brendan corcoran
bear the strain of ‘world-sorrow’. Upon liberating himself from the problems of
Ulsterin the late 1980s, it is important to note how, for Heaney, war not only does
not go away as a theme, but rather increases as a presence in the poetry ofThe Spirit
Level(1996). The war in Northern Ireland remains present in and as a subject of his
poetry, but the gaze is cast wider; as much as Ireland’s Troubles, the timeless threat
and universality of loss become the real subjects of his poetry, touched however
faintly or powerfully by war. And though when speaking of the new millennium
he describes ‘a bigger ‘‘chief-woe, world-sorrow’’ ’, such attentiveness to the global
register of suffering may be found throughout his body of work, even as this note
defines many poems written since the late 1980s.
Asked in 1988 about the continued relevance of Coventry Patmore’s phrase, ‘the
end of art is peace’, quoted by Heaney in ‘The Harvest Bow’ and then in his epigraph
toPreoccupations(1980), Heaney replies by inquiring again into the adequacy of
the lyric gaze encompassing not Irish painper sebut ‘world-sorrow’:
Can you write a poem in the post-nuclear age? Can you write a poem that gazes at death,
or the western front or Auschwitz—a poem that gives peace and tells horror? It gives true
peace only if the horror is satisfactorily rendered. If the eyes are not averted from it. If its
overmastering power is acknowledged and unconceded, so the human spirit holds its own
against its affront and immensity. To me that’s what the ‘end of art is peace’ means and
understood in those terms, I still believe it.^55
Like Auden’s statement in his elegy for W. B. Yeats that ‘poetry makes nothing
happen’,^56 the statement by Theodor Adorno that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric’ is one of modern poetry’s most cliched and misused phrases. ́^57 Used in
common parlance without the rigorous cultural interrogation that the statement
is meant to provoke, it signals the worst kind of self-indulgent poetic or critical
hand-wringing that elides serious engagement with the risks of insensibility or
sentimentality faced whenever poetry deals with history.^58 Fortunately, in a 1965
lecture, Adorno addressed the widespread misapprehension that lingers still:
I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry, and that gave rise to
a discussion I did not anticipate....I would readily concede that, just as I said that after
Auschwitz onecould notwrite poems—by which I meant to point to the hollowness of
the resurrected culture of that time—it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that
onemustwrite poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in hisAestheticsthat as long as
(^55) Heaney, interviewed by Rand Brandes, ‘Seamus Heaney: An Interview’,Salmagundi,80(Fall
1988), 21. 56
W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic
Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 242.
(^57) Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, inPrisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34.
(^58) Susan Gubar addresses at length these tensions and the limits as the well as resources of poetrynot
to re-member but to register ‘discontinuity’ and ‘keep...aliveasdying’ the extreme limits of historical
knowledge (Susan Gubar,Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew(Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003), 7).