Stephen Regan

Seamus Heaney and the modern Irish elegy.

In his highly illuminating study of the English elegy, Peter Sacks recalls Wordsworth’s definition of a poet as someone with a peculiar disposition to be moved ‘by absent things as if they were present’. Acknowledging the fact that critics today are likely to be sceptical of Wordsworth’s faith in the representational powers of language and in the consolatory powers of literature, Sacks nevertheless pursues a fundamental and persistent concern in poetry with the passion of deprivation. His interest is in ‘those absences which the use of language may seek to redress or appease’.1 This is an interest that also preoccupies Seamus Heaney in both his poetry and his prose. ‘The redress of poetry’ has, of course, become a familiar part of his critical idiom in recent years. In the first of his Oxford lectures, Heaney cites the OED definition of ‘redress’ as a noun: ‘Reparation of, satisfaction or compensation for, a wrong sustained or the loss resulting from this.’ He then ponders one of the many obsolete meanings of ‘redress’ as a verb: ‘To set (a person or a thing) upright again; to raise again to an erect position. Also fig. to set up again, restore, re-establish. ’2 Although Heaney’s broad concern in The Redress of Poetry is with ‘poetry’s possible service to programmes of cultural and political realignment’, his definitions of ‘redress’ have a particular significance for his work as an elegist, and especially for what is arguably his most impressive and memorable elegy, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’.

‘Crisis first-hand’: Seamus Heaney before and after the Ceasefire

Among the most striking and memorable poems written by Seamus Heaney over a period of fifty years are those in which moments of profound crisis are clarified and articulated. The poems most obviously coinciding with the intensification of political violence in Northern Ireland — those in Wintering Out (1972), North (1975) and Field Work (1979) — have been given widespread critical acclaim for their achieved obliquity and their potent use of myth and symbol, but what prompts and generates many of the poems of the 1970s is an immediate and potentially overwhelming sense of crisis. Breaking out of the long historical perspectives engendered by contact with Iron Age and Viking cultures creates a powerful momentum and a dramatic sense of return to immediate political actualities, a structure which is implicit in the two-part arrangement of North. Within single poems, however, Heaney shows exemplary skill in signalling the shift from long-established and accustomed modes of behaviour to the sudden apprehension of crisis. It happens in ‘Funeral Rites’ with the deftly placed ‘Now’ at the beginning of Section II of the poem, preceding the grotesque and intimate alignment of ‘neighbourly murder’: ‘Now as news comes in / of each neighbourly murder / we pine for ceremony […]’ (Heaney, 1998, p. 97). It happens, too, with the sudden, alarming escalation of violence in Derry, recalled in ‘Casualty’: ‘That Wednesday / Everybody held / Their breath and trembled’ (Heaney, 1998, p. 155).

Philip Larkin and the Movement

Discussions about poetic groups and movements are often confusing and misleading. Some critics have a tendency to approach literary history with simple formulas or convenient labels, thereby effacing the complex social and cultural dimensions of particular literary works. In the case of Philip Larkin, a good deal of critical debate has been concerned with the existence — real or imagined — of a group of writers known as the Movement. The common assumption is that the Movement was largely a reaction against the inflated romanticism of the 1940s, a victory of common sense and clarity over obscurity and mystification, of verbal restraint over stylistic excess: in short, the virtues of Philip Larkin over those of Dylan Thomas. Those critics who admire the rationalism of Larkin’s verse have been concerned to emphasise the importance of the Movement and its continuing influence in contemporary poetry; some have gone so far as to claim for the Movement a significant place in a tradition of modern poetry — usually dubbed `the English line’ — extending back through Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy to the poetry of William Wordsworth.

“Oil and Blood”: Yeats’s Return to the Nineties

Harold Bloom’s notion of “dialectical revisionism” has had a compelling effect on our understanding of literary influence in the nineteenth century, though, not surprisingly, such poets as Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson assume only a marginal role in the visionary company of Bloom’s “strong authors”. Bloom concedes that the poets of the Rhymers’ Club had “a lasting effect upon Yeats”, but the statement is heavily qualified by the later assertion that “their principal effect upon him was in the style of their lives, and their stance as poets, rather than in their actual works”.1 A more enterprising view of Yeats and the nineties was proposed by the late Richard Ellmann, whose wonderful biographical forays and close investigative studies of the nineteenth century gave renewed attention to the enigmatic presence of Oscar Wilde in Yeats’s developing aesthetic.2 More recently, R. K. R. Thornton has argued in The Decadent Dilemma3 that a significant connection can be seen to exist between Yeats’s mature poetic theory, especially his concern with artifice, and the aesthetics of the 1890s. If symbolism represents the final resolution of “the decadent dilemma”, then there is clearly much in the later poetry that maintains a direct connection with what Yeats felt to be most vital and characteristic in the poetry of the nineties.