The Figuring of W.B.Yeats in Seamus Heaney' Poems and Prose

9ROXPH,,,,VVXH,,$SULO,661 The figuring of W.B.Yeats in Seamus Heaney’ poems and prose Nagendra Singh Gangola Research Scholar M.B.G.P.G College, Haldwani Uttarakhand India Abstract Yeats has been a constant presence in Heaney’s criticism since the late 1970s, and a central figure in his consideration of poetic influence. Auden, in his elegy for Yeats on his death in 1939, famously said that ‘The Poet became his admirers.’[1] One of the admirers Yeats has most crucially become is Seamus Heaney. The strenuousness of Heaney’s ongoing engagement with Yeats is of keen interest not least because it sets him in the midst of one of the most fraught and contentious debates in recent Irish literary and cultural criticism, in which the voice of Seamus Deane has been particularly penetrating, with its articulation of Yeats’s later career as an exercise in ‘the pathology of literary Unionism’, and with its inveighing against a criticism complaisantly tolerant of certain presumptively Yeatsian procedures in contemporary Northern Irish poetry which appear to propose that ‘The literature – autonomous, ordered – stands over against the political system in its savage disorder.’ But it is of keen interest also because Heaney’s place in Irish national life is of a kind that no Irish poet since Yeats has enjoyed, or endured. The relationship between Heaney and Yeats which this paper is going to discuss here is an affair of peculiar delicacy, in which the bold but wary subtleties of Heaney’s negotiations over the years may have been almost matched by the subtleties of suspicious scrutiny to which they have been subjected. It will, however, also explore the way Yeats figures in Heaney’s poems as well as in his critical prose. KWWSZZZLMHOOKFRP 9ROXPH,,,,VVXH,,$SULO,661 Introduction Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013. Heaney has attracted a readership on several continents and has won prestigious literary awards and honours, including the Nobel Prize. As Blake Morrison noted in his work Seamus Heaney, the author is "that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with the common reader’. ‘Part of Heaney's popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule. The New York Review of Books essayist Richard Murphy described Heaney as "the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present." Heaney's poetry is known for its aural beauty and finely-wrought textures. Often described as a regional poet, he is also a traditionalist who deliberately gestures back towards the “pre-modern” worlds of William Wordsworth and Clare. However his poetry also seems to echo the great Irish poet W.B.Yeats repeatedly. Terence Brown ends his critical biography of Yeats with a chapter on his ‘afterlife’, an account of the various ways in which his work survives in subsequent writing. He says there that Seamus Heaney ‘has engaged as critic with the poetic achievement of Yeats more fully than any other Irish poet since MacNeice’– who published the first critical book on Yeats in 1941. In fact, Heaney’s writings on Yeats to date would almost make a book too-relatively slim, but intellectually substantial. These are also usually instances of Heaney at his best as a critic, provoked into some of his most alert and challenged acts of attention. A collection of Heaney on Yeats would begin with two essays of 1978.One, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, sustains a contrast between a poetry of ‘surrender’ and a poetry of ‘discipline’. The other, ‘Yeats as an Example?’, adds a question mark to the title of an essay by W. H. Auden to suggest how deeply problematic a figure Yeats is for Heaney. ‘Yeats as an Example?’ is central to the sense of this relationshp.2 Other essays would include the uncollected ‘A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary KWWSZZZLMHOOKFRP 9ROXPH,,,,VVXH,,$SULO,661 Revival’, published in 1980, in which the Protestant Anglo-Irish Yeats is compared with the nineteenth-century Catholic apostate novelist William Carleton [2]. Then there is an essay of 1988, ‘The Place of Writing: W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee’, in which Heaney meditates on the various meanings of the Norman tower in the West of Ireland in which Yeats lived for a few years, and which he figured extensively in his poetry. The essay is one of three – the others are frequently allusive to Yeats too – which made a short book, also called The Place of Writing, published in the United States in 1988,[3] excerpts from which were reprinted in the prose collection Finders Keepers in 2002. This putative collection of Heaney on Yeats would continue with an essay of 1990 called ‘Joy or Night’, which compares attitudes to death in Yeats and Larkin, decisively favouring Yeats as ‘more vital and undaunted’ (RP 160,147). It would include the lengthy essay written for The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, a revised version of which forms the introduction to the Faber selection of Yeats which Heaney published in 2000.[4] And it would end with the Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in Stockholm in 1995 entitled ‘Crediting Poetry’, which he subsequently reprinted at the end of his not-quite-collected volume, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, in 1998.[5] An account of his own career as a poet in relation to the circumstances of Northern Ireland since 1969, this lecture is also much taken up with Yeats, that earlier Irish winner of this same prize. Peter McDonald has said that ‘this feels like the last word on a topic Heaney knows must now be dropped’,[6] but it is hard to agree that this must necessarily be so, given that Yeats remains as the supreme model for poetic persistence into old age. Yeats figuring in Heaney’s creations Any full treatment of this subject would prominently consider the sequence ‘Singing School’ in North (1975), whose title derives from Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, and whose epigraphs set a quotation from Yeats’s Autobiographies against another from Wordsworth’s Prelude in a way that makes, of itself, an ironic political point; and it would examine many other poems in that volume too. It would think about the poem ‘The Master’ in the sequence ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ in Station Island, where the anonymous figure of authority is dressed in very Yeatsian imagery; and it might think about that poem all the more because Heaney in fact identifies the master in an interview as Czesáaw Miáosz.[7] It would consider ‘A Peacock’s Feather’, published in The Haw Lantern (1987), but punctiliously dated 1972 – an extremely significant date in recent Irish history, about which we shall have more to say in a moment. This is an apparently occasional poem written for the christening of a niece, but its ironically KWWSZZZLMHOOKFRP 9ROXPH,,,,VVXH,,$SULO,661 Marvellian octosyllabics offer a consideration of Anglo-Irish and class resentments in which prominent reference is made to Yeats’s poems of Coole Park, the Irish house owned by his patron, Lady Gregory. A full treatment of the topic would also examine the references to Yeats in the sequence ‘Squarings’ in Seeing Things (1991), in some of which we would discover, I think, a poet learning from Yeats’s astonishing poem ‘The Cold Heaven’ one way of registering a religious sensibility without using the terms of religious orthodoxy. More generally, Heaney is a poet of antitheses – of time and eternity, world and other-world, earth and air – in the way Yeats is. Clearly, given this catalogue of instances, a full treatment of this relationship would need a book; this is an attempt to isolate what seems to us one exceptionally significant moment of it, by bringing four texts into relationship: Heaney’s essay ‘Yeats as an Example?’, written in 1978 and published in Preoccupations in 1980; Yeats’s poem ‘The Fisherman’, published in The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919; Yeats’s most famous political poem, ‘Easter, 1916’; and Heaney’s poem ‘Casualty’, published in Field Work (1979). ‘Yeats as an Example?’ is one of the most spirited of Heaney’s earlier essays, in which we witness his approach to another writer with the clear awareness that this is going to be a significant phase of self-development. The essay notices, as much criticism has, something cold, violent and implacable in Yeats’s art, and asks if this can be regarded as in any way exemplary. Heaney does admire what he calls Yeats’s ‘intransigence’ and admires too the way ‘his vision did not confine itself to rhetorics, but issued in actions’ (P 100). He respects, that is to say, the inextricability of the life and the work in this poet who maintained a theory of their separation. He then offers a quite unpredictable reading of a couple of moments from the life. One is from the 1890s, in the first flush of Yeats’s enthusiasm for spiritualism, and the other from 1913, when he spoke in outrage against Irish middle-class philistinism.

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