‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ While Irish poets like Longley or Heaney may have been drawn to the subject
ofwar in general and its many attendant issues, they also felt pressure to write
abouttheirwar. But, as Paul Muldoon noted in 1984, ‘the trouble with this place
[Northern Ireland] is that if you don’t engage in it, you’re an ostrich (whatever
‘‘engage in it’’ means). If you do engage in it, you’re using the situation as a kind
of...you’re on the make, almost, cashing in.’^34 Muldoon identifies the essential
paradox that has driven the tempestuous critical debates about the appropriateness
of various poets’, including Heaney’s, responses to war in Ireland. Poets driven
to write about war in Ireland or elsewhere must struggle to achieveadequacy,a
kind of truth telling that interfuses empirical actualities with poetry’s capacity to
transform and illuminate the subject in question. Such a poetry offers a ‘glimpsed
alternative [to whatever the predicament is], a revelation of potential that is denied
or constantly threatened by circumstances’.^35
In examining this ‘imperative’ to produce an adequate poetry, Fran Brearton
suggests that ‘Heaney reveals a more acute insecurity than either Mahon or Longley
about the pressure to respond to the Troubles in some tangible way, for poetry to
make something happen, to legitimate its function in the world.’^36 This impulse
extends across his career, as Heaney repeatedly interrogates the central idea of
adequacy, the right relationship between poetry and war, ‘beauty and atrocity’.^37
This idea is expressed perhaps most famously in his lines from the 1974 essay
‘Feeling into Words’, where, grappling with the violence of the summer of 1969,
he says that poetry now involves ‘a search for images and symbols adequate to our
predicament’.^38 He explains: ‘I felt it imperative to discover a field of force in which
without abandoning fidelity to the processes and experience of poetry...it would
be possible to encompass the perspective of a humane reason and at the same
time grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and
complexity.’^39 Central to this notion of adequacy is the balance, what he will later
point to as the goal of a ‘transcendent equilibrium’ between the resources of poetry
itself—its ‘humane reason’, its beauty or music—and the intense actuality of the
violence and its origins.^40 He describes at once ‘poetryasan answer’ in addition to
‘the idea of an answering poetry as a responsible poetry’.^41 Poetry’s answer lies ‘in its
own language rather than in the language of the world that provokes it’.^42 Thus, he
declares; ‘if our given experience is a labyrinth, then its impassability is countered by
(^34) Paul Muldoon, quoted in Edna Longley,Poetry in the Wars(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe,
1986), 12–13.
(^35) Heaney, ‘Redress of Poetry’, 4.
(^36) Fran Brearton,The Great War in Irish Poetry: W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 225.
(^37) Heaney, ‘The Grauballe Man’, inOpened Ground, 116.
(^38) Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, inPreoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978(London: Faber, 1980),
- 39
41 Ibid. 56–7.^40 Heaney, ‘Redress of Poetry’, 3.
Heaney, ‘Frontiers of Writing’, 191.^42 Ibid.