoeing-but
they are themselves manuals on how the work is actually done. It is amusing, for instance,
to set ‘Churning Day’ beside E. Estyn Evan’s account of churning in Irish Heritage (1942) and Irish Folk
Ways (1957). 92
Moreover, this reliance upon descriptive accuracy lends to the charge that his poetry is readily paraphrasable. In
‘Seamus Heaney-from Major to Minor’, R. Caldwell observes that, ‘there is too often the feel with his poetry that the
paraphrase is the end of the matter: there is little of the multifaceted richness of suggestion that invites one to probe
further’. 93
Something of Heaney’s discomfort with a more than functional use of poetic language can be seen in his critique of
Dylan Thomas in The Redress of Poetry (based on a series of lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry)
where he contends that Thomas ‘continued to place a too unenlightened trust in the plasticity of language’. 94 It
would seem that for Heaney, poetry is primarily concerned with language as unequivocal communication. In his
critique of Thomas’s poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, he calls this unequivocal communication
“knowledge”. He praises Thomas’s poem for delivering a clear message:
The poem does not begin with words, as the young Thomas too simply insisted that poetry should, but
it moves towards them. And it is exactly the sensation of language on the move towards a destination in
knowledge which imbues ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ with a refreshing maturity. 95
Here we see how he not only admonishes the ‘young Thomas’ for his assumed poetic naiveté, but also infers from the
poem’s “clarity of meaning” that Thomas has achieved the necessary poetic maturity, a maturity that has enabled
him to make his meanings clear in order to ‘move towards a destination in knowledge’ that does not ‘begin with
words’ (i.e. linguistic resourcefulness). Heaney’s use of the term “knowledge” is significant because it has a
resonance with Wordsworth’s belief in the ‘poetic experience as a form of knowledge’. 96 His reservations about
poetic language extend also into his opinion of poetic artifice. Of Thomas’s use of it, he thinks that ‘the demand for
more matter, less art, does inevitably arise’. 97 Elizabeth Bishop, however, has his approval because ‘she never allows
45