It is a truism of Seamus Heaney criticism that the poet had a very strong sense of place, and particularly a very strong sense of home. In the presentation speech given before Heaney received his Nobel Prize, Östen Sjöstrand remarked that “the thatched farmhouse he grew up in was called Mossbawn – a name that has become mythical in Heaney’s poetry”. An aspect of this sense of home was his sense of Irish identity. Famously, when poems of his were included in the 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, he objected with the line “Be advised, my passport’s green /No glass of ours was ever raised /To toast the queen”. Yet, as Richard Kearney argued in Studies in 1986, home and identity for Heaney were not strictly geographical and political. Home, Kearney points out, is more metaphysical than literal. Home is something that must be attained, and it is mostly identified with ‘nature, Mother Earth and childhood’.
Richard Kearney, ‘Poetry, Language and Identity: A Note on Seamus Heaney’ in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 75, No. 300 (Winter, 1986), 552-563. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30090807
Poetry, Language and Identity: A Note on Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney is often hailed as Ireland’s greatest poet since Yeats. While such praise generally adverts to Heaney’s remarkable sense of craft, his verbal and formal dexterity, it frequently betrays another kind of evaluation: one concerned less with Ireland’s greatest poet than with Ireland’s greatest poet. Here the emphasis falls on the typically and traditionally Irish quality of Heaney’s writing. He is enlisted as the stereotypical poet of the patria, a home bird, an excavator of the national landscape devoted to the recovery of natural pieties. His primary inspiration, we are told, is one of place; his quintessentially Irish vocation, the sacramental naming of a homeland. Hence the preoccupation with images of mythology, archaeology and genealogy, of returning to forgotten origins.
This orthodox view would have us believe that while certain other contemporary Irish poets embraced the modernist idioms of social alienation or the crisis of language, Heaney remained faithful to the primacy of the provincial. He didn’t need to take his tune from current trends in Continental or Anglo-American poetry; for he had discovered the cosmos, as it were, in his own backyard. Mahon, Montague and Deane steeped themselves in the French modernists and engaged in metaphysical meditations about the problematic rapport between self, language and history. Durcan, Cronin and Bolger composed biting satires about urban bourgeois hypocrisy and the ravages of advanced industrial capitalism. But Heaney stuck to the home patch. He resisted the modernist impulse and remained, inalienably, ‘one of our own’. So the orthodoxy goes.
Some commentators have offered a more ideological interpretation of the nostalgia for lost traditions which is said to exemplify the ‘native’ strain of Irish literature. The harking back to an abandoned, or at least threatened, organic life-style in tune with all that is best in the national heritage, has been seen as an attempt to reconstruct a cultural harmony which would overcome, by overlooking, the actual social divisions which torment modern Irish society what Yeats referred to as the ‘filthy modern tide. As one critic remarked: ‘An emergent Catholic capitalist class espoused a myth of natural pious austerity in opposition to the profane forces of modernity, while the Anglo-Irish déracinés sought harmony with nature and a people characterized by wild, irrational, asocial energies’.(1) Viewed in such an ideological perspective, Heaney’s poetic efforts to bring Irish culture ‘home’ to itself, might be dismissed as a conservative return to antiquated mythologies of ‘tradition’ and ‘nature’.
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But the stereotyped portrait of Heaney, whether it serves the interests of popular consumption or ideological suspicion, is untenable. The theme of ‘homecoming’ in his work, for instance, involves a complex conflict of sensibility which has nothing to do with insular piety or parochial sentimentalism.
First, it should be noted that Heaney’s poems are not in fact primarily about place at all; they are about transit, that is, about transitions from one place to another. One need only look to the titles of some of his major works to see just how fundamental this notion of poetry as transitional act is: Wintering Out, Door into the Dark, Field Work, Sweeney Astray, Station Island. One of the central reasons for Heaney’s preference for journey over sojourn, for exodus over abode, is, I suggest, a fidelity to the nature of language itself. Far from subscribing to the traditional view that language is a transparent means of representing some identity which pre-exists language – call it self, nation, home or whatever – Heaney’s poetry embraces the modernist view that it is language which perpetually constructs and deconstructs our given notions of identity. As such, poetic language is always on the move, vacillating between opposing viewpoints, looking in at least two directions at once.
Heaney has been criticized for refusing to adopt a fixed unambiguous position, for not nailing his colours to the mast, particularly with regard to the ‘national question’ (i.e. his attitude to his native North). One Irish politician described him as an ‘artful dodger’ who displays ‘all the skills of the crafty tightrope walker . . . sidestepping and skipping his slippery way out of trouble’.(2) Bemoaning the fact that his work is a ‘job of literary journeywork, this same politician admonishes him to ‘seek a less ambivalent position’. The point is, however, that Heaney is a poet, not a party politician. He does not deny that his work has political connotations for that would be to deny that it is concerned with life as it is lived. But this does not mean that he is compelled to subscribe to a definitive ideological standpoint. Heaney’s refusal to be fixed, to be placed in any single perspective is no more than a recognition that poetry’s primary fidelity is to language as an interminable metamorphosis of conflicting identities. Heaney himself states his position on language as dual or multiple perspective in the following passage from Preoccupations (1980): ‘When I called my second book Door into the Dark I intended to gesture towards this idea of poetry as a point of entry into the buried life of the feelings or as a point of exit from it. Words themselves are doors: Janus is to a certain extent their deity, looking back to a ramification of the roots and associations and forward to a clarification of sense and meaning . . . In Door into the Dark there are a number of poems that arise out of the almost unnameable energies that, for me, hovered over certain bits of language … (3)
Heaney frequently endorses the modern view that literature is essentially about language itself. Mallarmé and Rimbaud made this view the central plank of their modernist program; as did, in another context,(Heaney’s compatriots, Joyce and Beckett. This is not to suggest for a moment that Heaney or his fellow modernists approach literature as some élitist art for art’s sake; nor that his fascination with words degenerates into self-regarding formalism. Heaney simply recognizes that reality as we perceive it is always profoundly informed by the words we use. And these words carry several meanings for language is an endless creation of new worlds: possible worlds which remain irreducible to the univocal slide rule of a one-to-one correspondence between word and thing. That is why the double-faced Janus is the deity of Heaney’s literary ‘journeywork’.
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NOTES:
- See Terence Brown’s discussion of Culture and Ideology in Ireland, Curtin, Kelly and O’Dowd, (eds), Galway University Press, 1984, in The Crane Bag, Vol. 9, No. 1. 1985, p. 90.
- Jim Kemmy, New Hibernia, Dublin, November, 1984.
- Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, Faber, 1980, p. 52.
Photo: Sean O’Connor (public domain)