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As a critic the Philadelphia-based poet, Warren Hope, is capable of burning with a slow fuse. This brief and v Perhaps as a cover to their general cultural illiteracy the British have always had a poet or two up their small-talking sleeve.Once it was Dylan Thomas, of course, then Betjeman, then Ted Hughes and now, after an indeterminate, inadequately consummated affair with Larkin, the token name to camouflagingly wrap around your conversation is Heaney. In America it was once Robert Frost while, on both sides of the Atlantic, Sylvia Plath continues to be pressed into sophomoric (in every sense) service to the same end. This is all low-level social history. The conversational virtue of this list of goodish (and, possibly, one great) poets is that they all made news for reasons unconnected with literature. But Hope, whose abiding concern is with writing, with poetry, proffers as a major plank in his placing of Heaney the proposition that in meeting his publicity rather more than halfway, the border-bestriding Irishman has been his art's own worst enemy. To condense into our own oversimplifying nutshell, Hope perceives on the one hand a private, self-aware Seamus Heaney, confident as a poet even when uncertain as a man; and, on the other, "Famous Seamus, the most over-interviewed of living poets," diffident beneath the laureate blarney and writing verse by the yard both to maintain a public image and to keep at bay through such occupational therapy the disquieting sense that the Muse may be ignoring him. The private Heaney is patient, waiting for the poem to come to him: when it does the work is authentic and achieved. The public Heaney impatiently sets out to proposition the Muse. What then results is the work of a craftsman, certainly, but something lacking that final quality of emotion, of personal remembrance and psychology, rendered on to paper in tranquillity. A fine, not so minor poet himself, Hope is at his best when coming down to case-proving chapter, verse and word. He finds the poet he admires in the elegy to the aunt whose death has left a 'sunlit absence' in Heaney's life. Memory recalls that and this compels Hope to remark "Simple gestures described in simple language come to life as if by magic, through the combination of love and memory that is the root of poetic expression. The poem concludes with a striking image that seems to recognise and sum up the relationship between the poet, his personal past, and his readers: And here is love The poet is present only by implication. This….gives the poem its quiet authority." In contrast Hope points to Heaney's attempt to 'go public' in a 'big' poem kick-started by murderous events in Belfast occurring while he himself, at thirty was well out of it soaking up the sun in Madrid. "Retreating from the heat of the bullying sun to 'the cool of the Prado', Heaney contemplates three paintings by Goya that imply three possible reactions to events in Ireland. The concluding lines seem to be a comment on Goya that is meant to convey how he might serve as a model for the public poet, a poet who feels called upon to comment upon political events: He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished There is a hollow ring to these lines, a sense that the author is straining to produce an effect rather than achieving a sense of himself. The portrait of the artist as a young bullfighter is not only a cliché in itself, but a cliché of questionable taste when it comes so soon after these lines: We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports The 'death-counts' here refer to news of the war in Viet Nam. It seems Heaney found it impossible to keep from simplifying and aestheticizing the violence not only in Northern Ireland but everywhere else in the world." Minimal though this sampling has to be here, the sheer feel of the words on the page would seem most strongly to support Hope's basic thesis. And, indeed, his monograph, although certainly executing its professed primary aim, is far more than an (invaluable) 'student guide'. Because written by a practising poet with a developed sense of technical form, a sure eye for a word and a fine ear, it has the smell of wordsmithery about it. Of work. As he analyses, Hope communicates the craft, the challenge, the fun of sitting down to capture on paper that poetic insight which has swum into the forefront of your awareness. He makes you want to take up your pen and have another stab yourself. This short book has the prime quality of all the best criticism: even as it signposts dangers, it begets enthusiasm. The gravestone of another Irish poet not given to shrinking from publicity, W. B. Yeats, urges the onlooker to 'cast a cold eye'. But Hope's final view of Heaney is neither cold nor jaundiced. He looks at the work, item by item, with professional objectivity. And Heaney should not be overly put out at having his wrist slapped for playing to the gallery. Rather, the Irish poet should be grateful that so good a poet as the American, so good a critic (in another Greenwich Exchange study Hope is author of arguably the brief, definitive word on Larkin), should have found scattered among his own extensive output a handful of poems to which he accords unstinted admiration. The final grenade is kindly meant. "If Seamus Heaney has been granted the authority to write some living poems, he should be able to overcome his uncertainty and rest assured they will survive when he is finally free of the gas-filled balloon of his contemporary reputation." Trenchant criticism, Hope's first-rate survey should most be taken by its subject as a sternly benign word to the wise. |
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ery much to the point assessment of Seamus Heaney in the admirable Greenwich Exchange 'Student Guide' series begins in a routine, even humdrum fashion. Then, a few pages in, the first of series of grenades explodes. By the study's end we are persuaded that its subject, Heaney himself, would do well in future not to believe so readily in - or, at any rate, be so concerned about - his own publicity.
