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will transfigure the conditions and effect thereby what I have been calling “The Redress of Poetry”. 108
Here, he apologises for descriptive poetry by claiming that it is not merely descriptive. He contends that the
descriptive poet’s perception and expression will transform in some sense the appearance of objects described.
Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion in the Introduction to their anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British
Poetry inadvertently indicate that for Heaney transforming an object’s appearance is achieved through
defamiliarisation. Concerning his poem, ‘The Grauballe Man’ they write:
As Heaney’s eye ranges over the anatomy it transforms skin and bone to a clutter of inanimate things:
the wrist to ‘bog oak’, the heel to a ‘basalt egg’, the mortal wound to a ‘dark elderberry place’, and so
on. 109
It should be pointed out that defamiliarisation is dependent upon vision in order to revive our awareness of objects
that have become over-familiar through constant exposure to them. To this extent, it is an empiricist mode of writing.
Interestingly, Heaney’s use of defamiliarisation owes more than a slight debt to Coleridge’s understanding of
something similar to it as alluded to in Biographia Literaria. In it Coleridge mentions with approval, an unpublished
poem of Wordsworth’s he heard Wordsworth reading aloud one time. Of the poem Coleridge writes:
It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in the observing, with
the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed [,,] and with it the depth and height of the
ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had
bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up all the sparkle and the dew drops. 110
Here we see a description of the workings on a poem of a method that achieves a similar affect to that which we now
call defamiliarisation. It should also be considered, that Wordsworth’s poetic practice (as has been pointed out by
Heaney in his Introduction to his selection of Wordsworth’s poems, published by Faber) favoured something akin to
defamiliarisation. In discussing ‘Resolution and Independence’, Heaney remarks, with reference to Wordsworth’s
Preface to LyricalBallads:
What happens [here] is that a common incident is viewed under a certain ‘colouring of imagination’;
ordinary things are presented to the mind in an unusual way and made interesting. 111
Seen in this light, Heaney’s “transfigurations”, as portrayed by Morrison and Motion, are not as transcendental as
they might appear to be.
In conclusion, this discussion of Heaney’s use of a “Wordsworthian defamiliarisation” is also relevant to the larger
debate concerning modernist and postmodernist poetry’s debt to Romanticism, as has been noted by Thurley,
Larrissy and Gregson among others. 112 Part of this debate involves Wordsworth’s penchant for discursiveness, which
can be seen manifesting itself as an influence in British postmodern poetry. Discursiveness (specifically in relation to
its poetic manifestation rather than within its philosophical framework) is a mimesis of thought processes and is,
therefore, empiricist. Although it could be argued that in much of postmodern poetry these thought processes
present themselves as plural and discontinuous, nevertheless, the lexical aspects (abstract nouns etc.) of
discursiveness disallow connotation despite the discourse’s fragmented appearance. What can be conveyed via
discursiveness in all its forms (recollection, rumination, speculation and confessional) could be rendered more
concisely with highly concentrated imagery.
Discursiveness, as has been noted, came to fruition with Wordsworth, as can be seen in this extract from ‘Tintern
Abbey’:
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
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