The Books: The Redress of Poetry; ‘The Redress of Poetry,’ by Seamus Heaney

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost. – Seamus Heaney

From 1989 to 1994, Seamus Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The “essays” in Redress of Poetry are not really essays, but lectures he gave on poetry and writing during his tenure at Oxford. The subject matter is wide-ranging, with Heaney’s typical fascination with the nuts-and-bolts of language. It is (and always was) his “way in,” not only to his own poetry, but to life itself. As he wrote in the opening poem in “Death of a Naturalist,” he watched his father dig with a spade. All of his ancestors dug in the dirt. He picked up a pen instead: “I dig with it.”

As an Irishman, whose ancestors were forced to speak a language not their own, language had a resonance to Heaney, political and social and ancient … one of Heaney’s lifelong obsessions. We owe him so much. It was James Joyce’s obsession, too. One of the most famous scene in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the “tundish” scene at the university, a dawning awareness that the tongue he spoke in had been imposed.

Dad gave me this book for my birthday. I wish I had talked with him more about it, although we did discuss Seamus Heaney a lot.

The Redress of Poetry is one of those books I go back to often for reference purposes. Heaney, in these lectures, discusses his own work, the work of other poets, of the “purpose” of poetry in general (I mean, the title alone: The “Redress” of Poetry: that’s how important it was to Heaney, that was what it could do, if done right). The Redress of Poetry also includes lectures with in-depth of analysis of specific writers, Christopher Marlowe, Hugh MacDiurmid, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop. Heaney approaches things from a language perspective, obviously, but there is also that Irish perspective (the fact that he was lecturing at Oxford was a big deal: and his appointment was hailed even back in Ireland). Heaney’s work is much larger than an anti-colonial or post-modern tract about the horrors of oppression (and many of these lectures, including the one I will excerpt today is about what exactly is the purpose of poetry, a theme that obsessed him) but he was aware of the fact that Ireland has been oppressed/squashed/dominated/overrun, and such cultural experiences affect language and how a people express themselves. Many of the poets emerging from England’s former colonies address such issues, sometimes very beautifully.

But Heaney wonders: Outside of the concept of “redress” (i.e. setting something right, or upright), what is poetry supposed to DO? Propagandists for a certain cause will always wish poetry to uphold their particular viewpoint. This was the ongoing decades-long argument between soulmates W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Yeats definitely saw poetry as a tool, not just as an arm of self-expression. He wanted to create a solely Irish space in literature, to try to extricate Irish self-expression from its British antecedents. But Maud Gonne wanted him to be more fiery, more angry, to say what SHE wanted him to say, to really “stick it” to the British. But poetry that has that as its aim is usually short-lived and often (worse sin) extremely bad poetry.

Heaney wanted to discuss the concept of “redress”, using all of these different figures, and he wanted to open the students’ minds to the power of a well-expressed line, regardless of who wrote it. In other words, just because someone comes from an oppressed class or race does not mean that their poetry is good, or superior to the poetry coming from the ruling class. (The opposite is also true: just became someone comes from the ruling class does not mean their stuff is better, even though the perception may be that it is. For example: those who honestly believe, without even knowing that this is what they believe, that the male point of view is the default and every other point of view is somehow deviant, or different, will not be able to perceive the work of Sexton or Bishop or Plath, OUTSIDE of the fact that a woman wrote the verses. This is how voices get marginalized. Much work has been done to right that situation, and that is good. When you have a list of great 20th century whatever – novels, poets, writers – and there isn’t a woman on the list? You need to read more. You have blinders on. Don’t get defensive, just read more, your list is inadequate. But if a list is pre-20th century? Okay, that’s fine, there were more men doing EVERYTHING back then than there were women doing shit, and while there are the female figures who broke through, including giants like George Eliot who blows away her male contemporaries to such a degree she seems to have descended from another planet, the majority of worthwhile voices who “made it” to us will be male. Pre-20th century, you’re off the hook, but you have zero excuse for that bullshit after that.)

There is a lot of good that is done in seeking out under-represented voices, but not at the expense of those already in the canon, whose influence, good and bad, must be contended with. We all come from that wellspring, like it or not. And hell, it’s a rich and fruitful wellspring. That was James Joyce’s whole fight, his entire life’s work: how to wrench himself free from those who had oppressed his nation, how to wrench himself free from the defining concepts of nationality/language/religion/family. As he declared in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “‘This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.'” (That used to be the tagline for my site. Ringing words of independence, and yet also an acknowledgement that he has been “produced” by outside forces, as much as he hates it, as much as he bucks against that domination.)

Of course, part of the reason the canon exists is BECAUSE of the shutting-out of other voices, female, non-white, whatever. But that’s reality. If you’re going to have a collection of poetry from, say, the 16th century, then yeah, there aren’t gonna be a lot of women represented. Please don’t dig into second-rate bad stuff, rightfully forgotten, so that I, with my precious vagina, can feel “represented.” Please. I understand history. I’m good, seriously, I’m good. An approach like that assumes that I cannot relate to the works of, say, John Milton or William Blake, that I need to feel myself in any volume. But I get so much out of the work of Milton and Blake and Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain and Marlowe and on and on. They’re men, but they speak of things that concern all humans and they do in prose that has resonated for centuries. Just because some men can’t “see themselves” in the work of Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot or Elizabeth Bishop, or (worse) never even read them because they’re “books by girls,” who lack the curiosity to try to see the world through female eyes, doesn’t mean I have to be as blinkered or as stupid as they are. It’s their loss if they have never read George Eliot just because she’s a woman. Seriously.

If you are talking to only your group, the ones who agree with you politically or socially, then your work may be beloved by that small group, but it very well might not travel. That’s the challenge.

Chris Rock, who has been burning it UP lately in interviews, talked a bit about this sort of thing in a recent Rolling Stone interview. The whole interview is great, but here’s the section I am thinking of:

Someone like Chuck D will say that there needs to be more historical awareness among hip-hop fans, that it’s not right that the Stones can play arenas and stadiums and Public Enemy can’t.
The Stones can play arenas because the Stones have songs that are not purely based on references that you had to be there for. I love Public Enemy. But they don’t have “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Kanye will be able to play arenas maybe more than Jay Z honestly, because there’s a vulnerability and an emotional thing that happens in his music that doesn’t happen in most rap. I love rap, but rap is like comedy: It rots. Comedy rots. Trading Places is a perfect movie, just unbelievably good. But there are other comedies, not nearly as old as Trading Places, that just have references and things in them that aren’t funny five years later. And rap’s got a lot of that.

Rock comes back to that thought later, in terms of what he wants to do with his own career:

And now, it sounds like your big challenge is trying to make your stand-up more personal.
As you get older, you got to find topics that aren’t reference-dependent. Did you ever watch Bill Cosby Himself? Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert is the best stand-up movie ever, but Cosby Himself – sometimes it’s even better. There’s not one reference in that thing that doesn’t play. People deal with emotions in music all the time, but comedians are always talking about what they see. But we seldom talk about what we feel. That’s the next thing for me. It’s not taking it up a notch, but how do I move forward artistically and not level out? Like we said earlier, what’s my “Can’t Always Get What You Want”? I just want to figure out more universal, deeper things.

“What’s my ‘Can’t Always Get What You Want’?” Goosebumps.

In the excerpt below, Heaney says that poetry, whether it comes from a now-despised ruling class or a rising minority finding their voice – either way – poetry has to be “a working model of inclusive consciousness.” That, to me, is what Chris Rock is talking about.

These are explosive topics. I get it. Heaney gets it too. As an Irishman, he knew firsthand what oppression could do, and his awareness that the tongue he spoke had been imposed (violently) on his people is never far from his view. However: one must KNOW the canon before one can effectively deviate from it. That’s part of what he talks about in the excerpt below.

He ends with an in-depth discussion of 17th century metaphysical poet George Herbert. Herbert, a Welsh-born English poet is the epitome of the canon, his place secure, his influence vast. What I love about Heaney’s approach is he breaks down what he feels in these verses, what he perceives, and then you get the whole poem, so you can see it for yourself. Heaney has a way of making a poem jump off the page. Poetry can be challenging to read, you have to get into the zone with it. It’s a zone I find deeply pleasurable, akin to prayer or meditation, where you have to empty your brain of anxiety, little concerns, whatever, so that the poem can do its work. It’s deeply gratifying, albeit a challenge.

Heaney gave this lecture in October, 1989.

Here’s an excerpt where he talks about the concept of “redress” and what that might mean for poetry.

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘The Redress of Poetry,’ by Seamus Heaney

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W.B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a late-twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense – an agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.

Not that it is not possible to have a poetry which consciously seeks to promote cultural and political change and yet can still manage to operate with the fullest artistic integrity. The history of Irish poetry over the last 150 years is in itself sufficient demonstration that a motive for poetry can be grounded to a greater or lesser degree in programmes with a national purpose. Obviously, patriotic or propagandist intent is far from being a guarantee of poetic success, but in emergent cultures the struggle of an individual consciousness towards affirmation and distinctness may be analogous, if not coterminous, with a collective straining towards self-definition; there is a mutual susceptibility between the formation of a new tradition and the self-fashioning of individual talent. Yeats, for example, began with a desire ‘to write short lyrics or poetic drama where every speech would be short and concentrated’, but, typically, he endowed this personal stylistic ambition with national significance by relating it to ‘an Irish preference for a swift current’ and contrasting it with ‘the English mind … meditative, rich, deliberate’, which ‘may remember the Thames valley.’

At such moments of redefinition, however, there are complicating factors at work. What is involved, after all, is the replacement of ideas of literary excellence derived from modes of expression originally taken to be canonical and unquestionable. Writers have to start out as readers, and before they put pen to paper, even the most disaffected of them will have internalized the norms and forms of the tradition from which they wish to secede. Whether they are feminists rebelling against the patriarchy of language or nativists in full cry with the local accents of their vernacular, whether they write Anglo-Irish or Afro-English or Lallans, writers of what have been called ‘nation language’ will have been wrong-footed by the fact that their own literary formation was based upon models of excellence taken from the English language and its literature. They will have been predisposed to accommodate themselves to the consciousness which subjugated them. Naturally, black poets from Trinidad or Lagos and working-class writers from Newcastle or Glasgow will be found arguing that their education in Shakespeare or Keats was little more than an exercise in alienating them from their authentic experience, devalorizing their vernacular and destabilizing their instinctual at-homeness in their own non-textual worlds: but the truth of that argument should not obliterate other truths about language and self-valorization which I shall come to presently.

In any movement towards liberation, it will be necessary to deny the normative authority of the dominant language or literary tradition. At a special moment in the Irish Literary Revival, this was precisely the course adopted by Thomas MacDonagh, Professor of English at the Royal University in Dublin, whose book on Literature in Ireland was published in 1916, the very year he was executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. With more seismic consequences, it was also the course adopted by James Joyce. But MacDonagh knew the intricacies and delicacies of the English lyric inheritance which he was calling into question, to the extent of having written a book on the metrics of Thomas Campion. And Joyce, for all his hauteur about the British Empire and the English novel, was helpless to resist the appeal of, for example, the songs and airs of the Elizabethans. Neither MacDonagh nor Joyce considered it necessary to proscribe within his reader’s memory the riches of the Anglophone culture whose authority each was, in his own way, compelled to challenge. Neither denied his susceptibility to the totally persuasive word in order to prove the purity of his resistance to an imperial hegemony. Which is why both these figures are instructive when we come to consider the scope and function of poetry in the world. They remind us that its integrity is not to be impugned just because at any given moment it happens to be a refraction of some discredited cultural or political system.

Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated. The Divine Comedy is a great example of this kind of tool adequacy, but a haiku may also constitute a satisfactory comeback by the mind to the facts of the after. As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function. It becomes another truth to which we can have recourse, before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way. In fact, to read poetry of this totally adequate kind is to experience something bracing and memorable, something capable of increasing in value over the whole course of a lifetime.