‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ I was simply refusing to have a poem levied....Ifyou’re going to write a poem of political
protest, which, let me put on record, is not only an honourable, but a necessary thing, you
have to be sure that it’syoursubject, that it’syouranger, not somebody else’s anger....
Protest per se isn’t a contribution, I don’t think, because protest is going on all the time....
So-called political poetry, protest poetry, gets on my nerves. Political poetry in Northern
Ireland should not be a spectator sport. It should have some purchase on the actual realities
of the place.^51
Despite the risks of writing poems about war, such poems offer not only the
‘salubrious’ potential resulting from poetry’s adequate engagement with war, but
a site wherein to address powerful issues that possess simultaneously local and
universal dimensions. The poem about war is especially interesting because it often
encompasses other types of poems like the elegy. Edna Longley begins her own
examination of poetry and war by appreciating this expansive nature of ‘war’ as she
suggests that ‘perhaps ‘‘war’’, not ‘‘history’’ or ‘‘politics’’ [or ‘‘violence’’, for that
matter], covers the broadest imaginative contingencies’.^52 She asserts that where
the human institution of war as a subject of poetry is concerned, ‘transcendence
and historicity are not as mutually exclusive as structuralism makes out’. And it
is at the interface of ‘transcendence and historicity’ that so many of the pitched
critical battles about therightrelationship between art and war take place.
In a 2003 interview, Heaney acknowledges his own tilt away from the exclusively
Irish historical context and towardsmore ‘transcendent’ concerns. Upon being
asked about whether the reduction of ‘political tension in Northern Ireland’ since
the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had diminished his ‘urgency as a poet’, Heaney
states:
In fact, I sort of jumped the Northern Ireland hurdle four or five years before the ceasefire
and all that followed from it. The poems inSeeing Things, in particular the ‘Squarings’
sequence, were a declaration of independence from the matter of Ulster—and they were
done in 1988, ’89. I felt at that stage that I had to quicken myself, shed some old skin. But
now there’s a bigger ‘chief-woe, world-sorrow’, as Hopkins would have said, something that
puts Northern Ireland in the shade.^53
This statement reiterates what he says in ‘Crediting Poetry’ about ‘straighten[ing]
up’ and sloughing off the weight of the ‘murderous’ subject of Northern Ireland.^54
This apparent broadening of the poet’s gaze also comes in the aftermath not of any
political changes on the ground in Northern Ireland, but of the deaths of Heaney’s
parents in the mid-1980s. His own suffering and consideration of his literal origins
prompt a new ‘lightening’ that, paradoxically, may make the poetry better able to
(^51) Heaney, interviewed by Karl Miller,Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller,ed.Karl
Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000), 23–4; italics original.
(^52) Edna Longley,Poetry in the Wars, 10.
(^53) Heaney, in Seamus Heaney and Jason Koo, ‘Citizens of the Republic of Conscience’,Gulf Coast,
16/2 (2004), 205. 54
Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 458.