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Seamus Heaney's Defence of Poetry

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Seamus Heaney's Defence of Poetry Town The copyright of this thesis rests with the University of Cape Town. No quotation from it or information derivedCape from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of theof source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non-commercial research purposes only. University ‘The Efficacy of Song Itself’ Seamus Heaney’s Defence of Poetry Town Cape of University by Sarah Rowan ‘The Efficacy of Song Itself’ Seamus Heaney’s Defence of Poetry by Sarah Rowan Town Thesis Presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Cape in the Departmentof of English UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN February 2009 University i Abstract ‘The Efficacy of Song Itself’: Seamus Heaney’s Defence of Poetry Sarah Rowan, February 2009 The defence of poetry dates back, in English literature, to Sidney‘s ‗An Apology for Poetry‘ (1595), and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an increasing number of writers advancing arguments in support of an art formTown that seems, more than ever, to be under threat. In this thesis, Seamus Heaney‘s essays on the purpose of poetry are considered as they constitute a defence of the art form. While Heaney‘s poetry and prose have, as a result of his popularity and standingCape as a poet, generated an almost unprecedented body of critical work, his defence of poetry has not been recognised as such, nor has it come under sufficient criticalof scrutiny. Essentially a defence of a defence, this thesis redresses that omission by examining Heaney‘s apology as it takes shape in his essays, and in its application to a selection of his own poems. It argues that his defence is important not for the originality of its ideas, many of which derive from the work of his predecessors, but for the way in which Heaney combines and interprets those ideas to produce an argumentUniversity that is uniquely persuasive. His prose style, and the consistent grounding of his argument in examples provided by individual poems, constitute a witness to the pleasure and the potency of the art form which is itself both notably pleasurable and potent. ii Acknowledgements My thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Stephen Watson, whose generosity of both time and spirit enabled me to ‗map the furrow‘ far more precisely, and with a far clearer sense of direction, than would otherwise have been possible. I am likewise appreciative of the support of friends and family,Town in particular my husband Andrew, sister Clare and my parents, Rene and Evan Johnson, who provided such diverse assistance as cooking meals, proofreading chapters and accompanying me on very early, very long runs. Cape of The A.W. Mellon Foundation and the National Research Foundation permitted me, through their significant financial support, to embark on and complete this thesis, for which I am grateful. University iii Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1…….The Genealogy of a Defence 11 Chapter 2…… Heaney‘s Defence of Poetry I: The Processes of Poetry 70 Town Chapter 3…….Heaney‘s Defence of Poetry II: The Political Accusation 97 Chapter 4…….Heaney‘s Defence of Poetry III: Cape The Redress of Poetry of 121 Chapter 5…… The Defence in Practice 146 Conclusion 194 Bibliography University 204 iv Introduction [Poetry has taught me] that there‘s such a thing as truth and it can be told – slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorized away and is worth defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of possessing inherent strength by reason of its sheer made-upness, its integritas, consonantia and claritas. Seamus Heaney, interview with Dennis O‘Driscoll1 I In 2002, my fourth year of tertiary study at the University of Cape Town, I did a course entitled ‗Poetry at the Millennium‘, in which the status of poetry at the turn of the twentieth century was explored through a variety of texts on the subject. My final assignment for the course entailed selecting, from those we had studied, the defence of poetry that I thought most convincing, and demonstrating in an essay what it was that I found so persuasive about that defence. My chosen reading wasTown Seamus Heaney‘s ‗The Redress of Poetry‘, and in that assignment lay the seeds of this thesis. I had determined before reaching university that my doctoral thesis would be on Ted Hughes, a poet whom I had discovered – like so many teenage girls, no doubt – via Sylvia Plath, and whose work I had swiftly comeCape to prefer. By the time I had read him more extensively, however, I had doubts aboutof spending three or four years immersed in his life and poetry: the ‗savagery and beautiful bleakness‘ of that poetry, the necessity of delving into a life characterised by an extraordinary degree of personal tragedy, made me wonder at the wisdom of such a pursuit, at least for someone like myself at this point in my life.2 My discovery of Seamus Heaney‘s defence of poetry, and with it his extraordinary verse – as weighty, as expansive as Hughes‘, but in a manner quite different – providedUniversity me with an alternative preferable for a number of reasons; and when, in 2005, I registered for my PhD, it was with relish at the thought of devoting an extended period of time to Heaney‘s work. I was, by that stage, an unashamed ‗Heaneybopper‘ – a now common term for members of the poet‘s prodigious fan base. 1 Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, ed. D. O‘Driscoll, (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 467. 2 Nicci Gerrard, ‗The Colossus Diminished: Review of Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein‘, The Observer, October 28, 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/28/biography.poetry (January 6, 2009). 1 ‗A man‘s theory of the place of poetry,‘ T.S. Eliot wrote in ‗Matthew Arnold‘, ‗is not independent of his view of life in general‘; and Heaney is no exception.3 His background is by no means lacking in tragedy of its own. Growing up in Northern Ireland as a Catholic Derryman, his early life took place in an environment always on the brink of a violence that was ubiquitous and self-perpetuating. As such, his development as a writer took place in a context which made the conflict between poetry and politics very real and very immediate. For all the anguish and difficulty that such issues have caused Heaney, however, he has retained, both as a man and as a writer, an astonishing equilibrium. His domestic life is, by all accounts, tranquil and untouched by scandal. He has been married for forty years, it would appear happily, and for thirty of those has lived, when not abroad, in the same house in Dublin.4 The success of his professional life has been measured out in a series of accolades culminating in, but not ending with, the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. The public criticismTown and contention that he has endured – inevitably to do with politics, and his degree of involvement therein – have done little, it seems, to disrupt the balance of his beliefs or principles, and his urge to celebrate life (often in its simplest forms) is undiminished,Cape a basic given of his personality. One‘s sense of him is of a man firmly grounded in every sense of that word, both in his preoccupation with the landscapeof of his native Ireland and, not least, in his assured sense of his vocation as a poet. That equilibrium, that urge to celebrate, are everywhere present in Heaney‘s poetry. As a result, its effect on the reader is uniquely harmonising. The aftertaste of his work is never that which accompanies malaise, however much a sense of disquiet might at times be its pointUniversity of origin. Those same characteristics are to become, as Eliot might have predicted, the bedrock of Heaney‘s defence of poetry: poetry creates balance, it redresses, and in so doing it both defends and extends the mind, the senses. It is the embodiment of joy, first and last. That exuberance is often represented as offensive in the face of tragedy and suffering, as Heaney well knows, and his task as defender is, in large part, to answer that accusation against poetry. As he does so, his passionate conviction as 3 T.S. Eliot, ‗Matthew Arnold‘, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England, (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 119. 4 Sam Leith, ‗Return of the Naturalist‘. The Telegraph, April 16, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3651313/Return-of-the-naturalist.html (December 12, 2008). 2 to the necessity of poetry – a faith, as he calls it repeatedly, the grounds for which it is the purpose of his defence to reveal – finds expression in passages and images that are very nearly as resonant, as striking, as the greatest moments of his poetry. The strength of Heaney‘s defence, I will argue, lies primarily not in its originality. Many of his ideas – as well as the terms that he utilises, the contradictions he attempts to negotiate – find their origin in the work of his literary forebears. Rather, his defence is extraordinary because of his ability to interweave those ideas as no other defender of poetry has done; to select and set side-by-side quotations from a wide and sometimes unexpected range of thinkers. In so doing, Heaney displays his prose style at its most virtuosic. As we will also see, the importance of the energy, vividness and acuity of that style, the poetic and metaphoric verve of his essays, cannot be overestimated in its contribution to the quality and status of his defence.
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