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 Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
The Irish literary landscape is filled with the statuary of giants, casting long shadows. Any Irish writer has to contend with these monoliths, either by dismissing them, embracing them, emulating them, or covering them with profane graffiti. You know, everyone is different. It’s a fact of the landscape and trying to ignore the statues would be like pretending you lived by the ocean when, in fact, you lived in Kansas. I love hearing contemporary Irish authors discuss these monoliths. It always yields some pretty awesome quotes. These guys of the Irish Literary Revival are almost a century dead now. Their influence continues. It can be daunting to pick up a pen at all, surrounded by those giants. Is this what Harold Bloom was talking about when he talked about “the anxiety of influence”?
Seamus Heaney, as both a poet and a scholar, grappled constantly with those statues. By grappling, I mean writing. He covered so many of them in essays and op-ed columns and book reviews throughout his life. It’s wonderful to hear someone so accomplished in his own right, who had really dug through the dirt (his imagery) to find his own voice, his own specific Ulster Irish voice/context/vocabulary … to turn his insightful gaze on James Joyce or Patrick Kavanagh or John Synge. Heaney, of course, was not only interested in Irish voices. There are many pieces in Finders Keepers (as well as the other prose collections) that have nothing to do with Irish concerns. His scope was wide, universal – and yet he never lost his love for the specific: the specific voice coming from a specific context. These can be complicated issues now, when things like “nationality” is called into question, or at least treated with condescension in certain circles. “Universality” can be another way of erasing our differences, and it is our differences that help create us, give us voice. Heaney was very sensitive to these things, since he had been raised in an environment that seemed to (and in fact did) have a vested interest in erasing his difference from the face of the earth. He was British, not Irish. His Irish-ness had no place in the canon. We’ve gone over all that before. Still, it makes for some marvelous reading.
“Yeats as an Example?” was a lecture he gave in 1978 at the University of Surrey.
Yeats can be a very complicated figure, especially if you take him seriously (as you really must.) Some years back, I read Yeats’ poetry in its entirety, in chronological order. It was an illuminating experience. I joked about having to get through his early stuff here – much of it is, quite frankly, terrible. When he starts to ‘come out’, when he gives up the fairies and the “cloud-pale eyelids”, and the great poems start emerging, the ones still taught in school today, it comes as a shock. It’s incredible. Goosebump-worthy. He was devoted to his work for his entire life. There were no fallow periods. He was tireless. He wrote what he felt like writing, but he also felt a huge obligation to the time itself, to helping create a sense of Irish-ness as a valid means of self-expression. He was a poet, he was a propagandist. He was an aristocrat, and privileged, and romanticized the Irish peasantry, but still never wanted to become one of those poor Gaelic-speaking priest-ridden individuals. He was a Protestant, with anti-Catholic feelings. He was a complex guy. Here’s one of my big Yeats posts.
Heaney put the question mark into the title of his lecture deliberately (and he explains why). Through the course of the lecture, he walks us through Yeats’ development, as artist, activist, theatre-owner, Irish Revival giant, champion of others (Synge, Joyce, etc.) But how is Yeats an “example”? What does Heaney think about it? How should we evaluate him, and how should we follow him? Heaney feels that Yeats’ example lies in the fact that his work, ultimately, is life-affirming. With all of the pomposity and balderdash that is there in the work, the fairies and twilights and twinkling beings and ghosties, etc., there was a commitment to the life force, to the beauty and warmth that is possible in human beings, if we just paid closer attention. And Yeats managed to do so through years of unbelievable tumult, the Irish civil war, partition, the Great War, etc. His poems are not Pollyanna-ish. (Well, some of the early ones are, when he was prioritizing his Irish-ness in order to make a point, to carve out a space for Irish-ness in literature and culture.) Yeats was not really a happy person, and had a tormented love life (understatement), but he never gave up, he kept writing, he kept working. And in his activity, Heaney finds the example for all artists.
Along with Auden and Shakespeare, Yeats is my favorite poet. Cloud-pale eyelids and all.
It’s quite a long lecture, I’ll excerpt just a bit of it. The launching-off point was a profile of Yeats, written by his contemporary George Moore, where Yeats really does come off as an unbelievable poser. But that was part of his point, his declaration of independence. Heaney goes into that.
Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
The conscious theatricality of this Yeats, the studied haughtiness, the affectation – this kind of thing has often put people off. This is the Willie Yeats whom his contemporaries could not altogether take seriously he was getting out of their reach, the Yeats whom Maud Gonne called ‘Silly Willie’ and whom W.H. Auden also called ‘silly,’ in his 1939 elegy: ‘You were silly like us, your gift survived it all.’ But in setting the silliness in relation to the gift, Auden went to the heart of the matter – survival. What Moore presents us with is a picture of Yeats exercising that intransigence which I praised earlier, that protectiveness of his imaginative springs, so that the gift would survive. He donned the mantle – or perhaps one should say the fur coat – of the aristocrat so that he might express a vision of a communal and personal life that was ample, generous, harmonious, fulfilled and enhancing. The reactionary politics implied by Yeats’s admiration of the Coole Park milieu are innocent in the original sense of that word, not nocent, not hurtful. What is more to the point is the way his experience of that benign, paternalistic regime and of Lady Gregory’s personal strengths as conserver of folk culture and choreographer of artistic talent issued in a poetry whose very music is a guarantee of its humane munificence. The silliness of the behaviour is continuous with the sumptuousness of the poetry of the middle period. Yeats’s attack upon his own middle class really springs out of disappointment: why aren’t they taking the lead culturally now that they are in the lead economically? Of course Moore is right to say he belongs to them, and of course Yeats’s pretensions looked ridiculous to his contemporaries. But this was his method of signifying his refusal to ‘serve that in which he no longer believed.’
When Joyce rebelled, he left by the Holyhead boat and created his drama by making a fictional character called Stephen Dedalus point up and repeat the terms of his revolt. When Yeats rebelled, he remained – Joyce scorned such ‘a treacherous instinct for adaptability’ – but he still made a new W.B. Yeats to tread the streets and stage of Dublin, a character who was almost as much a work of imagination as Stephen Dedalus. In order to fly the philistinism of his own class and the pious ignorance of another creed, Yeats remade himself, associated himself with cold, disdainful figures, of whom Charles Stewart Parnell was the archetype and ‘The Fisherman’ was a pattern. The solitude, the will towards excellence, the courage, the self-conscious turning away from that in which he no longer believes, which is Dublin life, and turning towards that which he trusts, which is an image or dream – all the drama and integrity of his poem ‘The Fisherman’ depend to a large extent upon that other drama which George Moore so delightedly observed and reported:
Maybe a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face
And gray Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark with froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream—
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, “Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.”
We are moving from what other people saw to what Yeats himself envisaged. I have said enough, I think, about the outer man and what he intended, so it is time to consider the inwardness of the poems instead of the outwardness of the stance.
Yet the poetry is cast in a form that is as ear-catching as the man was eye-catching, and as a writer, one is awed by the achieved and masterful tones of that deliberately pitched voice, its bare classic chases, its ability to modulate from emotional climax to wise reflection, its ultimate truth to life. Nevertheless, the finally exemplary moments are those when this powerful artistic control is vulnerable to the pain or pathos of life itself.
But I have to say something about why I put the question mark after the title of this lecture. ‘Yeats as an Example’ was the title of an appreciative but not ecstatic essay that W.H. Auden wrote in 1940, so my new punctuation is partly a way of referring back to Auden’s title. But it is also meant to acknowledge the orthodox notion that a very great poet can be a very bad influence on other poets. What Yeats offers the practising writer is an example of labour, perseverance. He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age. He reminds you that revision and slog work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He encourages you to experience a transfusion of energies from poetic forms themselves, reveals how the challenge of a metre can extend the resources of the voice. He proves that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration. Above all, he reminds you that art is intended, that it is part of the creative push of civilization itself: from ‘ Adam’s Curse’ to ‘Vacillation’ and on until the last poems, his work not only explicitly proclaims the reality of the poetic vocation but convinces by the deep note of certitude registered in the proclamation itself.
