Rooted Cosmopolitanism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky by Jamie L. Olson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Professor Laurence A. Goldstein, Chair Emeritus Professor George J. Bornstein Professor Linda K. Gregerson Associate Professor Michael Makin © Jamie L. Olson 2008 Acknowledgements One cannot complete a dissertation alone, and in my case, there are many who deserve gratitude for helping me get to where I am today. Without the personal and professional guidance of several faculty members at the University of Michigan, finishing this project would have proven a good deal more difficult. George Bornstein took me under his wing early in my graduate years, and his tidbits of wisdom have helped me over many a rough patch in my studies. Upon George’s retirement, Larry Goldstein stepped in and ably filled his shoes as my primary mentor, eventually helping me more than anyone else to shape and polish this dissertation into something I can be proud of. Linda Gregerson and Michael Makin, as well, offered me expert advice at crucial moments in the evolution of my project. Eric Rabkin never served in any official capacity on my dissertation committee, but his influence on my professional development as a scholar and a teacher has been tremendous. Several people helped me to translate individual poems by Joseph Brodsky and, in general, to gain a deeper understanding of his poetry in Russian. Marina Anderson struggled with me to decipher one especially confusing poem by Brodsky, “Tikhotvorenie moe” (“My quiet creation”), which now occupies a central place in my fourth chapter, and I am grateful for her assistance and kindness. Oleg Proskurin, a Russian literature scholar who currently teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont, generously informed me of the connection between another key poem in my Brodsky ii chapter, “To a Friend: In Memoriam,” and the rumored death of avant-garde poet Sergei Chudakov. Most of all, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Vadim Besprozvany, who teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan, for reading, annotating, and offering suggestions for revision on dozens of my translations of poems by Brodsky—some of which appear in my fourth chapter—during a seminar I took with him at the University of Michigan in the winter term of 2007. His linguistic expertise and boundless knowledge of twentieth-century poetry contributed a great deal to my understanding of Brodsky’s poems, and the Brodsky chapter would not have been the same without his help as a teacher and patience as a reader. Without the unfailing support of my family, of course, I would not have even made it to graduate school, much less gotten as far as I have along my career path. My parents, Lee and Debbie Olson, have always believed in me, and their hardworking example has kept me working hard as well. Finally, my wife Anna makes life worth living, and I cannot imagine that I would have been able to accomplish anything at all without her by my side. For me, looking ahead to a long, happy life with her and our daughter is the greatest incentive to keep working. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements . ii Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 1. On “Rooted Cosmopolitanism” . 5 2. From Blake to Heaney: A Chain of Elegies . 8 3. On Methodology: Text and Context . 15 4. Cosmopolitan Poetics: Singular and Plural . 22 Chapter 2: Seamus Heaney: Journey into the Wideness of the World . 30 1. On the Shelf: “…books from Ireland… And books from everywhere” . 30 2. Outward from the Omphalos . 45 3. Toward Dialogue: Wintering Out (1972) . 60 4. Fostering Distance: North (1975) from the South . 68 5. The Known World: Electric Light (2001) and After . 90 Chapter 3: Derek Walcott: Cosmopolitanism and Multivocality . 106 1. “Nameless I came among olives of algae”: Two Early Poems . 107 2. Dialogue, Exile, and Departure: From In a Green Night (1962) to The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979) . 128 3. “Then all the nations of birds lifted together”: The Fortunate Traveller (1981) . 141 4. Epilogue: Authorial Voice in Omeros (1990) and The Prodigal (2004) . 151 Chapter 4: Joseph Brodsky: Cosmopolitanism in Exile . 156 1. From Nowhere with Love: Chast’ rechi (1977) and A Part of Speech (1980) . 167 2. The Bread of Exile: Uraniia (1987) and To Urania (1988) . 189 3. A Russian Crusoe: Peizazh s navodneniem (1995) and So Forth (1996) . 199 Conclusion: “American” Cosmopolitanism . 209 Bibliography . 216 iv Chapter 1 Introduction My closest friends stay on the shelf, surnamed and posthumous, with space for two more, Joseph and burly-hearted Seamus. Derek Walcott, “See Index”1 In the summer of 1989, a BBC producer named Julian May arranged an interview with four poets who represented, to his mind, a recent tendency in English poetry that, at the time, had become known as the “new internationalism.”2 The poets—Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, and Derek Walcott—had come together in Ireland, where the interview took place, for the Dublin Writers’ Conference in Dun Laoghaire. None of the writers who sat down to talk in the BBC studio that day was British or American, but all of them wrote poetry in English; three of them, in fact, speak English as their native language.3 In his introduction to the print version of the interview, May identified the four poets, paraphrasing Brodsky, as “men from the provinces” who 1 Manuscript collection 136, box 5, folder 31, Derek Walcott Papers, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. This excerpt includes lines 3-6 of the eighteen-line poem. If one may attempt to draw any conclusions based on the order of typescripts in the Fisher Library, then it appears that Walcott intended “See Index” to be the final poem in his 1987 collection, The Arkansas Testament. 2 “Poets’ Round Table: ‘A Common Language,’” an interview by Michael Schmidt with Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les A. Murray, and Derek Walcott, Poetry Nation Review 15.4 (1989): 39-47. 3 The late Joseph Brodsky is the only one among this group who learned English as a second language; his native language was Russian. Les A. Murray, whose work I do not address in this study—although it does interest me—is an Australian poet. His ethical and aesthetic stance certainly coincides with that of Heaney, Walcott, and Brodsky. He speaks for them and as one of them when, in this very interview, he says, “…we have come from the periphery and the periphery has taken over from the centre” (“Poets’ Round Table” 46). In a recent review, Boyd Tonkin explains that he “tend[s] to slot” Heaney, Murray, and Walcott into a “special category,” distinct from other contemporary poets, and therefore refers to them collectively as a “triumvirate of pensionable bards” (“A Week in Books,” The Independent [18 Jan. 2007], <http://www.independent.co.uk/>). 1 “maintain civilizations when their centres collapse.”4 He picked up these phrases from Brodsky’s 1983 essay on Walcott, “The Sound of the Tide,” where the Russian poet formulates his thoughts in a rather more Yeatsian way: “Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment when centers cease to hold . … The job of holding at such times is done by the men from the provinces, from the outskirts.”5 Indeed, in a postcolonial, post-Soviet world, it may be the case that what is worth saving in some empires ends up being saved by the poets and the artists—in Brodsky’s words, it is “not legions but languages” that keep cultures from “disintegration” in such dire times.6 All three of the poets toward whom I direct my attention in this dissertation exist on the “outskirts” of civilizations, at the margins—whether geographically, spiritually, or both—yet they self-consciously accept their roles as world poets, participating deliberately and enthusiastically in a global literary tradition while always maintaining their local roots. Seamus Heaney first gained international attention during the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a key poetic voice of the Catholic minority and has grown more “global” since then, although a paradoxical detachment from and attachment to the North has steadily emerged both in his biography and his poetry; Derek Walcott writes from the perspective of a person of mixed-race ancestry—African and European—in the postcolonial Caribbean, a region whose complex political and cultural history finds expression in his multivocal verse; and Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and who lived from then onward in the United States, wrote poems in two languages and maintains a simultaneous foothold in two poetic 4 “Poets’ Round Table” 39. 5 Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, 1986) 164. 6 Brodsky, Less Than One 164. 2 traditions: Russian and Anglo-American. As a group, their poetry embodies what another Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, called “nostalgia for world culture,” which, in the case of Heaney, Walcott, and Brodsky, amounts to a reaffirmation of the Western literary canon and a forging of contemporary bonds across cultures—and not merely inter- European, but truly global bonds. Without a doubt, this simultaneously traditional and forward-looking globalism shows up in their poems, essays, and other writings, but their biographies, as well, refuse to be neatly contained by the borders of any nation, language, or culture. In fact,