Since his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney’s reputation as a poet has grown from strength to strength in the popular media and in some academic circles. I recall one critic, Robert Taylor, saying in around 2009, that Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (a collection of the lectures he gave while professor of poetry at Oxford): ‘illuminates a point of view of poetry as a force capable of transforming culture’. I was never quite sure in what way this applied to The Redress of Poetry, which essentially defines “poetry” as an act of describing acutely what is seen with the physical eyes, while using defamiliarization as a literary device to render these descriptions more lucidly.
In the book, Heaney’s reluctance towards experimentation and formal innovation is unmistakable, revealing a penchant for a poetry characterised by overt subject matter. This inclination is evident in his critique of Dylan Thomas, when he says that Thomas has a ‘too unenlightened trust in the plasticity of language’.
Heaney also expresses reservations regarding poetic artifice, asserting that in Thomas’ utilisation of it, ‘the demand for more matter, less art, does inevitably arise’. In contrast, Elizabeth Bishop garners his approval because ‘she never allows the formal delights of her art to mollify the hard realities of her subjects’.
In Seamus Heaney: From Major to Minor, R. Caldwell rightly criticises Heaney by saying:
‘There is too often the feel with his poetry that the paraphrase is the end of the matter: there is little of the multifaceted richness of suggestion that invites one to probe further’.
Heaney was a protégé of Philip Hobsbaum, who made it possible for him to get a publishing contract with Faber & Faber. Hobsbaum was also a founder of the 1960s British poetry coterie, The Group. Originally based in London, The Group founded an offshoot in Belfast when Hobsbaum had to relocate there to take up a teaching post at Queen’s University. Heaney met Hobsbaum while studying at Queens, and was invited to take part in Group meetings.
Given that Hobsbaum was a well-known critic of Modernism, especially of the American Modernism, he might have seen in Heaney someone who had the potential of sharing this view given sufficient nurturing. In Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry, Hobsbaum writes:
‘Whitman’s abstractions and random collocations have a raw life of their own, a form even through their formlessness; and this has remained highly characteristic of American poetry ever since. The Waste Land is, indeed, a heap of broken images: this is its meaning, and, to some extent, its distinction. But that kind of writing has never worked well in England’.
His criticism of Eliot extends to what Hobsbaum sees as the negative influence on English poetry of Eliot’s use of the American idiom:
‘Some damage was done to English verse by too close an imitation in the 1930s of the American idiom as evidenced in such poets as Eliot and Pound’.
Hobsbaum also sees a disparity between Eliot’s American writing style and traditional English poetic writing practice. Although Hobsbaum does not see this in itself as necessarily negative, the implication is that American Modernism is largely a geographical and cultural entity, unable to successfully function within an English milieu:
‘Again, Eliot’s work exhibits the characteristic American qualities of free association or phanopoeia and autobiographical content. English verse, however, has been at its best as fiction: an arrangement of what is external to the poet to convey the tension or release within’.
Given Heaney’s association with Hobsbaum at such a formative time in Heaney’s young life, it would not be unreasonable to presume that much of Hobsbaum’s poetic aesthetic would have filtered down to form some of Heaney’s later ideas on poetry—perhaps even on much of what he says in The Redress of Poetry.
