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May 12, 2002
SYNDICATED: Heart and craft
Reviewed by Lachlan Mackinnon
IN his preface to this large, handsome book, Seamus Heaney sets out to emphasize the continuity and coherence of his prose writing. He reprints words from the foreword to Preoccupations (1980) to express what he sees as his continuing concerns: “How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?” This shows a far more restless and self-conscious approach to writing than Heaney’s popular image would suggest.
In Digging (1964) — “a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem”, as he calls it — Heaney wrote:
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
This representation of poetry as agricultural labour by other means hung over his earlier work, with its fidelity to rural experience and its consonantal density. The problem was that this identity rapidly became a limiting confinement. In his fourth collection, North (1975), Heaney almost seemed to be two different poets, one using the old style to write about more private concerns, the other using a more regular metre and a less oral manner to address public matters.
The earliest prose here from 1974 distinguishes valuably between ‘craft’ and ‘technique’. Heaney tells us that: “Craft is what you learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making.” Once the young poet hits on a true poem, however, art ceases to be a game, and ‘technique’ comes into play. “Technique... involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture, it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality.”
If North suggested that Heaney’s craft was now lagging behind his technique, Field work (1979) had an altogether more unified voice, but one showing clear traces of the influence of Robert Lowell. In the lecture Lowell’s command (1986), Heaney writes that, for Lowell: “The whole thing was a test of himself and the resources of poetry.” Heaney’s account of Lowell’s development is as vivid, engaged and exciting as any I have ever read, but what is notable here is Heaney’s insistence on the poet’s involvement as a complete human being.
Heaney’s characteristic way of thinking about writing is to talk about the poet’s need to surrender to the poem, to let it carry the poet beyond himself. Lowell’s manner proved too willed.
The daring end bravura Heaney had now achieved suggest that the most important lecture he had given up to this point was ‘Yeats as an example?’ (1978). At the end of his thirties, Heaney found Yeats ‘the ideal example of a poet approaching middle age’. Yeats valuably “reminds you that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of you experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly”.
In 1986, Heaney wrote of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert that his work resembled ‘what a twentieth-century version of the examined life might be’. East European poetry has clearly been important to Heaney, as pieces of Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz demonstrate; the artistic result took the form of the arid allegories of The Haw lantern (1987). However, speaking as Oxford’s professor of poetry (his Oxford lectures were originally collected in 1995 in The redress of poetry), Heaney brings a new moral authority — and concern with moral authority — to his criticism.
This is most evident in the magnificent Joy or night: last things in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin. Heaney takes Larkin’s much celebrated ‘Aubade’ to task for its imaginative deadness.
Heaney compares Larkin with Beckett: “Larkin’s equal is not flinching from the ultimate bleakness of things... [he] then goes on to do something positive with the bleakness.”
It is because of his transformative way with language, his mixture of word-play and merciless humour, that Beckett the writer has life and has it more abundantly than the conditions endured by Beckett the citizen might seem to warrant.
Heaney has written a manifesto for a poetry committed to strengthening the spirit against any such ‘attractively defeatist proposition’ as Larkin’s poem offers. Because of this, he has been accused of cheer-leading boosterism — wrongly I feel. The strength of his position is demonstrated by the extraordinary volumes Seeing things (1991), The spirit level (1996, a year after his Nobel Prize) and last year’s Electric Light. Heaney is now able to be open to pure wonder: this has not been arrived at simply, as the present volume shows.
There is much to be enjoyed in this ranging selection of Heaney’s prose, but its final effect is to offer us the intellectual autobiography of a poet more canny, self-aware and strange than we may have expected. What also emerges is the portrait of a decent, conscientious, scrupulous man whose artistic swervings have never betrayed his integrity. We don’t have long to wait before someone writes the essay on ‘Heaney as an example’.
Finders keepers: selected prose 1971-2001
By Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber
ISBN 0571210805
426pp. £20
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