From: Gabriel Gudding <[log in to unmask]>
> When I was kid/dweeb I was enthusiast for Heaney's work. And though it
> seems in many ways his work has moved out of hte fields (but only
slightly)
> and into the livingroom, his work is obiously so at variance with the
> Ireland of the 80s and 90s that it can only be seen as some kind of
> Freudian nostalgic reaction formation.
I'd agree with Gabe that Heaney's work isn't of the eighties on, but after
that, I begin to get a wee bit disturbed. Freudian nostagia, yet? And
where do we ever find him in the livingrooms? Whatever he is, he isn't
Larkin.
> Though this of course was no
> surprise to me, what struck me upon getting actually to
> see/taste/smell/listen to Ireland is the disparity between Heaney's
Ireland
> ,as represented in his poetry, and the current wealth booming Ireland,
like
> every kid on Grafton street had a cell phone at his head (never before
> could I see at a glance over a crowd the statistical difference between
> right and left handers).
Sure, but Heaney began writing in the sixties in Belfast (not Dublin) and in
a political/literary context which was split more than several ways.
> Anyway, Heaney's work in that context is so
> purposefully offering the mythic Ireland, tying himself as powerfully to
> the "ancient' Ireland in order to retain a kind, maybe, of literary power:
> Sweeney, bogs, scribes who flap their heads, laconic dock workers, ghosts
> on Station Island yadayada; a world so at odds with anything really there
> anymore,
Well, bogs first of all. Take "Punishment":
I have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings ...
etc., before and after in the poem. This has sod all to do with any
romantic Ireland (and anyway, Aarhus is in Denmark, not Ireland) and
everything to do with "the tribal, intimate revenge". Gabe's use of
"Ireland" in the paragraph above begs so many questions, but whatever,
Heaney's intimate betrayals in the Bog Poems take (took) place in Belfast,
not Dublin (lucky Dublin) and are as much Belfast's Bogside as they are Old
Scandinavia's peat-pits.
And when it comes to a mythic, nostalgic Ireland, surely the figure conjured
up is Yeats -- Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the
grave ..." And Heaney's Big Daddy was never Yeats but Patrick Kavanagh.
There is a past in Heaney, sure, that resonates in the poems, but it's the
past of Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger", not Yeats' Celtic twilight. And even
the later Yeats is treated a bit skeptically in Heaney. "Easter 1916"
emerges as (itself) nostalgic when Heaney ghosts it behind the rhythms of
"Four Men", their brains beaten out on the railway track.
Robin Hamilton
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