Introduction
Helen Vendler: a critic's advantages and disadvantages
My criticism and {restriction}
Less illustrious critics
Seamus Heaney and Parnassian
Seamus Heaney's abstractions
The meaningless-pointless-grotesque concrete
Accuracy of language?
His achievements in semantic force
His failures in line and stanza enjambment
Lines, scale and Aristotle's 'megethos'
His gifts in prose poetry and prose-poetry
His effective rhythms and contrasts of tempo
Warwickshire and County Derry
Archaism
Knowledge and learning
The limitations of affability
Conclusion

The historical background:

The distortions of Irish History

See also:

Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe
AA Man' and other poems
Seamus Heaney: ethical depth? Includes Google rankings.
Seamus Heaney: translations and versions
Seamus Heaney: Human Chain
The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Review)

Supplementary material is in this font, size and colour.

Introduction

The success of Seamus Heaney in terms of recognition, honours, awards, favourable comment, isn't in doubt. The extent of his artistic success shouldn't be in doubt either - it's surely restricted. So much of his poetry is routine ('Parnassian'). The flaws which more often than not restrict the success even of very good poems - and magnificent poems - are often serious. He has weaknesses in technique and emotional range and not least in revision: I give many instances in these pages.

There are many Seamus Heaney 'sceptics,' although you would never know it from the admiration of the Seamus Heaney 'believers.' I criticize some of the believers in these pages, above all, Helen Vendler, Neil Corcoran and some of the contributors to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney.'

Doubting the existence of God is scandalous or unthinkable to some people, doubting the near perfection of Seamus Heaney's poetic work is scandalous or unthinkable to others. In a review of Ted Hughes' 'Birthday Letters' in the poetry magazine 'Thumbscrew' (issue 18) Edna Longley wrote, 'Is Hughes's reputation being talked up in some mysteriously collective way, and to hell with critical judgement, to hell with poetry?' I feel similarly about the reputation of Seamus Heaney, (although I think that Seamus Heaney is a more rewarding poet than Ted Hughes, by far, in his best work, although, obviously, a much tamer poet).

As for an overall 'placing' of Seamus Heaney, this depends upon weighting. If we give more weighting to rhythm than to diction, then Seamus Heaney is inferior to such poets as Shelley and W H Auden. These poets have abilities in poetic rhythm, whereas Seamus Heaney has practically none. Writers of doggerel generally have more developed abilities in rhythm, of a simple and monotonous kind, than Seamus Heaney. But a talent for language which has semantic force is much rarer than talents - except very developed and complex talents - in rhythm. I'd give weighting to semantic force, and surely Seamus Heaney's gifts in semantic force are far higher than those of Shelley or W H Auden. Although Yeats is surely a greater poet than Seamus Heaney, he's not a better poet in every respect. I give great weighting to 'rootedness' in poetry, a quality obviously to be found in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, although not everywhere by any means. The 'soaring' which I find in Yeats (and in Rilke) is a weakness as well as a strength, I think. I provide no amplification here, but my page on Rilke may make it clearer what I mean by 'soaring,' the poetic 'aerial view,' and the contrast between 'soaring' and rootedness. I find Yeats a far more rewarding poet than Seamus Heaney in general but Seamus Heaney a more rewarding poet in general than Shelley, Byron, Browning, W H Auden, Browning, to mention only a few names.

This page should be read in conjunction with the page Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems. This provides a wider range of illustrative examples and extends the discussion.

Helen Vendler: a critic's advantages and disadvantages

A critic always has advantages and disadvantages, strengths and limitations. Where the critic lives or used to live, how the critic lives or used to live, the specialist interests of the critic and the critic's wider interests, what meetings, lectures or exhibitions the critic happens to have attended, and many other factors, may make it harder or easier to do justice to the work, to avoid gross distortion and to arrive at justifiable appreciation, enthusiasm, passion, or justifiable lack of appreciation, dislike, loathing for the work criticized. Seeming advantages may sometimes amount to disadvantages. Later, I discuss some disadvantages of learning and knowledge.

My higher education was chaotic - a year at Cambridge University, two years at another university and two years at the New University of Ulster, where I eventually graduated. The New University was at Coleraine in County Antrim. For a short time, I lived in County Antrim but then I moved to a predominantly Protestant area of County Londonderry. Seamus Heaney grew up in a predominantly Catholic area of County Derry - the two counties are very similar but not identical.

This was during the Troubles, when they were at their worst, if the number of deaths is evidence of that. In one of the two years I lived in Northern Ireland, there were 476 deaths: 149 police and army deaths, 78 loyalist and republican paramilitary deaths and 249 civilian deaths.

'Malcolm Sutton's index of Troubles related deaths ... records 3 523 deaths which are directly linked to the conflict in Northern Ireland, and which occurred between 14 July 1969 and 31st December 2001 ... One might point out that 3523 deaths might be small, but it is for a population of 1 685 267 ... Almost 2 percent of the population of Northern Ireland have been killed or injured as a result of political violence since 1969. The equivalent ratio of victims to population in Great Britain during the same peried would have been over 100 000 killed, and in the USA over 500 000, about ten times the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam war.' (From Liam O' Rourke, 'Statistics of Danger.') These figures and ratios, and the percentage, are overall ones, taking account of the many 'safer' years and the 'more dangerous years.' Those for the worst years were far higher. But compare Poland during the Second World War, when about a quarter of the population lost their lives.

The university area and the area I lived in were very safe. There were innumerable bomb scares but no major incidents, except for one. I was sitting an exam and heard the massive explosion of a car bomb which killed six people. I believe the engine of the car landed in the barber's where I'd had my hair cut the week before.

Visits to Belfast and other places had an effect out of all proportion to the risk, which was slight for me, even when I explored the republican Falls Road or the loyalist Shankill. (The Protestant who went with me into the Falls Road, a very good friend, said that we risked execution if we were stopped - we looked too much like undercover army men - but I think this would have been very unlikely.) My poem Sailing from Belfast, at the time of the Troubles is a direct reminder of that time, the violence of Northern Ireland symbolised by the violence of a storm at sea. My poems about the bombing of Germany during the Second World War, such as Collision, are indirect reminders.

I never experienced anything of the fast-disappearing rural life of the county and I had no interest at the time in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Now that I grow potatoes - and most of the vegetables I eat and all the fruit - use a scythe and have such an interest in wheat, barley, manure, growing, country life, the rhythms of nature, I have far more insight into the poetry of Seamus Heaney than was possible when I was living in the County, and more appreciation of some limitations of Seamus Heaney's practical knowledge of country life.

When I was staying near Frankfurt, I was taken to see an exhibition in Mannheim: a comprehensive display of mummification and preservation of bodies, including preservation in peat bogs, the subject of some celebrated poems in 'North,' such as 'The Grauballe Man.' This was another possible advantage in the study of the poetry of Seamus Heaney. The last exhibit, just before the exit, was chilling, giving rise to bleak reflections about mortality - a large blue canister, with the accompanying machinery and instrumentation, used to preserve a corpse in liquid nitrogen for resuscitation later, if technology ever finds a way to achieve it. Seamus Heaney would have found it difficult to transform this canister, to give it 'poetic uplift,' to write a 'positive' poem. Poetry's ability to transform, to find good or sublimity in ugliness and harshness, isn't unlimited. I myself found that the mummies from the peat bogs exhibited at Mannheim were resistant to Seamus Heaney's poetic alchemy. When I looked at them and into them, chilling bleakness was for me the authentic emotion and poetic transformation, I thought, gave an inauthentic emotion: the inauthentic emotion not sentimental, but all the same a distortion. My reading of The Grauballe Man on another page mentions the miscalculation of Seamus Heaney which undermines this magnificent poem, the miscalculation which finds a corpse almost living, or at least vital, rather than a corpse, finding a vivid presence in the corpse rather than an absence. The vividness of poetry may amount to a distortion. Poets with exceptional gifts for vivid language such as Seamus Heaney may distort more than most.

A critic should make use of advantages as well as do everything possible to overcome disadvantages. Of all the advantages which the critic has, or should have, the most important by far is the critical attitude itself - independence of mind, the attempt to overcome critical bias, the refusal to be influenced by reputation - or to be unduly influenced if you've met or know well the writer you're writing about.

This page is far from being a comprehensive survey of the critical literature concerned with the poetry of Seamus Heaney. One book I refer to often is Helen Vendler's 'Seamus Heaney.' Helen Vendler may not have had experience of the rural life of County Derry or the Irish Troubles or have seen any mummified bog people 'in the flesh.' These were only slight disadvantages in comparison with the disadvantage of meeting Seamus Heaney at an early stage in his career. 'My own acquaintance with Heaney's work began in 1975. I was lecturing at the Yeats School in Sligo in the summer of that year, and at the school's annual poetry reading a young man in his thirties named Seamus Heaney, wholly unknown to me, stood at the lectern and read some of the most extraordinary poems I had ever heard.' Some of the poems he'd written by then were extraordinary, in some ways but not all ways, but in coming to a considered judgment about his achievement, the critic in Helen Vendler had no chance in competition with the admirer.

Helen Vendler ought to have declared the full extent of her acquaintance with the poet. It went well beyond meeting him in 1975. It's disturbing that she doesn't mention it, in view of her almost complete admiration for his work. At the time she was writing, Seamus Heaney, like Helen Vendler, was a Professor at Harvard University, in The Land of the Lethal Injection, otherwise known as the USA. The book 'Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller' contains a long interview and in one of his answers, Seamus Heaney says, 'My friend Helen Vendler at Harvard is a great teacher. It refreshes my belief in poetry just to hear her talk about a poem.' Seamus Heaney's volume 'The Spirit Level,' published two years before Helen Vendler's book on the poet, is dedicated to Helen Vendler! And 'Hermit Songs' in his most recent volume, 'Human Chain,' is 'for Helen Vendler.' Was her critical independence compromised by her friendship with the poet?

For Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney was a poet who wrote extraordinary poems and went on writing extraordinary poems for decades afterwards, instead of being a poet whose work declined markedly. Seamus Heaney was a poet whose limitations in his earlier, extraordinary poetry, went undetected by Helen Vendler. In this book, she obviously considers the poetic career of Seamus Heaney to be almost faultless in all its phases, from County Derry farm to the Irish Republic to American academia. In her book, the only criticism of any consequence is the bog poem 'Strange Fruit,' from 'North:' 'Heaney pursues his archaeology less successfully in the poem on the museum-display of the exhumed head of a girl ('Strange Fruit') which relies too heavily on lavish but conventional adjectives: 'Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible / Beheaded girl'. However, this is an inadequate survey of the poem. The criticism concerns only a line and a half of a poem made up of 14 lines. (The poem isn't a sonnet.) There's also a not so very damning reservation about the poem 'From the Canton of Expectation' ('The Haw Lantern') : ' ... the organization of the poem is perhaps over-schematized by its grammatical armature ...' There seem to be no other criticisms or reservations in the book at all.

Shakespeare is less than magisterial in such works as 'Titus Andronicus' and 'The Comedy of Errors,' Wordsworth wrote vast quantities of mediocre poetry in the later part of his career (and vast quantities of 'Parnassian' poetry in his early work of genius, 'The Prelude.') Mozart wrote vast quantities of perfunctory music (alongside - but largely after - music which was anything but perfunctory) in the opinion of Donald Francis Tovey, and sometimes even 'bonus dormitat Homerus' ('the good Homer is drowsy') according to the Roman poet Horace. The supposition that Seamus Heaney's poetic career, early, middle and late is almost faultless has to be examined very carefully.

My objection is less to Helen Vendler's 'positive' assessment than to her abandonment of the values of the critic-scholar - who usually does have a great deal of confidence in one interpretation rather than the the competing interpretations but is fully aware of the competing interpretations, states them and takes care to consider them carefully, even if they are rejected. To put it bluntly, Helen Vendler's book on Seamus Heaney is a critical disgrace.

I quote from and discuss Neil Corcoran's 'The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: a Critical Study' frequently, but mainly on the page Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems. The book gives some useful background information but his critical standards are almost always of a low order. I don't provide amplification here but I do in many places on that page. As I think it's so important for reviewers and critics to declare anything which might have a bearing on favourable or unfavourable comments they make, although they should do their utmost to eliminate bias as far as they possibly can, I have to say that Neil Corcoran is one writer I've talked to, a long time ago. I found him a very impressive person, his personal qualities very much in evidence.

Patrick Crotty, in 'The Context of Heaney's Reception' ('The Cambridge Companion') claims that 'Three monograph studies distinguished by their combination of depth, critical flair and textual responsiveness may be described as indispensable to the serious student of Heaney. These are Bernard O' Donoghue's Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1994), Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney (1998) and Neil Corcoran's The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1998). Patrick Crotty refers to Neil Corcoran's 'interrogative intelligence.' 'Corcoran brings a sensibility steeped in modern poetry to bear on Heaney's output ...' 'One of the most attractive things about his treatment of the writing is his willingness to come to evaluative conclusions ...' (This is to regard evaluation as almost a luxury, or at least an 'extra,' instead of central.) 'He is particularly persuasive on the symbiotic relationship between the prose and the poetry.' I don't accept this 'symbiotic' relationship and I explain why in my analysis of Wolfe Tone ('The Haw Lantern.') I don't discuss Bernard O' Donoghue's 'Seamus Heaney' and the Language of Poetry' but my estimate of his critical powers - as a critic of Seamus Heaney - is that they are very, very modest. Patrick Crotty's claims for the 'depth, critical flair and textual responsiveness' of Helen Vendler and Neil Corcoran are not just inflated but amount to {reversal} of the truth.

My criticism and {restriction}

In my pages on Seamus Heaney, whenever I criticize any commentators, such as Helen Vendler, Neil Corcoran and contributors to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' the criticisms relate strictly to their discussion of Seamus Heaney. (This amounts to {restriction}: - (scope of the criticism.)) My criticism isn't intended to be general, to deny any achievement in their other writing. Helen Vendler, for example, is far more than the indulgent commentator on Seamus Heaney.

I think, for example, of her interesting and generally accomplished review in the 'London Review of Books' (Vol. 27 No. 17) of 'Dante in English,' edited by Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds, and entitled 'Can we conceive of Beatrice ‘snapping’ like a shrew?'

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n17/helen-vendler/can-we-conceive-of-beatrice-snapping-like-a-shrew

She takes issue with the introduction written by Eric Griffiths. An extract:

'Were you aware that the Vulgate ‘had itself been when it was composed an exercise in dumbing-down such as the Commedia in part aims to be’? Does your recollection of the Paradiso portray Dante ‘mute and about to weep before Beatrice and the encircling blessed, harrowed with embarrassment, like a man who convivially declares “My shout!” and then finds he has forgotten his wallet’? Remembering the entrance to the infernal city, would you say that ‘having made the tricky entrance into the city of Dis, Virgil rests – to take the weightlessness off his feet a while’? Would you, in commenting on the hideous episode in which Ugolino and his sons are starved to death in an ‘orribile torre’, remark that ‘a tower is a Mr Big’? ... when Beatrice, after cataloguing Dante’s transgressions in the Purgatorio, asks him ‘Che pense?’, would you say: ‘She waits only a moment before snapping “Che pense?”’ Can we conceive of Beatrice ‘snapping’ like a shrew? ...

'There is desperation behind such a manner – the terror that nobody will pay any attention to Dante unless he is jazzed up in contemporary slang.'

The link gives Eric Griffiths' letter of reply. He doesn't deny the criticism of his style, although he does take issue with other matters: 'Helen Vendler (LRB, 1 September) does not like the way I write; I can’t blame her, there are days I don’t like it myself. But there it is, we can’t all have her style. I in my turn deplore the way she reads.'

In my page on Surveys, I write about 'literary criticism and sampling,' and include a discussion of fairness in criticism. I quote all of it here instead of providing a link. Here, I use my notation (( )) to indicate 'survey' or 'surveys,' 'i( ... X)' for 'is an instance of X - instantiates X' and { ... } to indicate {themes}. This notation is explained at greater length in my page Introduction to {theme} theory.

'Ecologists are conscious of the need to avoid bias in sampling when they carry out an ecological (( )). If they have to state the number of creeping buttercup plants in a field, it's not practicable to count all the creeping buttercup plants in the field. They have to sample, by counting, for example, the number of plants in 0.01% of the field and multiplying the number they find in the sample by 10 000. Their sample has to be random. They don't take samples from the area nearest the road, for convenience, or take samples only from the unrepresentative area which contains almost all the creeping buttercups.

'Again and again, critics use distorted sampling and their (( )) are flawed. As in the case of ecology, it's impractical to deal with the whole, even if the whole is far from extensive. Even in the case of a poem of moderate length, it may be impossible to discuss all of it adequately. Critics usually have to sample, but they may choose the 'best part' of a poem to quote and discuss in support of their case, or the 'worst part' to support an adverse judgment.

'On the page which discusses 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' I quote Denis Donoghue on an exchange of views between F R Leavis and F W Bateson on the subject of close reading. In general, I'm sympathetic to F R Leavis's views on close reading, but of course close reading is usually not close reading of a whole but of a sample. Close reading itself does nothing to eliminate the problem of sampling. On the same page, I criticize Dennis O' Driscoll:

'Dennis O' Driscoll, in 'Heaney in Public,' one of the essays in The Cambridge Companion, claims that 'Every idea is examined afresh, as every word is coined anew.' Every idea is examined afresh! Every word is coined anew! Are all these five words in 'Gifts of Rain,' 'could monitor the usual / confabulations' coined anew? Bernard O' Donoghue ought to have had a few words with Dennis O' Driscoll, and made it clear that this claim couldn't possibly be justified and shouldn't appear in any self-respecting book, and certainly not one published by the Cambridge University Press. The Press had its reputation to consider, and so did he, as editor, and as an academic at Oxford University. But he obviously didn't even notice that Dennis O' Driscoll was practising a form of 'automatic writing.' He was practising 'automatic editing.' '

'This is just one sample of Dennis O' Driscoll the critic. Just one sample may seem conclusive, with no further need to collect further samples. This would be the case with a piece of sub-literate criticism of Shakespeare's Hamlet which began 'Hamlett is a krap play, everyone nows it whose seen itt.' There would be no need to read further. The one sentence of Dennis O' Driscoll would seem so poor that there's no need to collect further samples. Persisting even so, and reading the whole of his essay, 'Heaney in Public' in 'The Cambridge Companion' gives more extensive sampling, which qualifies the judgment formed from the earlier small sample: the essay as a whole is far better, but lacklustre in large part.

'To provide more one than one sample of a critic's writing i{amplification}, that is, ('instantiates' {amplification} or 'is an instance of' {amplification}. To provide more than one brief comment, 'far better, but lacklustre in large part' and to provide abundant evidence for the comment also i{amplification}, in accordance with the thoroughness and comprehensiveness which I see as very desirable in criticism. But to provide sufficient {amplification} is often impracticable or even impossible and sometimes unnecessary. Here, my main objective isn't to arrive at as fair an estimate as I can of the criticism of Dennis O' Driscoll but to discuss sampling in criticism and to discuss [sampling in criticism] < > [sampling in other fields, eg ecology].

'Even so, I extend sampling of Dennis O' Driscoll to discuss briefly a review by him, 'The Letters of Robert Lowell,' edited by Saskia Hamilton, in the U.S. Issue of the poetry magazine 'Agenda.' (Vol. 41 Nos. 3 - 4). It has a bearing on his own estimate of Seamus Heaney.

'He writes, of Robert Lowell, at the beginning of his review, 'He was better than good, less than great' and refers to his 'Pungent phrase-making, forceful rhythms, crackerjack technique and a credible public rhetoric ... ' Based upon this small sample from the review, his own criticism here is better than poor, less than good. Again, {amplification} would be necessary to make the discussion adequate. Extending the sample to the next sentence gives {modification} of the original estimate. This is poor: 'Few reputations live on poetry alone; and Lowell's prominence owed as much to his deeds as to his words; he was jailed as a conscientious objector during the Second World War ... ' This is no way to estimate the reputation of a poet, and the 'deeds' are equivocal. Depending on the critic's view of pacifism, Robert Lowell was heroic here or deeply misguided. I think he was completely misguided. His pacifism lowers his reputation for me, but not his reputation as a poet. (In the same way, the reputation of the composer Benjamin Britten isn't modified for me by the fact that he was a pacifist too during the Second World War.)

'When Dennis O' Driscoll returns to Robert Lowell as poet, he has severely critical things to say about him: 'Lowell was a willed poet more than an inspired one; so, a production line of habitual sonnets became an attempt to create an inspiration machine. The dogged, episodic, solipsistic poems he processed were dappled intermittently with brilliance, but monotonous and inert, crying out for divine afflatus rather than monkey wrench revision.'

'This further sample of Dennis O' Driscoll again modifies my view of his work. Without providing {amplification} for what I regard as the critical strengths and weaknesses of this sample, on its own it would be enough to modify a critical opinion based on the sample I gave first of all, concerning the words and ideas of Seamus Heaney.

'His view of the poetry, not the life, of Robert Lowell, is markedly different from Seamus Heaney's own. Seamus Heaney deals with the life and actions as well as the poetry. His account of the life and actions seems to me very acute - again, without giving {amplification}, but his account of the poetry seems to me to be based upon distorted sampling.

'Quoting should be regarded as a form of sampling. It would be impractical, usually, to quote the whole of a poem or other literary work (and would often infringe copyright). Anyone new to the poetry of Robert Lowell would have a distorted view of his work from Seamus Heaney's quote-sampling. He quotes lines from 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket:'

When the whale's viscera go and the roll
Of its corruption overruns this world
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole
and Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Johoshaphat
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
and hacks the coiling life out ...

'Are these lines representative in their literary quality? Seamus Heaney could have done far more to address this issue, I think. In my own pages on Seamus Heaney's own poetry ... I try to ensure that my sampling is as fair and comprehensive as I can make it, given the {restriction} of space. This {restriction}, of course, is generally severe in its effects. It may allow only the most limited sampling and the most limited {amplification}, or none at all. But my view of criticism is that, subject to {restriction} of space, the critic should attempt to reduce unfairness so far as possible by, amongst other things, sampling as well as possible.

'I don't address here one other matter which emerges from my discussion - the need to address contradictions. Contradictions play almost as important a part in literary criticism as the contradictions, of a very different kind, studied in logic. Seamus Heaney's view of Robert Lowell's poetry is so different from Dennis O' Driscoll's as to amount to criticism-contradiction.

On the page where I discuss 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney' I include this comment on Fran Brearton, 'I don't have an extensive acquaintance with work by Fran Brearton other than her essay in The Cambridge Companion, but enough to know that she can write very well, as in this review of Paul Muldoon (a much less important poet than Seamus Heaney, I think.)'

The contradictions of critics may sometimes come close to the contradictions of life. Below, I give a brief quotation from Richard D. Cureton, of the University of Michigan, writing in 'Versification: an interdisciplinary journal of literary prosody' (Vol. 1, No. 1). The essay is entitled 'Helen Vendler and the Music of Poetry, a Review of Poems, Poets, Poetry: an Introduction and Anthology by Helen Vendler.' The quotation is concerned with rhythm and its neglect by so many critics but the first section of the essay is concerned with 'Lyric Poetry and the New Criticism.' This section is accomplished, so much of his comment on Helen Vendler is accomplished - but not all. Some of it is deranged, as the quotation of the last paragraph of the essay will show. He goes so far as to grant Helen Vendler exemption from criticism, or, as he puts it 'speaking ill' (even though in the section which immediately precedes it he does criticize her: 'the approach to the poem that she recommends can never achieve the scope and explanatory power of those dramatic and/or novelistic theories of the poem that she refutes.') But this is Richard D. Cureton writing not as critic but anti-critic. Richard D. Cureton writing on Vendler brings to mind Helen Vendler on Seamus Heaney. His claims are very radical and sweeping.

'The great accomplishment of Vendler's work, both professional and pedagogical [he's earlier described the book he's reviewing as 'the best poetic pedagogy that has ever been written] is to advance beyond the efforts of any of her peers the observation and description of the "poeticality" that remains to be explained. The breadth of her analyses, the depth of their insight into aesthetic structuration in poetry and its relation to human subjectivity, is unparalleled. We feel the critical force of her analyses and therefore, to what Vendler accomplishes, we can - and should - say nothing ill.' He continues with a long and fatuous analogy. 'For those concerned with poetry as an art, rather than with their professional advancement or the quick satisfaction of their students in the classroom, what Vendler gives us is a precious fruit, and the eating of that fruit should spur us on to both desire and pursue a full repast. The difficulty of this pursuit, however, should not be underestimated. The distance that we must traverse to enjoy that full repast will belong indeed. At a time when the road to that repast had been washed away, Vendler strikes a path that avoids that washed out road and puts us again (and, I hope, forever) on a more productive way. She deserves both thanks and praise.

The editors of 'Versification' should have protected him from himself here.

There are no mechanical ways to arrive at an estimate of a poet or a critic. The best single guide has a linkage, I think, with a good scientific theory, which is able to withstand the 'criticism' of observations and experiments. There are significant differences. A poem or a poet can't possibly withstand all criticisms. This would be to ignore factorization. The factors that can be claimed as important in good, or more than good, poetry, are very varied, including emotional depth as well as emotional range, rhythm and metre, inventiveness in form (the need for this can be disputed), vivid diction (the need for this can be disputed). In music, Beethoven easily withstands criticism for so many factors, but not all. (It can be claimed that in many of his early and middle works, the emotional range, though great, was restricted by a kind of simple-minded optimism which brushed aside harsher emotions. His third period, though, gave not just a new sound world but a new emotional world.)

'Withstanding' is better than 'the verdict of posterity' or appeals to poetry which has lasted. The poetry which has lasted has often, but not always, withstood criticism. There are still poems, whole poetic careers, which have certainly lasted, but which have been spared effective criticism. Their reputations have been perpetuated unthinkingly. They have been granted 'exemption.'

Less illustrious critics

Some interesting criticism of Seamus Heaney that I know of comes from much less prominent critics than Helen Vendler. This is unextended criticism, but this isn't an overwhelming disadvantage here.

Extended analysis isn't always perceptive and very perceptive unextended criticism is obviously better than very unperceptive extended criticism, but a critic may be very perceptive in some ways, very obtuse in others. (This is certainly applicable to Martin Seymour-Smith, very perceptive, I think, in connection with Seamus Heaney, Tom Stoppard and, to a large extent, Ted Hughes, but sometimes wide of the mark.)

Andrew Waterman is a poet and critic and a former lecturer in English at the New University of Ulster. His essay 'Ulsterectomy' appeared in an early edition of PN Review (No. 3, 1977). By that time, Seamus Heaney had written 'Death of a Naturalist,' 'Door into the Dark,' Wintering Out,' 'Stations' and 'North.' These volumes contain his strongest poetry by far, although there are isolated successes in later books - this is a very common opinion, and one I share, even though the commonness of an opinion - and the fact that I share the opinion - isn't a criterion of validity.

He writes of Seamus Heaney, '...one understands Heaney's desire to take his unmistakable gifts beyond the superb naturalism which in his early work got rural Derry so tangibly on the page; but his subsequent attempts to concoct myth through which to articulate Ireland seem less than compelling: most of his son-of -bogwoman solemnities and place-name ruminations are portentously not what life's all about. I question not the sincerity of Heaney's impulse here, but the burden of nationality which has foisted it on him, and wonder with interest what he will do when he has dug through to the end of this tunnel. North smacked too much of a Bord na Mona literary show-factory...' A footnote explains, 'Bord na Mona:' Republic of Ireland nationalized authority for the manufacture, etc., of peat brickettes.'

Just over a year later, he expanded his comments:

'Heaney I was in my first context somewhat hard on, true to my irked reaction to the clogged poetry of most of his last volume North, where his remarkable talents seemed put to mistaken repetitious use self-consciously quarrying preoccupations marginal to the central human experiences. The more relaxed openly topical poems of Part II of North are hardly preferable: Heaney worrying that

While the constabulary covered the mob
Firing into the Falls, I was suffering
Only the bullying sun of Madrid

is limp liberal-guilt stuff.

'...his is a poetry of limited scope, notably weak, despite a poem like 'Exposure', on the inner spiritual questing and self-questioning that is so central and defining a strength of most of our finest poetry from George Herbert through Wordsworth and Hardy to Edward Thomas and beyond...There's a spacious hole in the heart of Heaney's oeuvre: but his talent for verbal realization of the subject-matter with which he does engage is a magnificent one, and if, in the best sense, 'minor', still irreplaceably distinctive.'

Martin Seymour-Smith's 'Guide to Modern World Literature' has long been out of print, although it wasn't when Helen Vendler was meeting Seamus Heaney for the first time. It's a book which is often unreliable and wrong-headed but I think this isn't so in the general estimation of Seamus Heaney:

'In Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first collection (there had been a pamphlet, Eleven Poems, in the previous year), he wrote some sensitive, original rural poems in traditional verse. Some of these were moving and striking; clearly the work of a poet whose metaphors (often yoking writing with farm or manual work) were unforced and natural to him. He tells in the poems of this volume of how the world of nature menaced him as a child, and of how hard he found writing poetry to be. But it was an un-self-conscious book, whose complexities were not imposed from outside, or from reading, or from critical ideas. It looked as if Heaney was going to be a true poet: true, that is, to his own voice, and to his own sense of the rightness of his words in describing his experience. There were many good poems, too, in Door into the Dark (1969). But the successive volumes, Wintering Out (1972), North (1975) and Field Work (1979), showed him departing from his old principles, and becoming 'literary' in the wrong sense...In his first book Heaney could write (it is the first stanza of 'Poem'):

Love, I shall perfect for you the child
who diligently potters in my brain
Digging with heavy spade till sods were picked
Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.

This was felt and genuine - and the rest of the poem is as good. By the time of North he can, too, still write a very good poem - for example, 'A Constable Calls', a memory of a policeman calling on his father to check that his farming is 'correct'...But there is a disturbing new note, here, too, as in 'Exposure':

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

The poem ends with a peculiarly pretentious line, 'The comet's pulsing rose' - and, although a poetic impulse was there, peters out into something that a likely critic might describe as 'deepening into a new complexity.' Heaney himself does not feel in the way he pretends here: with his own voice he would never say 'My responsible tristia'. And this 'continental manner' which Heaney increasingly adopted, causes a naturally concrete poet to become abstract and meaningless.'

Peter McDonald is a 'Student at Christ Church, Oxford.' For those not very familiar with the language of Oxford, or this particular college (not that it's called a college, although it is), he's not an undergraduate at a Church but an academic - a fellow - at the Oxford college (even though it doesn't contain 'College' in its name) with that name. I hope this clarifies the matter.

For Peter McDonald, there seem to be high-status and low-status critics, on the evidence of a letter to the impressive and much-missed poetry magazine 'Thumbscrew,' and only high-status critics have the necessary authority to be taken seriously. (Martin Seymour-Smith couldn't be taken as a high-profile critic.) This is one of those fallacies which are illegitimate modes of reasoning and persuasion. Perhaps the best-known of these fallacies is the 'argumentum ad hominem' but the fallacy here is the 'argumentum ad verecundiam,' mentioned by Locke in the 'Essay concerning Human Understanding.' (Both fallacies, in {theme} theory, instantiate {substitution}.) Peter McDonald's reasoning is fallacious when he claims that Carol Rumens' 'weight and reputation as a critic are not such as to make ex cathedra judgements ... immediately impressive.' Alternatively, this can be viewed as a ridiculous and pompous attempt to put Carol Rumens in her place:

'Carol Rumens (Thumbscrew 14) shows no lack of confidence in her own judgement when she dismisses Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘Genesis’ as “that galvanised corpse”, an “adolescent” piece full of “second-hand imagery and rhetorical swagger”. Of course, confidence can be something which, in criticism as in poetry, issues as readily from failure as from success; while Rumens does not explain exactly how she has arrived at these opinions about Hill’s poem, it is not, I hope, impertinent to observe that her weight and reputation as a critic are not such as to make ex cathedra judgements like these immediately impressive. Edna Longley’s positive reference to ‘Genesis’, also made in passing, has behind it a critical authority to which – by any possible reckoning – Ms Rumens cannot lay claim; an impartial reader might think that Professor Longley has earned the benefit of even Ms Rumens’s doubt, but such impartiality would be, of necessity, naive.'

He doesn't explain exactly how he has arrived at these opinions about Carol Rumens' lack of critical gravitas. He seems to assume that he has the necessary weight and reputation as a critic to make an 'ex cathedra' judgement about her.

Seamus Heaney and Parnassian

'Parnassian' is the weak, routine, relatively mediocre work of a poet who is capable of much stronger work, not the mediocre work of a poet who never writes above a mediocre level.

Letter of Gerard Manley Hopkins to A W M Baillie

I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked ...

The second kind I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet's mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration, which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself. For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity ... [Poets] have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, - this is the point to be marked, - they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet's particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism, if you like.

Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet ... in Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with the difference that if you actually try you find you cannot write his Parnassian ... I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian. We seem to have found out his secret. Now in fact we have not found out more than this, that when he is not inspired and in his flights, his poetry does run in an intelligibly laid down path ... judging from my own experience I should say no author palls so much as Wordsworth; this is because he writes such an 'intolerable deal of' Parnassian.

There is a higher sort of Parnassian which I call Castalian, or it may be thought the lowest kind of inspiration. Beautiful poems may be written wholly in it. Its peculiarity is that though you can hardly conceive yourself having written in it, if in the poet's place, yet it is too characteristic of the poet, too so-and-so-all-over-ish, to be quite inspiration. E.g.

Yet despair
Touches me not, though pensive as a bird
Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare.

This is from Wordsworth, beautiful, but rather too essentially Wordsworthian, too persistently his way of looking at things.

Identifying the mediocre work of a poet with the best work is common. Bernard O' Donoghue claims as much for Seamus Heaney's poorer poetry, I claim later.

My own interpretation of Seamus Heaney's 'career' is bleak but, I think, realistic. It's completely opposed to the interpretation of Bernard O' Donoghue. Seamus Heaney had authentic, unreflective, uncomplicated gifts for vivid description in traditional, unadventurous poetry. His gifts were so great in some of his early work that they assured him a place in any history of English poetry. His poetry will last. This is a very great deal. But the poet who created such memorable works had greater ambitions. He was uncomfortably aware that genres differ in prestige. He'd created memorable works in a genre that isn't regarded as very prestigious. This is the genre to which Laurie Lee's 'Cider with Rosie' belongs, the nostalgic story of growing up in rural Gloucestershire. Seamus Heaney's early poetry has more literary value than Laurie Lee's prose. He turned to more 'complex' and prestigious themes, ones which allowed greater opportunities for 'explication.' He turned to archaeology, for example. The bog poems are more successful than unsuccessful. They gave him the opportunity to continue to use his enormously impressive descriptive gifts. At the same time, he continued his earlier work in natural description and the description of people, although this never amounted to a complex characterization. His own consciousness is far too limited for that.

Soon, his authentic voice began to fail. He was no longer able to create language with very much semantic force. He perhaps made a conscious decision to try to join the ranks of the poets - Eastern Europeans and others - whose prestige wasn't based on local strengths. He never forgot his roots in County Derry, but he found them inadequate and confining. His work in a genre which carries more prestige fell far short of his earlier work in a genre which carries less prestige. For a very long time, he did his reputation no favours. The poetry was poor, Parnassian. 'District and Circle,' a fairly recent volume, has heartening and significant examples of non-Parnassian writing, but these are fragmentary.

There are vast quantities of Parnassian in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Parnassian may be found in what I call expanses, whole poems or whole books of poetry, or there may be strong and weak, routine writing in close proximity, frequent transitions into and from Parnassian.

Gerard Manley Hopkins distinguishes the poetry of inspiration from Parnassian. His account of inspiration is very accomplished but his account has to be supplemented, to take account of the fact that the poetry of inspiration - or 'unforced poetry,' or 'non-factitious poetry' or poetry arising from the unconscious as well as conscious mind - may well be imperfect and to approach or attain perfection often needs revision. In my pages on Seamus Heaney, I point out evidence of his serious weaknessess in revision.

By the time of The Haw Lantern, Seamus Heaney was writing predominantly Parnassian. He went on writing predominantly Parnassian. Much Parnassian is harmless and relatively inoffensive. Seamus Heaney's Parnassian is sometimes shockingly bad.

One of the contributors to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' Patrick Crotty, in 'The Context of Heaney's Reception,' describes the editor's views in the book he wrote, 'Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry:' 'O' Donoghue's book is notable, among other things, for identifying the centre of gravity of the career in the collections from Station Island onwards; it nevertheless has many interesting observations to make about the early work, not least among them that the opaque, cultivatedly unmelodious language of Death of a Naturalist is to a degree foreign to Heaney's nature and that an underlying urge towards the claritas and airiness of Seeing Things is evident in the verse from the beginning.'

Bernard O' Donoghue's estimate is surprising. We have to negate his main assertions to arrive at a better estimate of Seamus Heaney's poetry. 'Station Island' was a prominent landmark in the drastic decline in the quality of Seamus Heaney's poetry. The 'unmelodious' but not at all opaque language of 'Death of a Naturalist' is the native idiom of Seamus Heaney, at least for some years. There's no sign of 'claritas and airiness' in the book.

There's the need to attend not just to obvious contrasts of success in a poem and between one poem and another but to much smaller contrasts, to attend not just to widely separated contrasts of success but to contrasts in proximate lines and within the same line. To give one example, 'To a Dutch Potter in Ireland,' ('The Spirit Level') has

In that slabbery, clabbery, wintry, puddled ground

There's a gradient of success in the adjectives here, I think. 'Slabbery' and 'clabbery' are only successful if someone gives extreme importance to 'using the full resources of the English language,' which might justify calling upon 'pulchritude.' 'Wintry' is much better, though inferior to Blake's 'wintry' in 'To my Mirtle,'

He scents thy footsteps in the snow
Wheresoever thou dost go
Thro the wintry hail & rain
When wilt thou return again

'Puddled,' far from being quirky, has a degree of exactness. It describes one significant aspect of the Irish, and British, winter, more often than not a winter lacking in harsh sensuousness.

Seamus Heaney's abstractions

The trend to meaningless abstraction was a process liable to get out of hand in some of the volumes published since Martin Seymour-Smith wrote. There are many examples of the intrusion of the ineffectual abstract, for example 'possibility' in 'The Wool Trade,' ('Wintering Out.')

Smell the tidal Lagan:
Take a last turn
In the tang of possibility.

'Bone Dreams' in 'North' has 'I push back / through dictions,'

'Strange Fruit' in North has 'outstaring axe / And beatification,' concrete linked ineffectually with ineffectual abstraction.

The mistaken idea that Seamus Heaney is usually a poet of vivid concreteness is easily dispelled by innumerable lines (but not in his first volumes) such as these, from 'Act of Union,' also in 'North:'

Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

- although this particular poem becomes far more concrete and far better in Part II, even if there is the line

Whose stance is growing unilateral.

'Summer Home' ('Wintering Out') has

More and more I postulate
thick healings ...

The ineffectual abstract followed by the ineffectual concrete, 'thick.'

Writing about Yeats' poem 'Prayer for My Daughter' (in 'Yeats, The Master of a Trade,' an essay in 'The Integrity of Yeats' edited by D. Donoghue) Donald Davie comments that a 'young poet' can notice '... how many of the words are abstract words - 'arrogance', 'hatred', 'custom', 'ceremony', innocence', beauty'. To be sure, it's no accident that this cluster of abstractions comes in the last stanza out of ten: the preceding nine stanzas have given these words the meaning that the poet can now take for granted; he's earned the right to use them. All the same, the 'prentice poet can learn from this that he almost certainly has an excessive fear of abstract words; that his efforts to be always concrete, always specific, never to state a thing but always to embody it in an image - these efforts too, like his efforts to be original at all costs, are largely superfluous.'

But the examples which Donald Davie gives are abstract words with rich connotations, unlike, for example, Seamus Heaney's 'postulate.' A word such as 'postulate' can be assimilated successfully into a poem, but it requires great care. I'd claim that I'm able to achieve this with very similar abstract words from logical thought in one of the poems in Relationships in trouble:

Propositions, arguments, terrible proofs,
shouted syllogisms, punishing logic:

Seamus Heaney's word 'beatification' had concrete connotations in the past to a far greater extent than now: it surely no longer belongs to the world of live thought and language. Sometimes, the abstract words he uses in his poetry are unassimilated, jarring and obtrusive. Unlike Yeats, he hasn't prepared the way for them. More often, ineffectual abstract words don't ruin lines which are otherwise inspired: the ineffectual abstract words belong with ineffectual concrete words in completely ineffectual lines.

Again and again, this poet who is so gifted, so often inspired, allows very strong poems and passages to be undermined by weak words and weak lines which stayed because he's so obviously weak in revision of a poem, the conscious process that should follow the unconscious, unless the unconscious has provided a perfect poem. This isn't usually the case, even for naturally gifted poets.

Seamus Heaney the translator is no more assured. From my criticism of Mycenae Lookout in 'The Spirit Level' ('Mycenae Lookout isn't a translation but the short quotation is):

'Before 'The Watchman's War,' there's a short quotation, presumably from Aeschylus' 'Agamemnon,' the source which lies behind 'Mycenae Lookout.' He translates it as 'The ox is on my tongue.' If so, 'is' is a weak and colourless translation of in, 'a great ox stands on my tongue.' He has omitted 'great.' This is a proverbial expression, and he may for some reason have translated the expression in the form , although it doesn't appear in 'Agamemnon,' which means 'an ox has trodden on my tongue.' He's not offering a translation or even a 'version' of Aeschylus in the rest of 'Mycenae Lookout' and he could have made far more of this ox: instead of the inert, static weight of the animal in Seamus Heaney's translation, the weight of the animal in motion, clumsy, blundering, or unable to avoid stepping on the tongue or treading on the tongue, far more vivid.

The meaningless-pointless-grotesque concrete

More prominent than meaningless abstraction, pointless abstraction and grotesque abstraction in Seamus Heaney's work are the meaningless concrete, the pointless concrete and the grotesque concrete. His weaknesses in concrete language have to be set against his obvious strengths. One recurrent failure is the grotesque linkage of massive natural features with human anatomy, some other aspects of the human or a much smaller natural feature.

He has a thing about those massive rivers of ice, white, more or less, flowing, but very, very slowly, called glaciers. In his work they become black, are easily moved or speeded up. This might work in a surrealist poem but not in this traditional poetry. 'Waterfall' in 'Death of a Naturalist,' has, in connection with water,

It appears an athletic glacier
has reared into reverse...

'Funeral Rites' in 'North' has

...the black glacier
of each funeral pushed away.

'Bog Queen' in 'North' has

My sash was a black glacier

The Irish poet Eavan Boland shows that although it's difficult, it's not impossible to use 'glacier' effectively in poems that aren't about such themes as high mountains, Alaska, the Antarctic. The closing lines of 'In Her Own Image:'

the room had been shocked into a glacier
of cotton sheets thrown over the almond
and vanilla silk of the French Empire chairs.

Although the lack of any rhythmic energy is obvious.

Glaciers are an intrusion into the Seamus Heaney poems where they appear, in jarring contrast with the rest of the poem-world. They could be well integrated into almost any surrealistic poem. Although it would be expected that they would fit into symbolist poetry, in the example from Mallarmé which I discuss in my page on Metaphor, the glacier seems to me badly integrated and not a good source of contrast either, unlike the blow oof the 'drunken wing' of the swan. I'm familiar with the principles which underlie the construction of his poetry - poetry which I read with intense interest - but what compels me to accept these principles in this poem, in extenuation? My discussion in the page on 'Metaphor,' technical to an extent, explains more fully my reasons.

Other poems in 'North' have other concrete peculiarities. In 'Bone Dreams:'

the vallum of her brow

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, dreaming
of Maiden Castle.

'Act of Union' has

Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

John Donne's 'Elegy XVIII,' 'Loves Progress' blunders in the same way - 'the glorious Promontory, her Chin,' 'a Cheek, a rosie Hemisphere,' and much more. C A Patrides, in 'The Poetry of John Donne,' which appears in his edition of the complete poems, writes 'a promising journey across the female body founders in risibly excessive analogies.'

Back to the risibly excessive analogies in the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

In 'Bone Dreams,' of touching the shoulders of a dead mole:

I touched small distant Pennines,

In 'Bog Queen:'

I knew winter cold
like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs -

On the other hand, in 'Strange Fruit,'

after the misguided

Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod

(because turf clods aren't notably dark at all) the line

Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.

can be defended. I think it's effective. The pools are much larger than the eyeholes, but in this case it's the common blankness which forms the linkage. If a large natural feature is being linked with a much smaller and contrasted thing, then for poetic success, there has to be {restriction} on the large natural feature, {restriction} in this case to the common blankness of the two. The other examples I quote are without this {restriction}.

'Oysters' in 'Field Work' has

My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight

followed a little later by wonderful lines, such as the informal

Orion dipped his foot into the water.

and (particularly for 'damp' and 'disgorge,' I think)

I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege.

Faulty imagery is very common in his work. For example, 'Mycenae Lookout' in 'The Spirit Level' has

... I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck

Here, there's more than a simile. The tongue and the gangplank are treated almost as literal equivalents, so that what applies to a gangplank applies to the tongue and a tongue is as capable of bearing heavy traffic as a gangplank. This is literalness rather than imagery.

'Viking Dublin' ('North') has a similar fault.

a swimming nostril.

This later abandons swimming for travel by boat, becoming part of the boat:

so that the nostril
is a migrant prow
sniffing the Liffey,

This isn't Seamus Heaney as a surrealist or Dadaist or successor of Gogol (who wrote 'The Nose,' a story in which a nose escapes from the face of a civil servant - eventually the police catch it and return it to its owner) but simply Seamus Heaney not at his best.

Accuracy of language?

I think that if we read his work with critical faculties intact, rather than influenced too much by knowledge of his fame and prominence, then we find that his use of language is often far from sure, is sometimes ridiculously inept. Helen Vendler stresses the importance of accurate language, but Seamus Heaney's use of language is often casual and careless. Many commentators on Seamus Heaney, including Helen Vendler, have failed to detect these blunders.

Poets, and critics and commentators too, have sometimes been seen as 'guardians of language.' Seamus Heaney has an elevated view of himself and would most likely see himself as one of these guardians. Who will guard the guardians? Bernard O' Donoghue, the editor of the 'Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' another commentator who fails to detect the most obvious mistakes in the poetry, is a Latinist. He would be very familiar with Tacitus' 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?'

My page Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man and other poems gives many instances of his carelessness. I give just a few further examples here.

In 'The Forge,' ('Door into the Dark') he writes of 'the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring.' Notes are shorter or longer in length but pitches are higher or lower.

In 'The Flight Path' (The Spirit Level) Seamus Heaney chose to use a scientific term and he had a responsibility to use it accurately:

Like starlight that is light years on the go
From far away and takes light years arriving.

A quick look in an English dictionary, with no need for extended research, would have told him that 'light years' are measurements of distance, not time. Collins English Dictionary: 'a unit of distance used in astronomy, equal to the distance travelled by light in one mean solar year ...' Helen Gardner, a guardian of accurate language, discusses 'The Flight Path,' as do Neil Corcoran and two of the contributors to The Cambridge Companion but none of them mention this mistake: a significant mistake, not a minor one.

Whereas professional scientists and historians are expected to show and almost always do show impressively high standards of accuracy in giving factual information (and the volume of factual information they deal with is massive) poets shouldn't be expected to show any particular care for the very few technical terms they decide to use. Who cares? The most glaring mistakes can go undetected or uncriticized. Seamus Heaney's mistake here encourages this casual and negligent attitude.

Compare Sean O' Brien in his translation of Dante's 'Inferno,' Canto XIII, 40 - 42:

And just as when one end of a green log's
Ablaze, the hissing sap and oxygen
Come bubbling from the other, I watched

As Dante lived many centuries before the discovery of oxygen and oxygen obviously isn't in the original, using 'oxygen' here was ridiculous, all the more ridiculous because oxygen isn't a product of combustion but the gas carbon dioxide is.

In 'Weighing In,' also in The Spirit Level, there are these inert lumps of meaningless non-science, non-mathematics and non-poetry:

The 56 lb. weight. A solid iron
Unit of negation.

and:

Gravity's black box, the immovable
Stamp and squat and square-root of dead weight.

The first verse paragraph of 'Holding course' ('The Haw Lantern') is about 'the big ferries' and it begins 'Propellers underwater, cabins drumming ...' Except when the ferries are in dry dock or are lying on their side or upside down after catastrophic damage, the propellers can be assumed to be underwater. That's where propellers almost always are.

The faults of accuracy are not always blatant and obvious. 'Bone Dreams' in 'North' has

'...the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.

Unlike stainless steel, iron is a dull metal, very easily corroded, so 'flash' is wide of the mark. 'Cleaving' is splitting or cutting. A caesura would fit 'cleaving', but not 'consonants.'

'From the Canton of Expectation' ('The Haw Lantern') has a similar failure, but in a far less accomplished context: 'intelligences / brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.' Crowbars aren't 'brightened.' The image should have been revised or better still, excised.

The closing line in 'Summer Home' (Wintering Out') has an impressive ring to it, it sounds well.

Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.

It's the ring of the tuning fork, its tiny sound, which is intended, not the small size of the tuning fork, the instrument which makes the sound, but more importantly, another factor is insistent, the fact that the tiny sound produced by a tuning fork is short-lived. The poet concentrates on one factor, expressed by 'tiny,' but 'tuning fork' has other factors. A factor in an image, such as size, may be excluded or denied by the poet, who may make it clear that another factor, such as colour, is what counts in a simile - but the associations of the excluded factor may be impossible to overlook. I discuss this line in detail on the page metaphor and {theme}.

Seamus Heaney has damaged poetry by his frequent obliviousness to accuracy of language. Any notion that poets are the 'guardians of language' is undermined by his failures.

His achievements in semantic force

I think that Seamus Heaney's use of language with semantic force (but often in close proximity with inert and ineffective language) is his greatest single strength. The claim that his language often has 'sensuousness,' 'vividness,' 'muscularity' or 'sinews' is true enough, but doesn't quite do justice to his powers - he's even able to animate prepositions on occasion, to give them semantic force - and at the same time exaggerates the importance of sensuous and vivid language in poetry - as I show, I hope, by a comparison with music.

From my 'Glossary: poetry and poetics:'

Semantic force and semantic significance

Words, phrases (and concepts) with semantic force are used, heard, or read with an accompanying experience of intensity or forcefulness, for example, in a visceral or sensuous, an elevated or deeply anxious way. Although a person knows the meaning of many words, or can use many words meaningfully, words with semantic impact are particularly 'meaningful.' The primary linkage of 'semantic' here isn't with the very interesting academic study of semantics.

A person's active vocabulary and passive vocabulary are distinguished in linguistics. A person's active vocabulary (words which the person actually uses) is smaller than the person's passive vocabulary (words whose meaning is known but which the person does not use.) Words with semantic force are few in comparison with the active vocabulary and are subject to change in a more striking way. Words which once had semantic force for the person may no longer possess it. Words may acquire semantic force quite suddenly. Words may be used with semantic force on one occasion and not on another, owing, perhaps, to distraction or preoccupation. Words may be read or heard as well as used with semantic force.

These words are of the most varied kind. Examples are 'danger,' 'snow,' 'poignant,' 'classification' and 'mathematical set.' Where a word has rich connotations - 'danger,' for example - then using it with semantic force involves using the word with its more intense connotations. So attention is focused on more immediate, real dangers, such as the experience of being in an active war zone, rather than more distant, if still real dangers, such as 'the dangers of smoking.' It may be direct and intense personal experience which gives a word semantic force, such as the experience of being shelled or shot at, but this is not a necessity..

The use of words with semantic force is one, but only one, factor in a good poem. are used with greater semantic force. In a poor poem, words are used with no semantic force, in a routine or inert way. Deviance or deviation (established terms in stylistics, associated with the Prague school of linguistics) is particularly associated with poetic language. However, deviance can characterize mediocre poetry. Semantic force is a better 'indicator' of good poetry than deviance. This is not to imply that the more vivid the language, the greater the poem. There is a vividness in Seamus Heaney's poetic descriptions of growing up on a farm in Ulster, and a vividness in some of Robert Frost's descriptions of rural New England, which cannot be matched in the work of, for example, Rilke.

I don't argue here for the greater stature of Rilke, but I simply state my conviction that a great poet conveys wider semantic force than a lesser poet, or conveys aspects of semantic force which, it can be argued, are more fundamental. It is for this last reason that I myself regard Kafka as so important amongst twentieth century imaginative writers of prose, despite his restricted range. He has given massive semantic force to such an unexpected word as 'Unzugänglichkeit,' 'inaccessibility,' 'un approachability,' which appears in the section 'Before the Law' in 'The Trial' and which underlies the whole of his novel 'The Castle.' Another, more familiar example in Kafka is 'overate,' 'arrested.' The writer, however, who used words with greater semantic force than any other is, of course, Shakespeare.

The examples I've given vary very much in intensity. There's no necessary positive linkage between intensity and importance or artistic success. In fact, the idea of semantic force has to be extended, to include 'semantic significance.' A linkage with taste: many people crave more and more intense flavors, more and more highly spiced food, and neglect subtleties of flavor. I'm impressed by a passage from John Ruskin, who in Lecture 3 of 'The Queen of the Air' compares a Persian manuscript and a Turner drawing, the Persian manuscript intense in colour, the Turner drawing drab by comparison: 'One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in Turner's entire drawing.' But it's the Turner drawing which he claims has more 'semantic significance' in my term.

The achievement should have prior {ordering}, the {restriction} post-ordering. Seamus Heaney's achievement in semantic force is very great. In classes of students studying art, it's often found that one or two will have that unmistakable ability to make sketches consisting of not much more than a few lines convey an image which seems to leap from the paper vividly or sensuously, an ability far more likely to be innate than taught. Not all students have the ability to extend that ability to produce a complete work which gives the same evidence of extreme talent. Seamus Heaney was like an art student who can do just that, and despite any fluctuations in his poetic career can still achieve that. He has the unmistakable talent of a born writer.

Seamus Heaney can give semantic force not just to nouns, adjectives and verbs but even to prepositions. I underline words and phrases in which I think have marked semantic force.

'A Hagging Match' from 'District and Circle' has

Axe-thumps outside
like wave-hits through
a night ferry:

This is very notable without being unforgettable. The rhythmic inertness of the lines, a recurrent problem in Seamus Heaney, is a {restriction} on the power. But the ability here of water not just to cause jarring but, as the one word through expresses, a force felt the length of the vessel, is well conveyed.

'Home Fires' in 'District and Circle' has an almost identical effect, in this case the pain of Dorothy Wordsworth's toothache felt through her body, through jaw-bone and neck-bone, as far as her wrist-bone. This effect is outstanding here. The first three lines are surely Parnassian, not to be justified by claiming that they are a necessary and effective contrast to the intensity of the rest of the stanza.

Dorothy young, jig-jigging her iron shovel,
Barracking a pile of lumpy coals
Carted up by one Thomas Ashburner,
Her toothache so ablaze the carter's name
Goes unremarked as every jolt and jag
Backstabs her through her wrist-bone, neck-bone,
jaw-bone.

At the beginning of this section, I wrote that the importance of sensuous and vivid language in poetry can be exaggerated. More precisely, it's important to stress how important the superficially unpromising and unimportant can be in poetry, as in music. In classical music, melodies with sensuous scoring are far from being all-important. Tchaikowsky could write these melodies, but his achievement as a symphonist was limited because he couldn't develop superficially unpromising material. Compare this, from the opening of Haydn's String Quartet Op. 50 No. 1:

In his superb book 'The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Charles Rosen writes of this opening, 'The first movement of the Quartet in B flat major op. 50 no. 1 is built from almost nothing at all: a repeated note in the cello [ '(a)' ] and a six-note figure in the violin. [ '(b).' This is the first violin - I omit the second violin part here.]

'One could say that in this exposition Haydn treats the six-note figure as a row [the 'tone-row' of serial composers such as Alban Berg] except that his procedure has nothing to do with serial technique. The way its shape is twisted, while remaining always recognizable, shows us that Haydn may be said to work topologically - his central idea remaining invariant even when its shape is deformed - while a serialist works geometrically. More to the point, however, is that (b) alone is not the source of the piece, but rather the tension between (b) and the calm one-note ostinato up against it as a series of sequences, from which all the rhythmic animation of the work comes.'

'This movement, with its obsessive use of one six-note figure, may seem atypical (although there are many such pieces in Haydn, whose material could be even more laconic) ... '

There's no counterpart in poetry for the remarkable harmonic development which Haydn provides in this movement, as generally, and which Charles Rosen explains at length, but poetry is capable of some of the other effects here- rhythmic effects, 'topological' effects, and others. Poetic material which at first sight is unpromising - not sufficiently sensuous or vivid - can offer more opportunity for development of this kind than the sensuous and vivid material. I don't think that the poetry of Seamus Heaney is well adapted for purposes such as these.

His failures in line and stanza enjambment

I use the term 'line-enjambment,' for the carrying over of material from one line to the next. I use the term 'stanza-enjambment' for the carrying over of material from one stanza (or verse paragraph) to the next. These terms refer to the boundary which is crossed, the end of a line or the end of a stanza. In the page on metre I extend the classification of enjambment to include the different kinds of material which may be carried over, such as a sentence, phrase and metre.

Seamus Heaney uses stanza-enjambment very often, as in the poem 'North' from the volume 'North,' the verse paragraph ending with the botched line

The longship's swimming tongue

(compare the 'swimming nostril' in 'Viking Dublin')

followed by the verse paragraph beginning with the botched line

was buoyant with hindsight

This is an effect not generally used in prose. Prose writers generally regard what's within a prose paragraph as having a degree of unity. The next paragraph gives continuation, very often, of subject or argument but not of phrase or sentence.

Stanza enjambment can be justified as a conscious technique but its use requires great skill. Seamus Heaney uses stanza enjambment very effectively in only a few places.

An understanding of stanza enjambment requires an understanding of some aspects of the poetic line, of the eventfulness of moving from line to line and the emphasis given to the beginning of a new line. Christopher Ricks provides a very good treatment of these, in his essay 'Wordsworth: "A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines"' (Essays in Criticism, volume 21.) Some extracts:

'The punctuation of which poetry or verse further avails itself is the white space. In prose, line-endings are ordinarily the work of the compositor and not the artist. [and in prose-poetry and the prose which results after the Line Removal Test has been applied.]...the poet has at his command this further 'system of punctuation'. The white space at the end of a line of poetry constitutes some kind of pause...

'The language is deployed, just as the episodes are in a story, so as always to provoke the question 'And then?' - to provoke this question and to answer it in unexpected ways...here syntax is employed so as to make the most of each word's eventfulness, so as to make each key-word, like each new episode in a well-told story, at once surprising and just.'

Christopher Ricks's understanding of the transition from line to line can be extended to include the transition from one verse paragraph to the next, in cases of stanza enjambment. The effect here is much more marked. The white space between stanzas forms a more substantial space than the one between one line and the next. What is placed first in the new verse paragraph acquires great emphasis from the greater delay in reaching it from the previous paragraph. It's difficult or impossible to make the transition by enjambment from line to line marked in every case by significance (using 'marked' in the sense used in Stylistics.) These transitions are bound - the poet has no alternative but to make them, if enjambment is used at all. Transitions by enjambment from stanza to stanza are generally free - and far fewer. The poet has a far greater responsibility to make something of them.

The pause can be lengthened by means of stanza enjambment and by another effect - interposing a line between statement expecting {completion} and {completion}. In this example, from Derek Walcott's 'Midsummer,' the statement expecting {completion} is 'there's that island known ...' and the {completion} is 'for making nothing:'

So, a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast
dereliction of sunlight, there's that island known
to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froud,
for making nothing. Not even a people ...

Seamus Heaney isn't accomplished in line enjambment. Again and again, he's inept. An example, from the otherwise very successful poem 'A Constable Calls,' in 'North:'

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,
The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher
Skirting the front mudguard,
Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the 'spud'
of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,
The pedal treads hanging relieved
Of the boot of the law.

If the last two lines here had been

The pedal treads hanging
relieved of the boot of the law.

then 'hanging' would have made an effective pause-point at the end of the line and the reader would have had the experience of hanging in suspense before the pause, wondering what comes next. What would come next in this revised version is a full, sonorous and weighty phrase in a strongly marked rhythm, 'relieved of the boot of the law' and not the truncated and ineffective 'Of the boot of the law.' This is a line with insufficient scale, which I explain in the next section. In his poetry, lines beginning with 'of' are usually meagre in scale.

In his essay, Christopher Ricks discusses the passage in Wordsworth's 'The Prelude' where the boy at Windermere imitates the owls (Book 5, lines 364 - 388, 1850 edition) and emphasizes the effectiveness of 'hung' at a line-ending :

...and, when a lengthened pause
Of silence came and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents...

'Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung

- and there is the silence before us, and he and we hang upon the brink of it. A dozen lines later, there is a literal counterpart which conveys its different sense of suspension:

Fair is the spot, most beautiful the vale
Where he was born; the grassy churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village school,'

And a little later in the essay, he quotes this

Oh! when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock'

I regard 'far into the heart' in the first lines of Wordsworth quoted here as an instance of {distance}.

Lines, scale and Aristotle's 'megethos'

Seamus Heaney often seems to vacate the line to move on to the next for no clear reasons. I think that in general, each line of a poem should generally have sufficient substance or weight, unless the line has {direction}, has structural importance as transitional. I'm well aware that many poets and readers of poetry would disagree with my view.

See my page on the aphorism form for an extended discussion of Aristotle's 'megethos' and of what I call scale. In the 'Poetics,' Aristotle wrote that 'Tragedy is an imitation of an action that ...possesses magnitude.' (Section 4.1) The word he uses for 'magnitude' is'megethos' and it expresses the need that the dramatic action should be imposing and not mean, not limited in extent. I use 'scale,' which is a wider term than 'megethos.' Scale is a term with less {restriction}. I use it in cases of excessive scale, as in some architecture, as well as in cases of insufficient scale. The application-sphere of scale is very varied. It includes single words and aphorisms, always concise, as well as large artistic works.

Seamus Heaney's lines often have the defect of insufficient scale. He uses short lines and very short lines very often. A short line may have sufficient substance and weight (I would claim this for the one word closing line of my poem Sailing from Belfast, at the time of the troubles.) Considering the linkage between a poem and a piece of structural engineering - of course, a poem is far more than a structure - then many Seamus Heaney poems are made up of very strong and sturdy beams and very weak and flimsy members.

Some poems are made up almost entirely of these weak and flimsy members and to that extent defective as examples of structural poetics. 'Bone Dreams' in 'North' is an example. Most of the lines are lacking in scale. Usually any line of Seamus Heaney's beginning with 'of' is lacking in scale, as here:

As dead as stone,

flint-find, nugget
of chalk,

and later

There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron

of generation
swung at the centre:

Using the concept of scale (or 'megethos') we can find uses other than significant continuity for the significant pause of stanza enjambment. If the last line of one stanza and the first line of the next stanza have great scale, as well as showing some degree of significant continuity, then {separation} allows for a kind of 'framing effect.' The lines are given greater, and deserved, prominence on account of the inter-stanza gap. This is the case, I think, with two very strong lines in 'Bogland' ('Door into the Dark.')

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

unfortunately followed by a poorer line with an ineffective abstraction,

Missing its last definition

For a very interesting and comprehensive book on framing, see 'The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork,' edited by Paul Duro, although this is almost entirely concerned with visual art.

His gifts in prose poetry and prose-poetry

In the form usually called 'prose poetry,' writing laid out on the page as prose but with poetic diction, Seamus Heaney is nothing special and generally dismal. There are slightly better pieces than 'England's Difficulty,' (in 'Stations') but none that excel, in any of his volumes. 'England's Difficulty,' which was resuscitated for its appearance in the 'New Selected Poems 1966 - 1987' has

'I moved like a double agent among the big concepts.'

'The word 'enemy' had the toothed efficiency of a mowing machine. It was a mechanical and distant noise beyond that opaque security, that autonomous ignorance.'

Here, 'toothed efficiency,' 'opaque security,' 'autonomous ignorance' read as if composed by a 'random phrase generator.'

Seamus Heaney's achievements are in a different form, which I call 'prose-poetry,' poetry printed as poetry in the published volumes which isn't truly poetry. Setting the lines out as prose makes this clear. This is a classic test, quite often mentioned, which deserves a name. I call it 'The Line Removal Test.' This is the removal of the lines specified by the poet. There are lines left, of course, but only the lines whose length depends upon the compositor, not the poet. There are difficulties in applying The Line Removal Test, but as a preliminary approach to a poem, it has its uses, I think.

Seamus Heaney is usually determined to make it clear that in his published works we are supposed to be reading poetry, not prose. He usually capitalizes the first letter of each new line, but he's not consistent in his use of capitalization, for no obvious reason. In 'Death of a Naturalist,' all the poems have capitalization except for 'Churning Day,' 'Cow in Calf,' 'Trout' and Synge on Aran. In later volumes, most poems have capitalization. I see no need for it at all. As the beginning of a new line is unambiguous, capitalization is unnecessary.

I think that very often, Seamus Heaney's 'poetry' doesn't survive The Line Removal Test. It's prose written as poetry, its claim to be poetry dependent above all on poetic diction and sometimes rhyme. I think that anyone with access to his books of poetry and sufficient time could verify this quite easily. Here, I simply give a very few examples, after line removal.

(1) 'Blackberry picking,' from 'Death of a Naturalist.'

'We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, a rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking, too. Once off the bush the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.'

(2) Section IV of 'Bone Dreams' from 'North.'

'Come back past philology and kennings, re-enter memory where the bone's lair is a love-nest in the grass. I hold my lady's head like a crystal and ossify myself by gazing: I am screes on her escarpments, a chalk giant carved upon her downs. Soon my hands, on the sunken fosse of her spine move towards the passes.'

(3) 'A Daylight Art,' from 'The Haw Lantern.'

'On the day he was to take the poison Socrates told his friends he had been writing: putting Aesop's fables into verse. And this was not because Socrates loved wisdom and advocated the examined life. The reason was that he had had a dream.'

I don't classify as prose-poetry all those poems and passages in his work where expression is laboured or inert and feeling as a result seems laboured or inert, with not a trace of poetic intensity. After all, prose can approach the intensity of poetry. Instead, I refer to these poems and passages as non-expressive. Some prose-poems are genuinely expressive.

His effective rhythms and contrasts of tempo

As for effective rhythms, there are not very many worth mentioning. In most of his work, there's a plodding and hardly ever a personal rhythm. The accomplished diction, particularly, but not exclusively, in the earlier work, has deflected attention from his rhythmical inertness. On the page metre I discuss my general approach. Amongst the illustrative examples, there's a short discussion of the opening of Seamus Heaney's 'Exposure.' This opening isn't remarkable, but in terms of metre it's superior to much of his work.

An extract from my page which discusses individual poems:

'Seamus Heaney's lack of rhythmic sense and his deficiencies in metre are a liability in much of his poetry, or at least they diminish the impact of the poetry. These deficiencies are very significant, since metre is what distinguishes poetry from prose, to a greater extent than diction, in which he has enormous strengths, together with significant weaknesses. 'Digging' begins, though, with two lines with genuine rhythm, except that the effect is undermined:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

'The first line sticks out like a sore thumb. It's undermined by 'my' before 'thumb,' which gives three unstressed syllables in a row, shown here as faint print. This second instance of 'my' is superfluous for the meaning of the line and blunts the impact of the metre. This is metre and meaning not integrated but going their own way. The light and tripping unstressed syllables go on almost to the end of the line. They would be appropriate if the line concerned something held lightly, which could easily be dropped, but the secure hold requires a strong and secure rhythm, one without any unnecessary unstressed syllables. The firm hold on the pen has already been established by the meaning of the first line but not its metre. The strong second line, separated from the fragility of the first line by the pause of the line ending, comes as a jarring and pointless contrast with the first line. Seamus Heaney is hopeless as a reviser of his work. Simply cutting out the second 'my' would have given a far more effective line, rhythmically far stronger:

Between my finger and thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

'The light syllables before 'finger' and within 'finger' too (the strong stress of the first syllable of 'finger' is only relatively strong. It isn't as strong as the strong stress on 'thumb') would have given an effective contrast of meaning as well as metre: a finger isn't as broad or as sturdy as a thumb.'

It's important to examine cross-linkages as well as the most obvious linkages. The linkages between the rhythm of a line of poetry and the rhythm of some bars of music are obvious linkages. The linkage between the rhythm of a line of poetry and some harmonic aspects of the music is a cross-linkage, specifically, a cadence or cadences which give resolution, a satisfying {completion}. (Compare the comment that the adagio molto introduction of Beethoven's First Symphony presents harmonic tensions which achieve resolution with the beginning of the allegro con brio.) This meaning is different from 'resolution' used as the name of a {theme}, {resolution}.

In the lines

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

the resolution comes too late, in the second line, after the line boundary, rather than in the first line: with the partial resolution, 'The squat pen rests;' and the full resolution, 'snug as a gun.' If 'unresolved' material is what resolution resolves, and there are degrees in 'unresolved' - there surely are, so that 'largely unresolved' would be more accurate - then these degrees are increased in the first line. These degrees as well as the delay in resolving are open to objection. Since the meaning of the first line is clear, resolution should be established by the end of the first line. It's essential that the snugness of fit of the pen between finger and thumb in the first line should be established if the snugness of fit between gun and hand in the second line (or gun and shoulder: again, the ambiguity is artistically poor) is to have full impact as a simile.

It's completely unnecessary to give a full analysis of Seamus Heaney's failures in effective metre, but as his poetry became in general more routine, more 'Parnassian,' his metrical skills didn't degenerate. They actually improved, in a few places. By the time of the almost completely Parnassian book 'The Spirit Level' his use of metre was quite tight and taut in some places, such as 'Flight Path' and 'Mycenae Lookout.'

Discussion of rhythm, the acknowledgement of rhythm, are absent again and again in criticism of contemporary poetry. In {theme} theory, rhythm is absent from the ((survey)). Earlier, I criticized Richard D. Cureton for his grotesque comments on Helen Vendler but in the same essay, published in 'Versification: an interdisciplinary journal of literary prosody' Vol. 1, No. 1, his comments on the importance of rhythm in lyric poetry seem to come from a different compartment of the mind altogether. This is exemplary by comparison: 'Most detailed studies of poetry pay little attention to rhythm, and when it is attended to, it is often discussed as merely a handmaiden to meaning and dramatic situation [though 'dramatic situation' isn't the aptest of phrases, in a section entitled 'Lyric poetry and the New Criticism] ... Contrary to what theorists such as Frye would claim, rhythm in the lyric is usually considered to be an "external architecture," a kind of frame/container for the real business of the genre: meaning, reference, semantic nuance, dramatic situation, etc.'

As for contrasts of tempo, Seamus Heaney gives an almost unvarying, all-purpose approximation to forward momentum. The welcome exceptions, short though they are, include 'taps a little tune,' a rare accelerando in his prose-poetry (after Line Removal):

'But now I stand behind him in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers. He puts a hand in a pocket or taps a little tune with the blackthorn shyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a stranger's moaning.' ('The Other Side' III, 'Wintering Out.')

There are innumerable examples in poetry of tempo handled with incomparably greater variety and skill than in the poetry of Seamus Heaney,and even more examples in music. Consider this discussion, for example, of a tempo which distantly approximates to the steady stroll of a characteristic S.H. poem but at an incomparably higher artistic level. It comes from Donald Francis Tovey's analysis of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata for piano, Op. 53: after a comment on Bars 10 - 16, which 'will give the tempo of this wonderful movement which crowds into its 28 bars the profoundest harmonies of the whole sonata,' the comment on bar 21, 'In the bass arpeggios we begin to feel that the music strains at the leash of the slow tempo ... now there is a danger of stiffness. It would be better to put up with stiffness than to hurry.' This is preparatory to the beginning of the wonderful rondo, marked allegretto moderato. 'Allegretto indicates a moderate tempo, and moderato intensifies the warning; very necessarily, for this movement is often played in public far too fast. Players who are bored by its breadth and who wish to speed up its climaxes should leave Beethoven alone.'

These are a few of the subtleties possible in music without dramatically varied tempo changes, without even considering the extremes of tempo and the subtleties which Beethoven and other composers achieved in these extremes of tempo, as in this sonata, which ends with a prestissimo passage, or the extreme of slowness in the second movement of Beethoven's Trio Op. 70 No. 1.

The human voice, in such forms as song and opera, is incapable of matching this range of instrumental music, in particular the tempo of 'prestissimo.' The human voice, speaking or reading poetry, likewise. Poetry is confined to the middle and slower range of tempos, although not the slowest. But this still leaves a great range of possibilities, possibilities which Seamus Heaney has left almost entirely unexplored. His general failure to achieve rapidity is particularly noticeable. I never feel that the poetry is 'straining at the leash,' that the poet is technically able to give a more rapid tempo and will give a more rapid tempo, but that this is deferred, to produce tension of artistic value which will be released when the contrast of tempo comes.

If Seamus Heaney's poetry often suggests a dog being taken for a walk on a leash, Beethoven's music often suggests, not straining at the leash, but Dionysian outbursts, sustained outbursts, all the more thrilling for being sustained, as in the long development section of his Eighth Symphony - this in a Symphony 'written in a mood of relaxation after the immense triumph of the Seventh.' 'With grand modulations this continues for what is surely the longest sustained ff in any classic, matched only by Brahms in his double concerto ...' (Basil Lam, 'Ludwig van Beethoven' in 'The Symphony Vol. 1.')

Basil Lam writes well about the Seventh Symphony too, and the overwhelming, heaven-storming momentum of its last movement. He points out (without using the term) that the driving rhythm of this last movement uses a dactylic rhythm. Seamus Heaney's weakness in metre has a close linkage with his weakness in tempo. He's unable to write a sustained series of dactyls or any other metrical units, and so he's generally unable to produce any sustained generation of tension, thrilling momentum, any suggestion of a wild animal with heightened senses, rather than a dog on its leash.

Stanley Sadie writes of Mozart's 40th Symphony in G minor: 'The G minor symphony may be an outburst, but only within well understood limits ... it seems that his musical language, so much more complex than anyone else's at that time, texturally and harmonically, was widely found bewildering in such works as this, or Don Giovanni, [although this was appreciated very much in Prague] or some of the late chamber music. Indeed, the next generation too failed to come to terms with these works, since from Beethoven's time onwards the expression of strong emotion took forms altogether more overt and more violent.'

Seamus Heaney's metre is usually closer to random than controlled: useless for achieving either power or subtlety, or the union of the two. Artistic control has, of course, wider application-spheres than metre. David Cairns writes of Don Giovanni, in 'Mozart and his Operas,' that 'No other opera equals its sense of headlong momentum, of moving in a single continuous impulse from first note to last.'

Painting can give the illusion of movement, just as it can give the illusion of spatial depth by means of perspective. In the same way, artistic forms subject to time, such as music and poetry, can give the illusion of stillness. In music, this demands the use of forms other than sonata form or counterpoint, which are inescapably dynamic, such as variation form. Beethoven achieves this stillness in the second movement of the piano sonata Op. 111, after the energy and forward momentum of the first movement. In the second movement, Beethoven seems to reduce movement and at one point almost eliminates it. (See the analysis in 'The Piano Music - II,' Philip Barford, 'The Beethoven Companion.' Seamus Heaney is able to achieve a degree of stillness. In 'Sunlight,' the first poem of 'Mossbawn,' ('North') he achieves remarkable effects, all the more remarable in that the stillness, an almost contemplative stillness, emerges from a poem about someone who is busy.

Warwickshire and County Derry

Seamus Heaney grew up in rural County Derry. Shakespeare grew up in Warwickshire, in a place far more rural than urban, by modern standards. Elizabethan Warwickshire had, of course, communications with the wider world far less well developed than those of twentieth century County Derry. The curiosity, adventurousness and restless intelligence of Shakespeare overcame these difficulties with ease. Shakespeare's world is incomparably wider than Seamus Heaney's, even though Seamus Heaney has been such a frequent Atlantic traveller and Shakespeare never left this island. To give only a few, very well known examples, the setting of Hamlet in Denmark, Twelfth Night in Illyria, The Merchant of Venice in - Venice - and the fact that in The Winter's Tale, Leontes is the King of Sicilia and Polixenes is the King of Bohemia, that in The Tempest, Alonso is the King of Naples.

Shakespeare wasn't content to give an indelible portrait of rural Warwickshire, as Heaney in his earlier books was content, on the whole, to give an indelible portrait of rural Ireland, with a few perfunctory foreign visits, such as the visit described in 'Night Drive' in 'Door into the Dark:'

The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France:
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name's fulfilment.

And so on.

Seamus Heaney's Northern Ireland is a severely restricted interpretation of this small province, for one thing a generally land-locked interpretation. Nowhere in Northern Ireland is far from the sea. Much of Northern Ireland's coastline is magnificent.. A poor poem, 'Wolfe Tone' ('The Haw Lantern') has a rare mention of the sea:

men in their shirts mounting through deep water
when the Atlantic stove our cabin's dead lights in

and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled
as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

To return to Shakespeare, although Warwickshire, unlike County Derry, has no coastline, Shakespeare was evidently fascinated by the sea. There's the shipwreck at the beginning of Twelfth Night and the setting of the beginning of The Tempest on a ship at sea. (For the seamanship of Act I, Scene 1 of The Tempest, see A F Falconer, 'Shakespeare and the Sea.')

Shakespeare, unlike Seamus Heaney, could face the destructiveness, changeableness and unpredictability of the sea, which is almost entirely beyond human control.

The sectarian divide and religion

Seamus Heaney was never a particularly independent-minded poet, has never been an untameable and uncompromising poet. He wasn't the kind who transcended the sectarian divide and defied anyone who tried to categorize him. A working class upbringing in a mining area in the Midlands was formative for D H Lawrence, but he didn't declare his allegiance to it, as Seamus Heaney has done, with minor reservations. Seamus Heaney has been far too timid. Like an English person who doesn't go to Church or believe in God but puts down 'Church of England' when asked to declare religion on an official form, he takes the conventional and feeble line of least resistance. The first and last verse paragraphs from the first section of 'Out of This World,' in the fairly recent 'District and Circle:'

'Like everybody else, I bowed my head
during the consecration of the bread and wine,
lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice,
believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred.

The loss occurred off-stage. And yet I cannot
disavow words like "thanksgiving" or "host"
or "communion bread". They have an undying
tremor and draw, like well water far down.'

The Catholic belief alluded to in the first verse paragraph is that during the consecration, the bread becomes literally, not metaphorically, the body and blood of Christ. 'The loss' is the loss of faith. Vague and routine allusions to deep well water may satisfy the poet, but he either believes in transubstantiation or not. Probably not, but this partial loss of faith is completely humdrum, and expressed in humdrum form: 'And yet I cannot disavow words like...'

Archaism

Seamus Heaney's use of archaisms is a study in itself. 'Funeral Rites' in 'North' slips into this mode easily, from funerals and brief mention of terrorist murders to the safe world of remote history. Of Gunnar:

Men said that he was chanting
verses about honour

It's as if all the intellectual ferment which has challenged faith has passed him by, as if Nietzsche and Darwin had never been. The outward forms of traditional Catholicism, with a modicum of inner significance, are frequent in his books, but so also are classical allusions which have no more life left in them, for the purposes of contemporary poetry, at least. Christianity, as in the authorized version of the Bible and the Catholic missal, and Greek and Latin learning, were often pursued together in past centuries, but always made a heterogeneous pair. Seamus Heaney continues this curious tradition. Some examples of the classical tradition in his poetry. Here, 'libations,' surely, can have no contemporary resonance: From 'A New Song,' 'Wintering Out.'

A smooth libation of the past
Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

This comes immediately after the wonderful

Vanished music, twilit water -

in which the associations of 'lit' are in beautiful tension with the crepuscular associations of 'twilit,' the word of which 'lit' is a part.

'At a Potato Digging' in 'Death of a Naturalist' has as its closing lines

Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.

'Bye-Child,' again in 'Wintering Out' has

Vigils, solitudes, fasts,
unchristened tears,

Knowledge and learning

These can easily be a disadvantage rather than an advantage. A critic who knows about 'libations,' mentioned in the previous section, may be more likely to approve of Seamus Heaney's references to libations in his poetry. But the poetic effectiveness of 'libations' in contemporary poetry is very much in doubt.

'From the Canton of Expectation' ('The Haw Lantern') begins with the line,

We lived deep in a land of optative moods,

I'm familiar with the grammatical category of 'mood,' which expresses the kind or degree of reality associated with an assertion. It's not well developed in English, and there's no 'optative mood' in English at all, despite this line. Helen Vendler shares the misconception. She writes about 'the speaker, realizing the weakness of the old optatives, yet disliking the new imperatives,' (which are obviously not in the least 'new') and the 'nationalist exhausted optatives.' The grammatical category of mood is well developed in classical Greek, which has an optative mood. (I discuss one use in Thucydides' 'History of the Peloponnesian War,' iii, 22, in connection with {distance}.) Quite apart from the lack of an optative in English, I don't allow the fact that I understand the allusion, like the classical allusion of 'libations,' to influence my estimate of the poetic success of this line - non-existent, I think.

I don't deal with his prose here or on other pages, except incidentally. This sometimes seems the work of two very different writers. The less accomplished and more pretentious of the two can perpetrate this kind of sentence, from 'The Redress of Poetry:' 'And yet, limber and absolved as linguistic inventiveness may seem in poetry, it is not disjunct from or ever entirely manumitted by the critical intelligence.' 'Manumitted,' meaning 'freed from slavery' or 'emancipated' should have been cut out, before cutting out the whole sentence. In his poetry, his own 'linguistic inventiveness' shows every sign of being 'disjunct from' his 'critical intelligence,' and is vastly more impressive.

See also my discussion of allusions in the page where I review the 'Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney.'

A poem which gives many opportunities for interpretation of its allusions is not in the least more likely to be a stronger poem than one which offers fewer opportunities. Poems which give many opportunities to the analyst likewise. Analysis can be carried out in separation from critical evaluation - often, people who are strong in one of these are not nearly so strong in the other - but eventually, critical evaluation has to take over.

Nicholas Cook's 'A Guide to Musical Analysis' impresses me very much, but at all times, a reader has to be aware that this is a book concerned with analysis, not critical evaluation. One of his questions is, 'How unified is the material presented in the exposition? Are there obvious contrasts of thematic and non-thematic materials? Are the themes strongly contrasted with one another?' These questions aren't well designed for detecting the magisterial accomplishment of a monothematic movement such as the fourth movement of Haydn's 103rd Symphony ('The Drum Roll') but seem suited to discussing a work he does analyze, Beethoven's Quartet Op. 18 No. 2, which he does discuss - the weakest, but only comparatively weakest, of the Op. 18 set, along with Op. 18 No. 3.

The limitations of affability

To begin with some comments about Seamus Heaney's characterization in connection with his poem Wolfe Tone. I give an extract as well as a link to the page:

Early readers of Seamus Heaney's earliest books probably felt uneasy, some of them at least, about his treatment of people. In 'The Forge,' the blacksmith 'leather-aproned, hairs in his nose' 'expends himself in shape and music.' This is less vivid than

The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

and less vivid than the description of his father in 'Follower.'

He added before very long some tender and homely portraits, but as it became clearer that he wanted to become a poet of immense stature, his significant disadvantages became clearer. Was his mind, or poetic technique, adequate in the least for portraying the realities which disfigured the twentieth century. Could Seamus Heaney ever have portrayed a Stalin, for instance? It would have required far more than Stalin 'expending' himself as he opposed the Germans at Stalingrad and organized the Ukrainian famine or the terror. It would have required far more than a vivid description of Stalin's facial hair.

It's clear from his later work as well as his early work that there are vast areas of human experience which lie far beyond the reach of his poetry. Martin Seymour-Smith comments on Tom Stoppard's play 'Travesties,' 'this farce suddenly collapses when it has to deal with the personality of Lenin - Stoppard cannot deal with such people ...'

These comments only touch upon Seamus Heaney's weaknesses. He can describe, or at least mention, violent events, such as the man 'blown to bits / Out drinking in a curfew / Others obeyed, three nights / After they shot dead / The thirteen men in Derry.' But he lacks the resources, personal and technical, to convey the interminable and bitter futility with which fanatics, opposed by other fanatics as well as well-meaning people and courageous people, attempted to bomb into a united Ireland people resolutely opposed to joining a united Ireland, the likelihood of their eventual failure, their actual failure, the spilling of so much blood for no gain at all - reminiscent of equally futile but far more violent conflicts in history - which again, he would have lacked the resources to convey.

In his prose writings, he's able to adopt the pose of a poetic statesman, commenting on such matters as 'the government of the tongue' - at a safe distance from the trivialization of life, the moronic ways of acting, talking and thinking, which don't seem to disturb very much his composure.

His adopted home, America, has so many examples of grossness that would concern, enrage a more sensitive and a more critical person, some of them shared with Europe, some of them given to Europe, some of them dividing it from present-day Europe - for example, executions. Early in the new millennium, the state of Virginia executed some juvenile offenders. Practically no other countries were still executing those aged under 18 at the time. Recently, Tennessee executed someone who had been on death row for 29 years. Seamus Heaney's ethical sense has never recoiled from such acts, or if it has, he's been very quiet about it. See also my page on the death penalty and the section admiration in which I praise some writers who have spoken or acted differently.

Missing from Seamus Heaney are responses which go well beyond simple-minded affability - which should be valued but which isn't nearly enough. Much deeper feeling, much deeper reserves of justified anger, dismay - contempt - should also have modified his safe and traditional techniques, made his syntax less tame and his diction - so extensive, but not extensive enough - abrasive as well as vivid.

Conclusion

Helen Vendler writes that 'The terms of reproof against Heaney have been almost entirely thematic.' For example, the political journalists who 'argue that though he overtly deplores violence, in fact his poetry covertly supports Republican attitudes.' I agree with Helen Vendler in her view that these thematic arguments about poetry, as she calls them, are 'beside the point. Lyric poetry neither stands nor falls on its themes.' She continues, 'it stands or falls on the accuracy of language with which it reports the author's emotional responses to the life around him.'

My own objections to his poetry aren't thematic, in the sense used by Helen Vendler.

It will be clear enough what my objections to his poetry are. They include carelessness and sometimes incompetence in the techniques which a good or great poet should be expected to use well (since poetry, although to a lesser extent, has, like musical composition, techniques) and in restricted emotional range, restricted vision, restricted interests: a mainly tame and ultimately uninteresting poet, despite his enormous strengths. His poetry generally 'falls on the accuracy of language with which it reports the author's emotional responses to the life around him.'

Seamus Heaney has fame and prominence. These can make it difficult to detect the most glaring weaknesses for some people, including some critics. In some quarters, there's almost a 'cult of veneration' for Seamus Heaney, as if he's granted exemption. Similarly, Harvard University has such prestige that the work of Helen Vendler, of Harvard University, may be granted exemption too, exemption from criticism. No matter what the prestige of Harvard University, Helen Vendler's book on Seamus Heaney is very inadequate.

As for Seamus Heaney, he can even gain from a more dispassionate approach. Reliance on fame and prominence would probably place Seamus Heaney lower than Shelley and W H Auden. I'd say that Seamus Heaney is superior to Shelley and W H Auden (and superior to Ted Hughes, although not to Philip Larkin), a limited poet with outstanding gifts.

In 'The Public v. the late Mr William Butler Yeats,' (Partisan Review vol. 6, no. 3) W H Auden argued the case against the poetry of Yeats and the case in favour. In this page, and the page 'Criticism of The Grauballe Man and other poems' I argue the case against the poetry of Seamus Heaney but the case in favour as well. My appreciation for his poetic achievement isn't in question, I hope. . It's inferior to the poetry of Yeats, a far more substantial writer than W H Auden, but not in every way.

Seamus Heaney's strengths are obvious and magnificent and strengths in central, overwhelmingly important, areas of human experience. They obviously include the sensuous rendering of nature, the warm emotional rendering, in a few places, of a good marriage, warm renderings in a few places of friendships and meetings with people. But a fuller survey of human life shows his limitations, personal limitations as well as poetic limitations.

The distortions of Irish History

Introduction - isolationist history
The troubles
The Second World War
1916
The Great Famine
The rebellion of 1798, the Vendée and Napoleon
The earlier period

Introduction - isolationist history

A great deal of the commentary on Seamus Heaney has made use of isolationist interpretations of Irish history - ones which isolate the history of Ireland (regarded as the oppressed) and England (regarded as the oppressor) and neglect wider European history and world history. The perspectives which emerge by taking a viewpoint with far less {restriction} are dramatically different. For example, the struggle between the Republic and the Catholic rebels of the Vendée in France in 1793 and 1794 (according to the most reliable estimates, between 220 000 and 250 000 men, women and children were killed) gives a harrowing perspective on the rebellion of the Croppies in Ireland in 1798. These historical perspectives can transform understanding of some of the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

I don't wish to give the impression that I consider English history and attitudes to be beyond criticism. This is far from being the case. 'The distortions of English history' would be another instructive theme.

The troubles

Andrew Waterman writes (in 'Ulsterectomy') of 'the supposition of Ulstermen generally, too readily pandered to by the English, that bombs and bullets here make life somehow more real than in, say, Islington where people are taken to concern themselves with carpet-patterns or handing on to their trends for dear life. Or, 'The dear knows, it's all a terrible madness going on' - but kind of glamorous one is invited to agree.' This was at the time when the troubles in Northern Ireland were claiming many victims.

I comment on two poems of Seamus Heaney which deal with one aspect of life during the troubles on the page which gives analysis of The Toome Road and From the Frontier of Writing. I claim there that new experiences of terrorism make it necessary to examine these poems very sceptically now. I don't discuss the Troubles in this section because in general knowledge of them is greater than of the other periods which I do discuss.

Although I think he distorts in these poems, in general he's far from being a nationalist propagandist. He's made it clear, though, that he identifies with the nationalist view, and he's never disassociated himself from the nationalist view of history, a view which is sometimes severely restricted and distorted. There's a distorted view of significant events. Of course, the Troubles loom large in this view, as do the events of the Easter Rebellion and the other events which led to the creation of the Irish Free State, and the events of the Irish Famine. The nationalist view isn't severely restricted and distorted because these were unimportant events, but because the emphasis upon them is linked with the tendency to neglect other events on the world stage.

The Second World War

The most important single omission is The Second World War - not, obviously, a minor one. Nationalists often give the impression that nobody has suffered like the Irish, nobody has exploited others like the English. But in a conflict which was more devastating than any other in history, which inflicted suffering on a greater scale than any other, the English, and the other countries of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, a constituent part of the United Kingdom, carried on the war against Hitler alone, for a time, with exiled groups from many countries and volunteers from many countries, including volunteers from the Irish Republic, who served in large numbers. Irish nationalism and the Irish Free State stood aside and did nothing. The IRA actively sought help from the Germans. During The Second World War, the Irish Free State was neutral. After the death of Hitler, condolences were offered from only two sources, Portugal and the government of The Irish Republic.

'The Cruel Sea' is a popular novel by Nicholas Monsarrat.' The factual claims here are confirmed by Brian Girvin in his scholarly 'The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939 - 1945).'

'...it was difficult to withhold one's contempt from a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil. The fact that Ireland was standing aside from the conflict at this moment posed, from the naval angle, special problems which affected, sometimes mortally, all sailors engaged in the Atlantic, and earned their particular loathing.

'Irish neutrality, on which she placed a generous interpretation, permitted the Germans to maintain in Dublin an espionage-centre, a window into Britain, which operated throughout the war and did incalculable harm to the Allied cause. But from the naval point of view there was an even more deadly factor: this was the loss of the naval bases in southern and western Ireland, which had been available to the Royal Navy during the first world war but were now forbidden them. To compute how many men and how many ships this denial was costing, month after month, was hardly possible; but the total was substantial and tragic.

'From a narrow legal angle, Ireland was within her rights: she had opted for neutrality, and the rest of the story flowed from this decision. She was in fact at liberty to stand aside from the struggle, whatever harm this did to the Allied cause. But sailors, watching the ships go down and counting the number of their friends who might have been alive instead of dead, saw the thing in simpler terms. They saw Ireland safe under the British umbrella, fed by her convoys, and protected by her air force, her very neutrality guaranteed by the British armed forces: they saw no return for this protection save a condoned sabotage of the Allied war effort: and they were angry - permanently angry. As they sailed past this smug coastline, past people who did not give a damn how the war went as long as they could live on in their fairy-tale world, they had time to ponder a new aspect of indecency. In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.'

Brian Girvin writes, 'Eire did remarkably little to ensure that Germany did not win the war. The government acted in public as if it did not care who won and hinted at times that there was no real difference between the two sides. Yet Germany was a continuing threat to Irish sovereignty. Hitler was contemptuous of neutrality in general and if the Nazis had won the war, the likelihood of any neutral state remaining independent seems very low indeed.'

There's an implicit claim in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, as in the nationalist ideology, to occupation of the moral high ground. Far too often, commentators on the poetry have accepted this claim. Like Vichy France, but not to nearly the same extent, nationalism showed moral failure in confronting the worst challenge of all. The challenge that many nationalists still prefer to address is completely different in scale and kind: the prejudices of Northern Irish unionism, prejudices which made it less likely for a Catholic to find a job, not the Nazi prejudices which made it overwhelmingly unlikely that the victim of prejudice would escape death, the occasional excesses of the British Army (which generally acted with restraint, given the dangers it faced), such as the shooting of 'the thirteen men in Derry' on Bloody Sunday, not the killing by the Nazis of 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, by shooting, explosion and burning alive, or the killing of countless other civilians.

Irish nationalists often show a gross failure of {adjustment}, a failure to take account of changed moral realities.

The bleakness and harshness of the Troubles were compounded by the fact that the Troubles went on for a very long time, longer than The Thirty Years War, although vastly less devastating. There are still sporadic incidents, intensely painful for those caught up in them. But some Irish people have succeeded in persuading others that the Troubles were almost uniquely bleak and harsh. Anyone who knows just a little about The Thirty Years War, The Spanish Civil War, The Second World War in the East (Stalingrad and other campaigns), The Second World War in the West, the war against Japan on the Pacific islands, the Second World War in all its areas, the First World War - the Somme, Passchendaele and the rest - realizes that with its just over three thousand dead, the Troubles were not the greatest calamity of the twentieth century or previous centuries. The bombing during the British Blitz, the bombing at Guernica, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hamburg and other places, was on a different scale. In the city where I live, Sheffield, over 600 people were killed in two nights of bombing. This is much higher than the total number of deaths in the peak year of the troubles for the whole of Northern Ireland, with three times the population. See: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Sheffield_Blitz

I think that Seamus Heaney mentions the Second World War only once in his poetry, in part 1 of 'To a Dutch potter in Ireland,' dedicated to Sonja Landweer, who was in the occupied Netherlands during the Second World War - and this is 'from the Dutch of J C Bloem.' It was a mistake to use this Dutch poem as a starting point. The 'mention' of the war is a bare mention. The poem could have mentioned the terrors of everyday life in that place, at that time, the executions, the reprisals, and of course the deportations to the extermination camps. There's mention of only one aspect of the war, this:

Night after night instead, in the Netherlands,
You watched the bombers kill ...

This is unnecessarily obscure. The allusion could and should have been expressed more plainly, 'the bombers' identified. For the Dutch, there was an absolute difference between the two, representing the difference between death and hopes of survival and hopes of liberation. The German bombers were the ones that bombed Rotterdam in May 1940, killing 800 people. The death toll would have been far higher but for the fact that much of the population had already fled the centre for safety. The British bombers were the ones which dropped food to the starving Dutch during 'Operation Manna' near the end of the war.

1916

Although I think Seamus Heaney retained uncritically some of the nationalist distortions of history, this isn't an objection to his poetry. The chief responsibility of a poet isn't to give a scrupulous, comprehensive and well-argued survey of history. The 1916 uprising is instructive. In 'Outcasts from Eden,' Edward Picot has interesting comments:

'...like the 1798 rebellion, the 1916 uprising itself has become so thoroughly mythologized and impregnated with symbolic meaning that it seems almost impossible to cut away the layers of heroic glamour and see it in more dispassionate, objective terms.

'Recent Irish historians have begun a much-needed demythologizing process: here is David Fitzpatrick, in the Oxford History of Ireland [quoting from the longer extract provided by Edward Picot]:

"Joseph Mary Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh, like Pearse, revelled in the vulgar wartime lie that the shedding of blood was 'a cleansing and sanctifying thing'...The main victims of the 'proclamation of the Irish Republic' were...unarmed civilians, whose suffering was compounded by the wreckage of central Dublin..."

'Fitzpatrick argues that only after the English Government obliged the rebels by over-reacting to the uprising, were the ringleaders gradually transfigured into folk-heroes:

"...a sentimental cult of veneration for the martyrs developed outside as after previous failed uprisings."

'The 'sentimental cult' which came to surround the 1916 uprising certainly owed a great deal to the work of W. B. Yeats; and there can be little doubt that Heaney is following in the same tradition by making his own contribution to the 'sentimental cult' of 1798.' (See also my comments on his poem Requiem for the Croppies.

But I think that W. H. Auden was completely correct in 'attempting to account for the fact that a better poem had been written about a small Irish uprising in 1916 than any about the whole of World War II.' (Daniel Albright, the editor of 'W. B. Yeats: The Poems.')

The Great Famine

The Great Famine is heartbreaking, like so much else in Irish history - and the history of other countries - and I hope that nobody will take my discussion here - or anywhere else - to be heartless. The discussion follows two poems of mine on the famine which will be reminders, I hope, that analytical discussion isn't the only approach to this or other historical tragedies.

Irish famine: Doo Lough

By the waters of Doo Lough we lay down and slept,

and all our prayers were answered at once,

Mary, Mother of God, be thanked -

for an end to the sleet,

the intolerable sleet,

an end to the hunger

that gnawed our bones,

the intolerable hunger,

an end to our lives,

their intolerable lives.

On 30 March, 1849, hundreds of starving people applied for famine relief in Louisburgh, County Mayo. They were ordered to report to the Westport Poor Law Union at Delphi, ten miles to the south, at 7 a.m. the next day. They walked through the night, in rain, sleet and snow. They were refused famine relief and began the walk back. By Doo Lough, an unknown number died. An annual famine walk from Louisburgh to Doo Lough commemorates the event. The first line of the poem recalls the first line of Psalm 137, 'By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept ...'

This poem is intended for performance, the lines spoken by a single person except for the lines in italics, which are spoken by a number of people, perhaps members of the audience. This recalls the words of the priest and the responses of the congregation.

Irish famine: P. infestans

The trees were barely white.

The sky was largely grey.

The stored potatoes turned black.

That winter, all the family starved.

The children were buried in potato sacks.

P. infestans (Phytophthora infestans) is the scientific name for the fungus which causes potato blight.

The poem can be performed too, each line spoken by a different person.

The next extended quotation, on agriculture, industry and famine, is taken from my page on Feminism. (The page has an extended section on 'the material conditions of life' which is relevant as well.) Britain's response to The Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century was worse than inadequate, but Britain had this to its credit. It was the place where The Industrial Revolution began, where so many of the inventions and innovations which transformed life were devised, the place where for a long period of time The Industrial Revolution was most vigorous by far. There wasn't one famine in history, of course, which dwarfed all other famines, this period of famine in Ireland. By then, there had been famines in every country in the world, very often less severe, sometimes more severe. It was The Industrial Revolution which ended the threat of famine in industrialised countries. When Ireland eventually became an industrialised country itself, it was with British help.

'On the back cover of Peter Mathias's 'The First Industrial Nation:' 'The fate of the overwhelming mass of the population in any pre-industrial society is to pass their lives on the margins of subsistence. It was only in the eighteenth century that society in north-west Europe, particularly in England, began the break with all former traditions of economic life.'

'In the 'Prologue,' this is elaborated: 'The elemental truth must be stressed that the characteristic of any country before its industrial revolution and modernization is poverty. Life on the margin of subsistence is an inevitable condition for the masses of any nation. Doubtless there will be a ruling class, based on the economic surplus produced from the land or trade and office, often living in extreme luxury. There may well be magnificent cultural monuments and very wealthy religious institutions. But with low productivity, low output per head, in traditional agriculture, any economy which has agriculture as the main constituent of its national income and its working force does not produce much of a surplus above the immediate requirements of consumption from its economic system as a whole ... The population as a whole, whether of medieval or seventeenth-century England, or nineteenth-century India, lives close to the tyranny of nature under the threat of harvest failure or disease ... The graphs which show high real wages and good purchasing power of wages in some periods tend to reflect conditions in the aftermath of plague and endemic disease.'

'Larry Zuckerman, 'The Potato:' 'Famine struck France thirteen times in the sixteenth century, eleven in the seventeenth, and sixteen in the eighteenth. And this tally is an estimate, perhaps incomplete, and includes general outbreaks only. It doesn't count local famines that ravaged one area or another almost yearly.'

The rebellion of 1798, the Vendée, Napoleon

The rebellion of 1798 which ended in the defeat of the rebels at Vinegar Hill is the subject of Seamus Heaney's poem Requiem for the Croppies which I analyze and discuss in detail. The rebels themselves were far from blameless. They carried out atrocities before General Lake defeated them at Vinegar Hill. 'A group of at least 100 prisoners, overwhelmingly Protestant, and including women and children, was forced into a barn at Scullabogue, six miles east of New Ross, and burned alive. No one survived.' According to a survivor of the battle, 'about 95 Protestant hostages were taken out of prison on the day before the battle and stabbed to death by the pikemen on Wexford bridge.'

Desperate people don't, usually, have a wide choice of potential helpers, from the very enlightened to the very unenlightened. The rebels chose France. France was aggressive and militarist, if in a more high-minded way than than some other aggressive and militarist states have been. France declared war on Austria and Prussia in 1792 and on Britain and Holland in 1793. In his essay, 'Place and Displacetement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland,' Seamus Heaney writes, 'When England declared war on Revolutionary France, Wordsworth experienced a crisis of unanticiptated intensity ....' but this is incorrect. It was France that declared war on Britain, on 1 February 1793.

France was not only the enemy of Britain, it would also have been, in time, the enemy of Ireland. There's no indication at all that a victorious France would have been more enlightened in its relations to Ireland than Britain. The suffering that Napoleon brought to Europe was incalculable. Napoleon was an aggressive invader of other countries. Britain feared invasion by Napoleon and prepared against it. If Napoleon had not been defeated, it's very likely that he would have invaded Britain and that if he had been successful, he would have added Ireland to his list of conquests. The rebels of 1798 looked for help to France and the rebels of 1916 looked for help to Germany. Both appeals, for a Britain with survival at stake, amounted to treachery. All these considerations of international power politics are uncomfortable but inescapable.

The rebels were following the lead of a secret society, the United Irishmen. From 'Ireland's Holy Wars,' by Marcus Tanner: '... while radical Protestants were thick on the ground among the intellectual leaders of the United Irishmen, they were thinly represented at the other end ... The leaders might preach the secular nationalism of the French Revolution. The ordinary pikemen were motivated by an age-old hatred of Protestants of all classes ... the rebels called their prisoners 'heretics.' '

David A Bell, in his very impressive book 'The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare' has a chapter on the rebellion in the Vendée in 1793 - 1794. He mentions the killing in Southern France after the Protestant revolt of 1702 - 4 and in the Highlands of Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but he writes 'the Vendée, however, occupies a different dimension of horror.' It occupies a different dimension of horror from the rebellion of 1798 as well. In the Vendée, 'According te the most reliable estimates, from 220 000 to 250 000 men, women and children - over a quarter of the population of the insurgent region - lost their lives there in 193 - 94. The principal campaign against the Vendée's "Catholic and Royal" peasant armies, [Compare the predominantly Catholic, peasant armies of the Irish rebellion] which lasted from March to December of 1793, set a new European standard in atrocities. Then, at the start of 1794, the Republican general Louis-Marie Turreau sent twelve detachments of two to three thousand soldiers each marching across the territory in grid fashion, with orders to make it uninhabitable. These "hell columns" burned houses and woods, confiscated or destroyed stores of food, killed livestock, and engaged in large-scale rape, pillage, and slaughter. In some cases they killed only suspected rebels. In others, as at La Frocelière, they liquidated men, women and children indiscriminately, including "patriots" who had remained loyal to the Republic, on the grounds that no one still living in the Vendée could truly be loyal. In the port city of Nantes, the Republican authorities devised appalling new methods of mass murder to eliminate the "brigands" more efficiently and to reduce stress on the killers. Most hideously, they lashed thousands of prisoners into barges and lighters, which they then towed out into the Loire estuary and sank.'

'Writers favorable to the Revolution, meanwhile, while deploring "excesses," have insisted that horrors were committed on both sides and that the insurgents did, after all, side with France's enemies during wartime.' I'm not in the least an apologist for the Britain which quelled the Irish rebellion of 1798 but it's true that horrors were committed by both the British and the Irish and that Irish insurgents sided with Britain's enemy, France, during wartime. The France they sided with was the state which had perpetrated these atrocities.

The relevance of this to Ireland, not just the action taken against Roman Catholicism but the pikes and scythes of the peasants (compare Seamus Heaney's Requiem for the Croppies) will be obvious: 'In many of the more isolated areas, the Revolution's subjection of the Catholic Church to secular state authority cut deep into the tissue of communal life, with villages enraged at the dismissal of long-serving priests. In reaction, bubbles of anxiety and rage burst angrily on the surface of rural life. The most serious rioting took place after the fall of the monarchy in the fall of 1792, when crowds of peasants armed mainly with pikes and scythes occupied several towns in the region, leading to fighting that left up to a hundred dead.' The parallels extend too to the tactics of the rebels. 'Even after capturing several cannon, they rarely managed to stand in formal, pitched battles against the Republican forces. They preferred ambushes in the broken up and overgrown terrain and sudden, frenzied charges ...'

'What sustained them, above all, was religion. Witnesses described them marching in solemn silence, telling rosary beads, stopping for prayers, and crossing themselves before charging into combat. Priests accompanied them and before battles gave out remissions of punishments for sin.'

Like the croppies, the rebels in the Vendée committed atrocities themselves. 'Both sides routinely put captured enemy soldiers to death. Each side justified its conduct by reference to the other. The Irish rebels looked for help from France, the enemy of Britain. The French rebels looked for help from Britain, the enemy of France. They retreated towards the English channel, in 'a forlorn attempt ... to open a French port to the British navy, which had been seeking one since France and Britain had gone to war in the spring.'

'The remnants of the Catholic and Royal Army made a futile last stand near the village of Savenay, on December 23, and were annihilated.' This was the rebels' battle of Vinegar Hill. Westermans wrote to the authorities in Paris, 'I do not have a single prisoner with which to reproach myself.' But the killing of the rebels went on and on after the annihilation of the rebels' army.

English misrule In Ireland was a fact, but it's easy to forget - Seamus Heaney certainly finds it easy to forget - that enlightened rule was very scarce in the eighteenth century, as in other centuries.

In 'Irish Freedom: the History of Nationalism in Ireland,' Richard English writes, 'Much of the old orthodoxy regarding eighteenth-century Ireland has now been reconsidered in scholarly analysis: stark assumptions concerning the supposedly appalling oppression of Catholics, the antagonism between aristocracy and peasantry, the idea of English misrule as the cause of Irish economic problems, or even the colonial quality of the Irish-English relationship itself - all of these have been questioned to some degree.'

If the English had failed to defeat the rebels, historically almost impossible, and failed to defeat Napoleon, not at all impossible, if the rebels had set up a nationalist Roman Catholic state, it's historically probable that Napoleon, the secularist and enemy of such states, would have turned his attention to it and invaded. The armed forces of this new Irish state would have opposed him and been crushed.

'By 1812 France held effective sway over nearly the entire European continent, excluding the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Turkish empire. Most of the territory either fell under the direct rule of Paris or belonged to an ally or satellite state ... ' (David A Bell, 'The First Total War.') There were insurrections against French control between 1806 - 10 but it was in Spain that resistance to French control was greatest, where the fighting was most bitter, the atrocities the worst, the number of those killed the greatest. Goya illustrated some of the atrocities - the executions in Madrid in 1808 (Tres de Mayo) and the atrocities carried out by both sides in his etchings, 'The Disasters of War.' During the siege of Saragossa in 1808 the French bombarded the city with more than 40 000 explosive shells, the city still refused to surrender, the French broke in and 'there then began some of the worst urban combat ever seen in Europe before the twentieth century, ' but as was the norm in war before the twentieth century, more people died of disease than from shells, mines and small arms.

Saragossa eventually surrendered but in the Spanish countryside, guerilla war went on. It was their Roman Catholic religion which gave the guerillas their absolute enmity towards the French. The priests, monks and nuns preached against the French at every opportunity. A Spanish catechism of 1808 called the French 'former Christians and modern heretics' and remission from punishment for sin was promised to those who fought against them. It's a safe assumption that for Irish Catholics as well as Protestants, British control was a lesser evil than French control would have been. It's also a safe assumption that at this time in history, Ireland would not have had a great chance of being left unmolested as a peaceful, free and independent state.

The earlier period

The very harsh suppression of Catholicism by Britain during the earlier period of British rule of Ireland, the massacres of Catholics by the British - few in number, but atrocious - the whole of this shameful period of history, have been viewed in complete isolation by too many commentators on Seamus Heaney. The missing context includes the long era of religious intolerance in Europe during which Protestants executed Catholics and Catholics executed Protestants, by burning alive, hanging drawing and quartering, and other methods, during which Protestants massacred Catholics and Catholics massacred Protestants, during which Protestants imposed severe restrictions on the life of Catholics and Catholics imposed severe restrictions on the life of Protestants. The Christian killing of individuals shouldn't be forgotten either. Ludovic Kennedy, in 'All in the Mind: a Farewell to God' writes about an execution in France in 1766: '... the young Chevalier de la Barre was walking along a street in Abbeville. A Capuchin religious procession passed by. Because it was raining the chevalier did not doff his hat as was then the custom. This was observed and reported on, and the chevalier was arrested. The charge against him was blasphemy. He was found guilty. The sentence of the court was amputation of the hands, the tongue to be torn out with pincers and then for him to be burned alive ... Voltaire said he was haunted by the story for the rest of his life.'

When Christianity became less powerful, when Christians began to lose their taste for repressing and killing other Christians and repressing and killing non-believers, the repression and killing carried out by Moslems and non-believers (who have tortured and killed on a massive scale) ensured that there was no end, no slackening, of humanity's atrocious record of inhumanity. Secularism has brought many benefits, but not, unfortunately, an end to ideology or an end to bloodshed. (In all this, it's obvious, of course, that I'm referring to some Christians, some Moslems and some non-believers, not all. )

This, then, is the harsh context of the sufferings of Catholics at the hands of the Protestant British.

One massacre among many, recounted by Michel de Waele, at http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id
=g9781405184649_chunk_g97814051846491300

'The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was one of the bloodiest events of the Wars of Religion that shook France from 1562 to 1598. Catholics in Paris killed between 2,000 and 4,000 Protestants between August 24 (St. Bartholomew's Day) and August 30, 1572, and then thousands more in various provincial towns between August 24 and October 6. Estimates of the total number of Protestants massacred in France during that period vary from 10,000 to 100,000.The conflict was not purely religious; its roots were primarily social and political. The aristocracy in France was deeply split into two rival parties, one of which adopted Calvinism as an ideology with which to challenge its Catholic opponents. As the conflict deepened, the religious identities solidified, and as the two noble factions enlisted support among other segments of the population, the struggle evolved into fullblown civil war between Catholic and Protestant (Huguenot) communities.'

A later conflict, The Thirty Years War, which devastated large areas of Central Europe and above all Germany between 1618 and 1648, had social and political aspects but it was a religious war too, and again, Protestants killed Catholics and Catholics killed Protestants in enormous numbers. Almost a third of the 15 million people in Germany perished.

The responsibilities of critics are different from those of poets. The 'much-needed demythologizing' of Irish History which recent Irish Historians have carried out is in stark contrast with 'the much-needed demythologizing' of Seamus Heaney and many other poets, past and contemporary, which critics haven't attempted. And many critics haven't made use of demythologized Irish History in their interpretations of Seamus Heaney, but a tired and routine history to go with their tired and routine criticism, perpetuating questionable or indefensible claims.