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‘Something a little nearer home’: The Intersection of Art and Politics

in Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry

This chapter examines the strategies employed by Northern Irish poets who offer what Neil Corcoran has called ‘situatings, enquiries into symptoms and origins, trajectories of malaise’, and briefly ... More

This chapter examines the strategies employed by Northern Irish poets who offer what Neil Corcoran has called ‘situatings, enquiries into symptoms and origins, trajectories of malaise’, and briefly examines how poetry and politics intersect in the work of Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian's most influential precursor, Seamus Heaney. It then contrasts Heaney's apprehensive use of literary allusions with Muldoon's more confident deployment of intertextuality and with McGuckian's secret embedding of quotations. In particular, the chapter focuses on how intertextual relations allow the younger poets to refer indirectly, without resorting to the extremes of either propaganda or hermeticism, both to the Troubles in Northern Ireland as well as to the wider issue of colonial inheritance.Less

Commanding Voices

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the influence of other poets' works on Seamus Heaney's poetry. Heaney's engagement with the shades of others has enabled him to test and develop his own poetic authority. ... More

This chapter explores the influence of other poets' works on Seamus Heaney's poetry. Heaney's engagement with the shades of others has enabled him to test and develop his own poetic authority. However, he also recognizes that he must banish these shades, for the authority he seeks is ultimately to be achieved by securing creative freedom. The chapter examines Heaney's negotiations Robert Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, which have been revealingly complex and ambivalent, marked by both affirmation and wary circumspection. Envy, identification, alienation, unconscious absorption, and conscious emulation are all in evidence.Less

“To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney’s Prose Revisions

John Dennison

in Writing Modern Ireland

This essay examines Seamus Heaney's revisions to his prose works, suggesting that such revisions enabled Heaney to establish his public authority as a poet. It contends that Heaney's prose revisions ... More

This essay examines Seamus Heaney's revisions to his prose works, suggesting that such revisions enabled Heaney to establish his public authority as a poet. It contends that Heaney's prose revisions are a testament to the ways in which the published prose has been “polished” in a repeated, even habitual effort of self-conformation and, in some instances, self-censorship. The essay first considers several patterns of minor revision that extend throughout Heaney's prose oeuvre before discussing the extensive and significant self-conformations of “The Redress of Poetry” and “Crediting Poetry.” It explains how Heaney's revisions simultaneously create a sense of “poetry's transcendence over history, and establish poetry as a structure upon which to rejoice”.Less

Three Critics: T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which ... More

T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which his own opinions had come to carry. The young Eliot went on to be seen as the ancestor of an altogether less dangerous school of literary criticism in the United States and Britain, many of whose members adopted his literary enthusiasms and dislikes, along with a few motifs of interpretation held to be his ideas. Eliot confessed that he can never re-read any of his own prose writings without acute embarrassment. This chapter also examines the poem The Redress of Poetry, in which Seamus Heaney gives more than a glimpse of the charm, grace, and carefully judged gravity with which the poet handled his acts of praise. Geoffrey Hill as a poet-critic and the influence of his critical work on contemporary poetry other than his own are also discussed.Less

To Construct Something upon which to Rejoice

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

Heaney’s election in 1989 to Oxford Professor of Poetry heralds an enormously productive period that culminates with the publication of the collected Oxford and Nobel lectures in 1995. His expanding ... More

Heaney’s election in 1989 to Oxford Professor of Poetry heralds an enormously productive period that culminates with the publication of the collected Oxford and Nobel lectures in 1995. His expanding theoretical idiom and the artistic faith it expresses attain new fullness and definition in these lectures, as is evident in his Oxford inaugural ‘The Redress of Poetry’. There, Heaney’s re-appropriation of Christian religious and transcendent language points up the substantial fiduciary strain of knowingly constructing a theory and practice of art which, after Arnold, pretends to transcendence and ontology, a predicament further shown in the lectures ‘Joy or Night’, and ‘The Frontiers of Writing’. The logical strain of this position becomes most evident in close study of the revisions to Heaney’s previously published prose. Those revisions not only reveal Heaney’s elision of historical attachment, but are also an index of his strained effort to substantiate the redemptive function of art.Less

‘Fine contrary excess’: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Thomas’s Northern Irish Afterlives

Tom Walker

in Reading Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas’s work is indebted in many ways to the two giants of early twentieth-century Irish literature, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, as many critics have acknowledged. Yet Thomas’s work has also ... More

Dylan Thomas’s work is indebted in many ways to the two giants of early twentieth-century Irish literature, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, as many critics have acknowledged. Yet Thomas’s work has also left legacies of its own within subsequent Irish writing. As Seamus Heaney commented in his 1993 Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture on Thomas, the Welsh poet was a key ‘part of the initiation’ of his postwar ‘11+ generation into literary culture’, not only through his books but also through his broadcasts and recordings. This chapter argues that within modern Irish poetry, and especially Northern Irish poetry, not least against the backdrop of the failures of the Northern Irish political status quo, Thomas’s work has helped to open up an alternate and less restrictive sense of the poet’s place in relation to the public realm. The impact of Thomas’s adolescent notebook mining and poetic responses to war, as well as the whimsy of his prose and radio work, are traced in this chapter, especially in relation to the work of Heaney and Derek Mahon.Less

‘The Eye That Scanned it’: The Art of Looking in Northern Irish Poetry

in Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry

This chapter offers a comparative study of ‘the gaze’ of both Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. It discusses not only the poets' reactions to other people's art but also how the different structures ... More

This chapter offers a comparative study of ‘the gaze’ of both Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. It discusses not only the poets' reactions to other people's art but also how the different structures of looking embedded into their poems (scopic drive, voyeurism, zen-like trance, detached gaze, flickering glance) reveal subtle distinctions between their views on politics and gender. The younger poets' obliquity is contrasted with Seamus Heaney's directness. Heaney's gaze is singular and self-affirming, engaged as it is in eidetic reduction, the phenomenological search for the Platonic eidos. In contrast, the younger poets' points of view problematise this concept, demonstrating that the gaze is neither static nor passive. All three, however, share with Northern Irish visual artists a distrust of the supposedly objective media representations of the Troubles.Less

The Humanist Wager

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

In the wake of the 1994 ceasefire in Northern Ireland and his Nobel Prize, Heaney’s prose assumes a larger public address, and his poetics as a whole expand beyond an intensive apology for the ... More

In the wake of the 1994 ceasefire in Northern Ireland and his Nobel Prize, Heaney’s prose assumes a larger public address, and his poetics as a whole expand beyond an intensive apology for the totally adequate poem into a less metaphysical, more culturally directed affirmation of the humanistic tradition and language. While he toys with poststructuralist language, Heaney does not disavow high humanism, but upholds the wager on the enduring value and transformative effect of art. In the return to an affirmation of the auditory and literary heritage as a trans-historical source of renewal and continuity, Heaney’s work in translation is central. With such affirmations, he enters most fully into the Arnoldian inheritance of his undergraduate education, an avowal of a high, expansive trust in art which, as a supercessionary displacement of Christian belief, cannot shake the awareness of its lateness, its post factum status.Less

‘Roaming root of multiple meanings’: Irish Language and Identity

in Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry

This chapter explores how Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian cope with the contentious issue of Irishness, and how they use intertextuality to stave off what Thomas Kinsella has diagnosed as the ... More

This chapter explores how Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian cope with the contentious issue of Irishness, and how they use intertextuality to stave off what Thomas Kinsella has diagnosed as the alienated condition of Irish writers – the ‘divided mind’ – due to the disjunction between English and Irish cultural traditions. Their indirect strategies are contrasted with Seamus Heaney's more forthright approach to the politically sensitive issue of composing in the English language.Less

Mutable Redress

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter examines Seamus Heaney's notion of poetic redress. His work reflects a conflict between the seemingly irreconcilable imperatives to trust in poetry as a mode of redress — as agent for ... More

This chapter examines Seamus Heaney's notion of poetic redress. His work reflects a conflict between the seemingly irreconcilable imperatives to trust in poetry as a mode of redress — as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices; and to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means. It considers Heaney's tendency to perpetuate Romantic notions about poetic authority, and his attempts to play down aggressive connotations of the word ‘redress’.Less

The Voices of My Education

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

Spanning the years 1956–65, Chapter one asks ‘Where does Seamus Heaney’s preoccupation with poetry’s adequacy begin?’ It commences where Heaney scholarship to date has on this question, with the ... More

Spanning the years 1956–65, Chapter one asks ‘Where does Seamus Heaney’s preoccupation with poetry’s adequacy begin?’ It commences where Heaney scholarship to date has on this question, with the poet’s confrontation with the most recent Northern Irish Troubles. However, while the Troubles are undoubtedly the crucible of Heaney’s thought, his increasingly transcendental appeals to poetry’s adequacy in fact have their origin in the voices of his education. Making extensive use of notes made by Heaney as an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast, this chapter shows how Heaney’s preoccupation with poetry’s adequacy to life begins in his earliest formation in poetics. It then considers the emergence of Heaney as a young poet-critic whose thought by the mid-1960s was already marked by an Arnoldian trust in the restorative function of poetry.Less

Elements of Continuity

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

With the outbreak of widespread sectarian violence in 1969, Heaney’s inherited interest in the restorative function of poetry becomes an urgent, first-hand concern. Over the next five years, the ... More

With the outbreak of widespread sectarian violence in 1969, Heaney’s inherited interest in the restorative function of poetry becomes an urgent, first-hand concern. Over the next five years, the Romantic and modernist voices of his education come to inform an unstable amalgam of early poetics, dominated by the notion of poems as culturally restorative and trans-historical ‘elements of continuity’; here, the mythopoetic bog-people poems, with their supposed archetypal patterns, prove paradigmatic. But this emphasis stands in tension with a growing association of historical, public life with a state of unremitting violence; at points, it appears that Heaney’s adequate, restorative poem might in fact be a natural, authentic expression of history’s recurrent violence, an association which directly threatens the poet’s faith in poetry’s moral function. As a result, Heaney turns towards a revised conception of the poetry as an adequation of life, and a dualism of poetry and history.Less

A Shift in Trust

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

Exacerbated by external pressures, a crisis emerges within the inherited terms of Heaney’s poetics, forcing him to delineate more precisely the nature of poetry’s distinctiveness and efficacy. The ... More

Exacerbated by external pressures, a crisis emerges within the inherited terms of Heaney’s poetics, forcing him to delineate more precisely the nature of poetry’s distinctiveness and efficacy. The five or so years after 1974 represent a brief yet important period of clarification in which the dualistic conceptual structures and humanist faith of Heaney’s later poetics emerge and cohere. The example of Osip Mandelstam stimulates Heaney’s interest in the poem as a realized moral act in which poetic language itself becomes the means of social efficacy. Heaney goes on to clarify poetry’s relationship to history and culture as encompassing—rather than being subject to—these realities. What ensues is a differentiation between poetry and public, political and historical life, a willed, sometimes forced construction which settles into a dualistic pattern, and the insistence, sponsored by W. B. Yeats, on an increasingly humanist trust in art as its own reality.Less

Poetry is its Own Reality

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

Where the previous six or so years have seen a gradual redefinition and tightening of his conception of poetry’s relationship to life, Heaney now sets that account within an explicitly humanist ... More

Where the previous six or so years have seen a gradual redefinition and tightening of his conception of poetry’s relationship to life, Heaney now sets that account within an explicitly humanist commitment to the enduring social value of poetry. Central to this expanding trust in poetry’s adequacy to life is the resolute form of the achieved poem, which encompasses and transforms the stuff of history, while at the same time remaining autonomous. It’s a redemptive pattern, the product of Heaney’s sometimes muscular humanism. That commitment is conditioned by a post-Christian conviction of the necessity of an idea of transcendence, so that poetry’s adequacy becomes not simply a matter of encompassing history, but also of transcending it. The redemptive pattern is secured in his 1986 T. S. Eliot lectures, where the ideal poem, standing against history, is nevertheless efficacious by virtue of its internal adequation of beauty and truth.Less

Performing Antigone in the Twenty‐First Century

S. E. Wilmer

in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism

This chapter examines some productions in the late twentieth century (Fugard's The Island, Gambaro's Antígona Furiosa, and Glowacki's Antigone in New York) that have employed Antigone as a kind of ... More

This chapter examines some productions in the late twentieth century (Fugard's The Island, Gambaro's Antígona Furiosa, and Glowacki's Antigone in New York) that have employed Antigone as a kind of homo sacer, and then applies this analogy in a more detailed discussion of Seamus Heaney's version of The Burial at Thebes at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004. Heaney's version was inspired by President Bush's ‘war on terror’ and the detention and ‘rendition’ of suspected terrorists in prisons beyond legal redress. The language deployed in the play echoed statements made by President Bush and evoked his administration's unwarranted invasion of Iraq and torture of prisoners. By comparing recent versions of Antigone that represent her as homo sacer, subjected to a liminal state between life and death, the chapter demonstrates how the ‘state of exception’ theorized by Georgio Agamben has become normalized in the twenty‐first century. It draws parallels between the ‘exceptional’ actions of governments such as the Bush administration and the Argentinian dictatorship, making up the laws as they go along, removing people from their homes and environment, and incarcerating or disposing of them outside the polis, outside the reach of their friends and families. Moreover, it shows that Western governments are taking advantage of the ‘war on terror’ to develop new methods of social control (such as increased security measures by the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, including more intensive customs inspections, omnipresent CCTV cameras, heightened threat alerts, etc.) that deprive citizens of their civil rights. By applying Agamben's notions of ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of exception’ to these adaptations, as well as Slavoj Žižek's and Judith Butler's comments on recent political developments, it demonstrates the claim that Antigone makes on behalf of the disenfranchised of the world.Less

Introduction: The Idea of Adequacy

John Dennison

in Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

Central to Seamus Heaney’s developing account of poetry’s ameliorative relationship to the world is the idea of poetry’s adequacy. In its suggestions of equilibrium and sufficiency, the term ... More

Central to Seamus Heaney’s developing account of poetry’s ameliorative relationship to the world is the idea of poetry’s adequacy. In its suggestions of equilibrium and sufficiency, the term ‘adequate’ makes dynamic the conceptual structures of Heaney’s accumulating thought, where the poem is set in opposition to ‘the actual, historical world’ while at the same time encompassing within its internal economy a duality of life’s divergent trajectories. At the same time, ‘adequate’ marks Heaney as an inheritor of Matthew Arnold’s post-orthodox Christian humanism. In establishing the centrality of the adequate poem, the introduction also foregrounds the importance of Christian belief for understanding the sacerdotal, pseudo-religious character of Heaney’s trust in poetry. It explains the necessity of the book’s chronological method, and establishes the scope and nature of the critique which follows.Less

Finding a Post-Colonial Voice for Antigone: Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes

Stephen E. Wilmer

in Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds

The themes of the continually colonial and the neocolonial are prominent in this chapter’s discussion of Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes. The chapter situates the discussion in the context of what ... More

The themes of the continually colonial and the neocolonial are prominent in this chapter’s discussion of Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes. The chapter situates the discussion in the context of what it regards as the ‘modern McCarthyism’ involved in the suppression, by the government of the United States, of the academic investigation of post-colonialism. It argues that Heaney’s language in the play relates both to the history of British colonialism in, and oppression of, Ireland, and to the contemporary neocolonialist actions of America and its allies in Iraq. It combines close textual and rhythmic analysis with discussion of the primary sources relating to the commissioning and production of Heaney’s play in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The chapter suggests that the play takes up the post-colonial trope of gender politics as an analogy for geo-political developments.Less

Slow Erosions: Seamus Heaney and the Aftermath of Modernism

Nicholas Allen

in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present

Focusing on Seamus Heaney’s poetry, this chapter explores the limitations of Irish postcolonial criticism. Acknowledging the invigorating influence of Said on Irish critics, it nevertheless argues ... More

Focusing on Seamus Heaney’s poetry, this chapter explores the limitations of Irish postcolonial criticism. Acknowledging the invigorating influence of Said on Irish critics, it nevertheless argues that an overemphasis on Ireland’s colonial and “postcolonial” status has restricted attention to the nation and its political history. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger permits a global reframing of Irish culture that emphasizes transnational flows of money, people, culture, and literature. While Heaney’s poetry may seem archaic (rather than avant-garde), this chapter finds it creatively engages with transimperial affiliations. Rather than reading Heaney as a provincial northern Irish poet rooted in the native soil, the chapter emphasizes the poet’s embrace of mobility, fluidity, and non-Irish sites. Underscoring Heaney’s indebtedness to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett—whose works represented the circulations of seafaring cultural exchange—the chapter discovers in Heaney’s meditations on oceanic networks a corrective to the narrow critical focus on decolonization and nationhood.Less