Getting Along Seamus-ly

Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest living poets, has an over 20-year-long relationship with the University.

A visiting professor since 1981, before most undergraduates were born, he took on more responsibility as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1984, which required one semester’s teaching in exchange for eight months of vacation. These days, he’s trimmed his time here to six weeks every other year.

A search for “Heaney” on Harvard’s website will yield over 200 hits. You’ll find his essays, translations and poems on dozens of syllabi. And this year, he is the center of at least two courses taught by English faculty: “Beowolf and Seamus Heaney,“ offered by Daniel Donoghue through the Extension School, and “The Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” a junior seminar with Helen Vendler, author of two books about the man.

THE TASK OF THE POET

From the Lowell Lecture Hall to Lamont to Commencement 2000, he’s enriched the University with hundreds of appearances over the years—an effort he extended last Thursday with the kickoff to his October lecture and reading series. Red-faced, squinty-eyed and with a rich Irish accent, the affable Heaney delivered to a capacity crowd at Jefferson Hall on “Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven: How Some Poems Got Written.” What began as a highly anecdotal speech about the process of composition became an earnest defense of poetry and the arts in the face of world conflict.

It’s often said that good writing captures the poetry and rhythm of everyday life, and Heaney agrees that poets must pay attention to the immediacy of every action. The famous last line of his 1967 poem “Bogland”—“the wet centre is bottomless”—came to mind as he was pulling on a pair of trousers.

But preceding the words and animating them is above all what Heaney calls “poetic emotion.” Since a poem has no will of its own, it’s a poets job to breathe life into it; this is not done by reflecting upon emotion or trying to recapture it “in tranquillity,” but by understanding the writing itself as a wholly new and active experience. Hence, ventures Heaney, writing begins with starting points like Yeats’ exaltation, Dickinson’s interior journeying or T.S. Eliot’s spiritual exhaustion.

Whence the inspiration? It shouldn’t be hard to find, with life as rich and complex as it is. Contrary to what Harold Bloom has called “anxiety of influence,” Heaney proposes instead the “buoyancy of influence”: the dynamism of an old poem, with its wealth of experience, should offer something to get the young poet going.

For much of his own writing, Heaney returns to County Derry and his childhood on an Irish farm, to those “long forgotten and suddenly remembered places.” For instance, the foci of his poem “Lightenings,” which became the night’s case study in composition, are the recalled image of a beggar on a threshold, Heaney’s feeling that the world had become “unroofed” after his parents’ deaths and his memories of playing marbles as a child. Mix thoughtfully and voila. “Suddenly you are like a pharoah,” he sweeps his arm slowly, grandly, “let it be risen.”

TAKING THE DEFENSIVE

Without notice, without segue, Heaney then swerved rather powerfully towards a justification of poetry. Having grown and matured against the background of shootings, bombings and strikes in northern Ireland, Heaney is no stranger to political conflict and the demands of civic responsibility. Heaney admits that in the face of such peril, poetry seems like “arbitrary, pleasure-seeking shape-making.” And it is. What seemed to baffle the audience was that this doesn’t trouble him.

Heaney has written much in the way of political poetry over the years, such as his reflection on the Troubles, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” in his 1975 collection, North. But his political poems are surprisingly unpolitical. They provide journalistic responses to major events rather than rallying cries for partisan action. But if you’re a monumental figure of ethics no less than poetics, as Heaney is, the pressures from both sides to take a stance are stifling.

Heaney has long wanted to be a poet rather than propagandist. So is it surprising that he takes pleasure in “escaping the shackles of the civic”? On the other hand, in times of conflict, Heaney acknowledges that there can be “more reliability in the poetic than the actual,” making poetry a source of strength through dire straits. Indeed, Heaney invokes T.S. Eliot’s conviction that “public activity is more of a drug than this solitary toil [of writing] that often seems so pointless.”

If it seemed sometimes that Heaney was too quick to disparage the political in defense of the poetic, he was redeemed in the end by a president. In a 1995 speech, former President Bill Clinton claimed that some of his favorite lines were an extra chorus that Heaney wrote into his version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes:

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

There’s nothing really apolitical about Heaney or his “longed for tidal wave of justice,” just something unpartisan. And while Heaney might not rock the vote, his words are inspiring enough to have hung (as they did) on Clinton‘s White House study walls.

Heaney’s remaining lectures are a poetry reading on Tuesday, October 15th at 8 p.m., and “Staying Power: How—And Why—Some Got Translated,” on Tuesday, October 22nd at 8 p.m. Both lectures, which have been moved to Emerson 105, are free.