Seamus Heaney

Commonweal, Nov 6, 1998 by Daria Donnelly

Helen Vendler Harvard University Press, $22.95, 224 pp.

Daria Donnelly

Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, and America's best-known poetry critic, has been an ardent admirer of Seamus Heaney since she first heard him read at the Yeats School in Sligo in 1975. It must have been a stunning moment of the soul leaping up in recognition: her appetite and love for poetry, apprenticeship in Yeats, commitment to writing for both a professional and general audience, and generous temperament are all met in the poet. It will be for literary historians to tell the story of their friendship, and the role her work (seminars, essays, practical advocacy that brought him for five years to Harvard) played in his development. This new volume, Seamus Heaney, will stand at the center of that story's latter half. Felicitously timed as a companion to Heaney's new Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-96 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux $25, 464 pages), Vendler's book is a clear, concise, and comprehensive study of Heaney's poetic oeuvre offered in the aftermath of his international fame.

Vendler sets herself three tasks: "to show by what imaginative, structural, and stylistic means Heaney raises his subjects to a plane that compels such worldwide admiration"; to testify to Heaney's "vigilant willingness to change" as it is embodied in thirty years of poetic evolution as well as in poems that directly talk back to earlier ones; and, third, to convey the ways in which Heaney's poems have enlarged "the specifically literary inheritance on which they depend." Vendler keeps all three of these tasks in mind as she moves from poem to poem, volume to volume (nine in all), structuring her study by means of a series of "A" words (anonymities, archaeologies, anthropologies, alterities and alter egos, allegories, airiness, and afterwards) which describe, but never reduce, Heaney's poetic strategies. The sheer pacing of her original and lithe insights makes this a tour de force of literary description. (And though I occasionally felt impeded by the apodictic statements that launch her close reading of poems, I concluded that they are more stylistic than invitations to serious quarrel).

Vendler strikes just the right note in her analysis of the relationship between Heaney's evolving poetic style and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Born in 1939 in County Derry, Heaney, a Catholic, came to poetry just moments before the Catholic minority took to the streets of Belfast and Derry to demand their civil rights, a flowering of desire for change whose thwarted fruit was "a quarter century of life - waste and spirit-waste," as Heaney called it in his Nobel lecture. While the accumulation of that still unconcluded history wrought some changes of emphasis in Heaney's essentially elegiac vocation, it provoked far more dramatic changes in his methods. He has moved from a search for adequate outward symbols to describe reality, to an inward dramatization of the conflict, to, more recently, a philosophical consideration of his desire for equilibrium. In her attention to Heaney's "second thoughts," a phrase she borrows from his poem 'Terminus," Vendler makes a powerful argument for his humane political witness, accomplished by being faithful to the aim of lyric poetry, "to grasp and perpetuate, by symbolic form, the self's volatile and transient here and now."

Because Vendler's work here is description and appreciation, she makes virtually no negative or comparative judgments about the poems and books that she so beautifully explicates. I admire this as a principled resistance to a culture (general and academic) that mistakes irony and aggression for intelligence. But I also think that a pugnacious and exacting reader, such as the poet Mary Kinzie, not only can brilliantly illuminate a poet's art but also can accommodate those who instinctively resist the poems. (Her essay on Seamus Heaney, centered on the poem "Sandstone Keepsake," can be found in The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling [University of Chicago Press].)

In particular, I wish that Vendler had pressed harder against Heaney's professed relationship to Catholicism. The poet respects faith, is comfortable in his unbelief, reaches for poetry as a restorative force, and uses Catholic mythology and sociology as poetic resources. Because she leaves that account unexamined, Vendler's close readings of poems that touch on religious matters are partial. Relying (uncharacteristically) on the teller rather than the tale, Vendler does not consider the word "risking," and so fails to hear the religious nuances in the conclusion of Heaney's "Elegy" for Robert Lowell, "the fish-dart of your eyes/risking, 'I'll pray for you.'" More importantly, she does not distinguish poems that are dulled by announced unbelief from those, such as "Clearances" (section iii), that are sharpened by it. In this gorgeous elegy for his mother, the poet recalls, at her deathbed, their peeling potatoes together, "her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives," while the parish priest goes "hammer and tongs at prayers for the dying." By allowing the estranged and estranging religion in the poem to be opposed by, and found unexpectedly congruent with, the work of poetry, Heaney realizes the "equilibrium" whose poetic, political, and spiritual value he so eloquently sets out in the essay, "The Redress of Poetry."