HEANEY PONDERS THE POWER OF POETRY
Author: By Robert Taylor, Globe Correspondent
Date: Thursday, November 16, 1995
Page: 67
Section: LIVING
When a masterful poet admits us into the rag-and-bone shop of the heart we
may account ourselves fortunate. Seamus Heaney's recent Nobel Prize coincides
with the publication of "The Redress of Poetry," the lectures he gave over
five years as professor of poetry at Oxford, ranging from the Elizabethan
audacities of Christopher Marlowe to the bleak void of Philip Larkin, and
illuminates a point of view of poetry as a force capable of transforming
culture and the self.
Throughout the 10 lectures reverberates the overall theme of redress -- in
its dictionary sense meaning reparation, and in one of its obsolete
definitions suggesting "a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can
sweep ahead into its full potential." The first poem cited, Robert Frost's
allegorical "Directive," commences with the hard monosyllabics of desolation,
"Back out of all this now too much for us," but glimpses nevertheless a
potential order of things "beyond confusion" and implies ''that the
imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most
truly grasp and comprehend it."
Poetry, Heaney states, is essentially an answer to the conditions of the
world given in poetry's own terms rather than the language of uplift. "To
effect the redress of poetry, it is not necessary for the poet to be aiming
deliberately at social or political change." Which, of course, does not mean
the poet dodges his civic responsibilities; only that poetry reconciles two
orders, the practical and the poetic, the former teaching us how to live, the
latter how to live more abundantly.
The lectures, though, would be worth reading for their felicitous images
alone. "A Torchlight Procession of One" adroitly describes Christopher Murray
Grieve, who took the pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid. He has few readers outside
those who comprehend his blend of Scots Gaelic and the vernacular Scots of the
Lowlands; but his poem "A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle" remains an astonishing
collision between an intoxicated mind and a meditation upon the idea of
Scotland. In the Marlowe lecture, a highlight of the series, Heaney
considers the seductive "Hero and Leander," a poem somewhat neglected but
exhibiting a humorous-erotic dimension that is one of its most attractive
qualities. And the lecture on Dylan Thomas sees him as a Welsh version of an
Irish "bucklepper," someone who leaps like a young buck, with a stereotypical
sprightliness and gallivanting roguery, insufficiently self- aware and not
necessarily spurious, but still offering himself or herself too readily as a
form of spectator sport.
Only two of the pieces, "Orpheus In Ireland" -- about Brian Merriman's
frisky parody on the sex wars, "The Midnight Court" -- and "Speranza in
Reading" -- which deals with Oscar Wilde and his mother -- have a specifically
Irish locus. Merriman's poem is linked unexpectedly to the Orpheus episode in
Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; even more offbeat is the discussion of "The Ballad of
Reading Gaol." It is a poem that has now gone out of fashion, its palpable
anguish made artifice by a metrical decor as extravagant as egret plumes and
parasols; all the same, in the words of Richard Ellman, "Once read, it is
never forgotten." Heaney places the Wilde piece in the tradition of the jail
journal, a precursor of Brendan Behan and ''Borstal Boy," and proposes the
"Ballad" as the kind of propaganda poem written by Wilde's mother (a fiery
nationalist signing herself "Speranza"). Once read, this interpretation, like
the poem itself, is not easily forgotten.
John Clare and Elizabeth Bishop also inspire penetrating comments --
Clare's poems propelled by an eclectic relish of language, and Bishop's sense
of proportion making a personal style seem meshed with the canonical poetry of
the past. At the close, Heaney, his tenure ended, leaves Oxford with the
vision (not too unlike Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gypsy) of a commonwealth of
art wrested out of the dilemmas of the past. The pragmatism of poetry, as he
said at the start, allows consciousness "a chance to recognize its
predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds
of venturesome ways."
TOMKEL;11/07 NKELLY;11/16,14:01 BOOK16
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