Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  Sainted cliff at Alternan, nut grove, hazel wood! Cold quick sweeps of water fall down the cliff-side.

  Ill

  It is nine years since those lines were written, and sixteen since they were done in the freer register, so what I am doing here is re-creating the feel of the writing experience rather than giving a report on the details of the procedure. Yet that feel is the sine qua now. the guarantee of the life of the thing. For in spite of the real enough influence of the cultural and political context I referred to

  earlier, the true anxiety and the true motivations of writing are much more inward, much more to do with freshets that start unexpectedly in moments of intent concentration and hope. Literary translation—or version-making or imitation or refraction or whatever one should call the linguistic carry-over that is mediated through a crib—is still an aesthetic activity. It has as much to do with form-feeling as with sense-giving, and unless the translator experiences the almost muscular sensation that rewards successful original composition, it is unlikely that the results of the text-labour will have life of their own.

  The closer, line by line, stanza by stanza, end-stopped, obedient, literal approach finally yielded more. I had a sense of accumulation rather than of truancy—a different satisfaction, not necessarily superior but more consoling in the execution of a long piece of composition. I had also forgotten about the political extensions that were originally intended. In fact, by the time Sweeney Astray-appeared, I had got fed up with my own mournful bondings to the 'matter of Ulster' and valued more the otherness of Buile Suibhne as a poem from beyond. If, in the beginning, I was somewhat surprised that I had taken on the translation at all, in the end I was grateful to feel still somewhat estranged from what I had made of it. In fact, it was only after the translation had been completed for the second time and I had earned that familiarity which I had originally arrogated—it was only then that the work yielded its full reward. The freedom and peremptoriness which I had exercised prematurely returned in a burst of confidence and I produced the speedy poems included in Station Island under the general title 'Sweeney Redivivus'. The identification I had made previously between the green man and the rural child was admitted and even exulted in. Sweeney was unreservedly rhymed with Heaney:

  Give him his due, in the end he opened my path to a kingdom of such scope and neuter allegiance my emptiness reigns at its whim.

  ('Sweeney and the Cleric')

  On Poetry and Professing

  I have spent much of my life teaching, at very different levels. I began in the early 1960s in St Thomas's Secondary Intermediate School in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast, in front of a class of deprived and disaffected adolescent boys, many of whom would end up a decade later as active members of the Provisional IRA. I proceeded from there to work in a teacher training college, also in Belfast, and to spend time trying to persuade student teachers of the value of imaginative literature and other kinds of creative play in the educational process; I went on to lecture on poetry in Queen's University and ended up in more recent years as a poet in residence at Harvard. In each of these places, members of the audience differed widely in literary awareness, and in the degree of their assent to the idea that poetry was a subject worth discussing at all. I have known both the heckling of the have-nots in St Thomas's and the nods and gleams of the granny glasses in Harvard Hall; in each case there was a desire, repressed in the Belfast context but altogether ardent in Cambridge, a desire to have the worth and meaning of the art confirmed. What was at stake was the credibility of this honoured but hard to define category of human achievement called poetry. Even in Ballymurphy, those boys excluded by their social and cultural background from any contact with literary verse and disposed to regard it as some kind of fancy affectation, even they were curious despite their resistance. There were plenty of influences at work to make them shy away: peer pressure, the macho conventions of the playground in a boys' school, a working-class shyness in the face of anything that smacked of middle-class pretension. Even so, the mystery of the thing interested them, and every now and again during those English classes something steadied and came into focus: for a concentrated

  moment the words they were attending to made sense and went home as only poetry can.

  Another thing that happened during those English classes is also worth recalling. About once a week, and always unexpectedly, the headmaster of the school would suddenly appear in the classroom door. Mr McLaverty was a short-story writer of real distinction, but he was also compulsively a teacher. He was meant to be in his headmaster's office all day, administering, but instead he prowled the corridors in his tweed suit and polished brogues, seeking whom he might interrupt in order to get in a bit of the actual schoolmaster-ing that he missed so much. 'Right, boys', he would exclaim as he hurried across the floor to claim the boys for his own. And then, 'Right, Mr Heaney!' in order to relieve me of responsibility for them, or rather to appoint me as his straight man in a double act which rarely varied. 'Mr Heaney,' he would continue, 'are they working hard for you?' 'Yes, Mr McLaverty', I would answer. 'And are you doing any poetry with them?' 'Oh yes,' I would reply, 'I am indeed.' 'And are you seeing any improvement in them at all?' To which the correct answer was, 'Of course, I am.' And then, climac-tically, he would turn his attention very deliberately from the class to me and enquire, 'Mr Heaney, when you look at the photograph of a rugby team in the newspaper, don't you always know immediately from the look of the players' faces which ones of them have studied poetry?' And dutifully, unfailingly I would answer, 'Yes, Mr McLaverty, 1 do know', and McLaverty would nod triumphantly and turn back towards the desks. 'There you are now, boys', he'd say. 'Work hard and don't end up down there with the rest of them, measuring the length of your spits at some street corner! Right, Mr Heaney!' And away he would go in all his peremptory vigour, as memorable and problematical as poetry itself.

  When I say problematical, all I mean is that poetry cannot be proved in the way a theorem can. McLaverty could only manage to get away with his proposition that poetry changed people perceptibly for the better because I was ready to connive with him. And anyhow, the boys in the class knew that the whole thing was a masquerade. But it' is precisely this masquerade of fictions and ironies and fantastic scenarios that can draw us out and bring us

  close to ourselves. The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are or might be. In fact, Mr McLaverty's caricature of the humanizing power of poetry was tempting as well as comic, because it was drawing upon two and a half millennia of Western aesthetic and educational theory. From Plato to the present, from the Athenian academy to the parent-teacher meeting at your local primary school, there has been an ongoing debate about the place and the point and the choice of imaginative writing in the curriculum, and about the relevance of such material to the formation of the good citizen's sensibility and behaviour. In fact, McLaverty's performance was in itself a kind of parody or exaggeration of one of the central ideas of this humanist tradition, the idea that there is an essential connection between the good and the beautiful and that the study of the beautiful is actively conducive to virtue. This particular defence of the value of art was disastrously weakened in the last century, of course, by the historical fact of the Holocaust: what good is a devotion to and an appreciation of the beautiful, the question goes, if some of the most cultivated people in a most cultivated nation could authorize mass killings and attend a Mozart concert on the same evening? Yet if it is a delusion and a danger to expect poetry and music to do too much, it is a diminishment and a derogation of them to ignore what they can do.

  What they can do is testified to not only by Mr McLaverty but also by Shakespeare's Caliban. In The Tempest, Caliban's description of the effect that Ariel's music produces in him could be read as a kind of paean to the effect of poetry itself. You remember the lines: Caliban is telling Stephano and Trinculo not to be worried about the mysterious tune that is coming
out of the sky above them and says:

  Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,

  That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again.

  'Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not': that, as a description of the good of poetry and of literature in general, will do. It is not required that the experience of the sounds change Caliban into another kind of creature, or that it have a carry-over effect upon his behaviour. The good of literature and of music is first and foremost in the thing itself, and their first principle is that which William Wordsworth called in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads 'the grand elementary principle of pleasure', the kind of pleasure about which the language itself prompts us to say, 'It did me good.'

  So: one function of university chairs such as the one we are here to inaugurate this evening is to promote the experience of that particular good. One function of the holder of such a chair is to enter the university in much the same way as Mr McLaverty entered my classroom and to use the occasion in such a way as to reinforce a belief in the fundamental purpose of the spiritual intellect's great work.

  11

  The essential professing that poets do usually comes about at moments of crisis in their lives; what they have to say about problems they endure or resolve gets expressed first in terms which are personal and urgent, and then these ad hoc formulations about the art or the life become familiar reference points, and may even attain the force of prescriptions.

  Take Keats's famous letter to his brother George, the one where he simplifies his vision of the poetic destiny to a parable about the education of an intelligence into a soul: a school is needed and that school is the world of pain. This sacred text arose unpredictably from Keats's own desperate need to square his essentially celebratory temperament with what he perceived to be the awful conditions. Or take Osip Mandelstam's head-lightening faith that the poet is 'a stealer of air', and is therefore never a 'worker' in the sense officially demanded by the state, but works only in the sense that lacemakers work to make a design that is 'air, perforations and

  truancy', or bakers of doughnuts work to produce the antic hole rather than the worthy dough. Mandelstam's reckless brilliance is a profession of poetry's freedom which outstrips anything that is ever likely to be said on a podium; and, of course, it came at a correspondingly higher cost than the usual orthodoxies of the academy.

  Nevertheless, if poetry is to be professed within the educational system, it makes sense that this should be done occasionally by the poets themselves; as long as they recognize the fundamental difference between their function as educators and their function as artists, no harm need be done and a lot of good may even flow from their involvement. And anyhow, like everything else in the area of teaching, success will depend more upon the temperament of the poet/professor and his or her capacity to involve the student than upon any innate genius or acquired wisdom. Teaching is as much a mystery as it is a technique, and the aura of the person, his or her intellectual radiance or general trustworthiness, is going to have as much to do with the poet/professor's impact as the size of the reputation or the intrinsic quality of the poetry itself.

  The great advantage a poet has is the fact that he or she is likely to possess a credible personal language—and obviously by this I don't mean colourful 'poetic' speech. I mean, rather, that there will be no gap between the professional idiom and the personal recognitions: the way the poet speaks in the corner of a bar, gossiping about the faults and strengths of a poem that has just appeared in The Irish Times, will tend to be the way he speaks to the students in the lecture room. Characteristically, there will be a sensitivity to the technical aspects of the work combined with a more down-to-earth recognition that poetry is part of the usual life and an expectation that a poet or a poem should embody a certain amount of gumption and horse sense. Furthermore, in spite of what might be generally assumed, poets are likely to be hard on fancy stuff, on soft-focus 'feeling' and hyped-up rhetoric; they know the dangers of archness and inflation and self-deception to which their ventures are prone, and they are predisposed to be on the lookout for these flaws in the writing of others if not in their own.

  Poets are also more likely to attest without self-consciousness to the living nature of poetic tradition and to the demotic life of 'the canon'. Nowadays, undergraduates are being taught prematurely to regard the poetic heritage as an oppressive imposition and to suspect it for its latent discriminations in the realm of gender, its privilegings and marginalizations in the realms of class and power. All of this suspicion may be salutary enough when it is exercised by a mind informed by that which it is being taught to suspect, but it is a suspicion which is lamentably destructive of cultural memory when it is induced in minds without any cultural possessions whatever. On the other hand, when a poet quotes from memory or from prejudice or in sheer admiration, 'the canon' is manifested in an educationally meaningful way. To put it simply, I believe that the life of society is better served by a quotation-bore who quotes out of a professional love than by an 'unmasking'-bore who subverts out of theory.

  Not to confuse the artistic with the educational, however, is the main caveat for the poet as professor. The worst thing that such a confusion leads to is arrogant and ridiculous behaviour by the poet in relation to the student: the poet who thinks that excellence in the art excuses ill-manneredness or ill-preparedness in the classroom is offending the human as well as the professional imperatives. I have seen talented men and women so encased in the shining armour of moi that they have utterly failed to connect with the group in front of them. This can be merely a case of idiocy and wasted opportunity, but it becomes grievous when the authority which their position confers is used by the poet/professors to overbear the potential and to destroy the confidence of neophyte readers or writers. Whatever the age of the students and whatever the circumstances—primary-school classroom or graduate poetry workshop—the covenant between the teacher and the taught demands a certain stand-off and protectiveness on the part of the empowered figure of the teacher. We have been rightly alerted to all forms of sexual harassment in these contexts, but there can be such a thing as vocational harassment, where the student's hopes and aspirations are unthinkingly assailed. Of course, a fair and honest estimate of the student's gifts—good or bad—has to be

  communicated, but the communication must be done with respect and a care for the emotional tissues.

  What I tend to say at the beginning of the term to my students in poetrv workshops is this: I am going to be involved with your capacities as writers, but your destinies as writers are your own business—after all, you will be receiving grades at the end of the term, so let that be a reminder of the status of our relationship, which is, strictly speaking, pedagogical. But even as I say this, as much for my own protection as for theirs, I recognize that once a personal connection is established with a student by way of my respect for his or her potential or achievement—-or vice versa—then one of us has affected, however fleetingly, the other's sense of a destiny in poetry. And this may turn out to be something very positive indeed.

  Englands of the Mind

  One of the most precise and suggestive of T. S. Eliot's critical formulations was his notion of what he called 'the auditory imagination', 'the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back', fusing 'the most ancient and the most civilized mentality'. I presume Eliot was thinking here about the cultural depth-charges latent in certain words and rhythms, that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not just the ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body; thinking of the energies beating in and between words that the poet br
ings into half-deliberate play; thinking of the relationship between the word as pure vocable, as articulate noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history, memory and attachments.

  It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back, all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England. All three treat England as a region—or rather treat their region as England—in different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial—Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of the liter-

  ary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and seaside outings, of churchgoing and marriages at Whitsun, and in the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of churchgoing has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened—all this is signified by their language.

  When we examine that language, we find that their three separate voices are guaranteed by three separate foundations which, when combined, represent almost the total resources of the English language itself. Hughes relies on the northern deposits, the pagan Anglo-Saxon and Norse elements, and he draws energy also from a related constellation of primitive myths and world-views. The life of his language is a persistence of the stark outline and vitality of Anglo-Saxon that paid into the Middle English alliterative tradition and then went underground to sustain the folk poetry, the ballads and the ebullience of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Hill is also sustained by the Anglo-Saxon base, but his proper guarantor is that language as modified and amplified by the vocabularies and values of the Mediterranean, by the early-medieval Latin influence; his is to a certain extent a scholastic imagination founded on an England that we might describe as Anglo-Romanesque, touched by the polysyllabic light of Christianity but possessed by darker energies which might be acknowledged as barbaric. Larkin then completes the picture, because his proper hinterland is the English language Frenchified and turned humanist by the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance, made nimble, melodious and plangent by Chaucer and Spenser and besomed clean of its inkhornisms and its irrational magics by the eighteenth century.