brendan corcoran
stemming from a far darker place than many readers would expect. But, as Dillon
Johnstondemonstrates, Heaney’s work has grappled continuously with an interest
in and a knowledge of violence, beginning on the farm but expanding much further
afield.^30 I would extend Johnston’s reading further to say that from the earliest work
Heaney is perhaps most continuously focused on death, though not in a maudlin or
nihilistic manner. Indeed, as he demonstrates in poems and essays, his is in many
ways an Orphic project, which, as he says of Dylan Thomas, ‘keeps its gaze firmly
fixed on the upward path, and works against the gradient of relapse’,^31 the necessity
we know through the story to be death’s ultimate victory. Of course, after singing
out of loss and hope in the depths of death’s kingdom, the Orphic poet on the
upward path is tormented precisely by the question of his art’s efficacy. This image
of Orpheus after having momentarily won out over death yet always about to lose
his love again and for good serves as yet another image of the stay, of a suspension
in which life and death are compassed together.
Seamus Heaney is not a ‘war poet’. When introducingCenotaph of Snow(2003), his
own collected ‘poems about war’, Michael Longley, in an echo of Wilfred Owen’s
draft ‘Preface’, crucially declares: ‘These are poems about war, not war poems.
You have to be a war poet to write war poems. I am a non-combatant drawn to
the subject of war for a number of reasons.’^32 Longley’s distinction is a salutary
clarification when considering the relationship of poetry written by poets from
Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence—the war that has largely defined the
place since 1969. The ‘war poet’ who writes ‘war poems’, according to Longley’s
logic, must be a combatant. Such plain-spoken honesty de-emphasizes the question
of identity and instead attends to poetics, which involves not only the means but
the subject of lyric representation. Longley’s larger point is that many of his poems
tackle ‘war’ as a subject-matter which incorporates but remainsdistinct fromits
Irish franchise. This conjunction of local and brutal actualities and a universal
ineffability has proved irresistible to poets since Homer. Why Heaney, like Longley,
is ‘drawnto the subject of war’ says much about the poet and, more generally, offers
insight into the larger connection between war and poetry.^33
(^30) Dillon Johnston, ‘Violence in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry’, in Matthew Campbell (ed.),The
Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
113–32. Johnston offers a very useful and extensive survey of violence throughout Heaney’s 31 œuvre.
Heaney, ‘Dylan the Durable?’,The Redress of Poetry, 144.
(^32) Michael Longley,Cenotaph of Snow: Sixty Poems about War(London: Enitharmon, 2003).
Longley’s introduction to the book appears at<http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/books/viewBook.asp?
BID= 74 >
(^33) Heaney himself states the obvious in ‘Crediting Poetry’, when, ensconced in the seeming remove
of Wicklow as Northern Ireland endured the torsion of war, he recalls ‘feeling puny in my predicaments
as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam’s fate in the nineteen-thirties, feeling challenged yet
steadfast in my non-combatant status when I heard, for example, that one particularly sweet-natured
school friend had been interned without trial’ (Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 452).