Like many, I have been following this thread with fascination and
appreciation. And while I hesitate to take issue with Prof. Herron, it does
seem to me that Heaney is not on entirely solid ground when he cites Ezra
Pound in this context, since--as I am sure everyone is well aware--Pound is
himself an example of just how problematic the relationship between art and
politics, including the artist's politics can be.
Peter C. Herman
At 04:52 PM 3/24/03 +0000, you wrote:
>Seamus Heaney has been mentioned; interesting to find his balanced opinion
>on all this, from his Oxford lectures collected in *The Redress of Poetry*
>(Faber and Faber 1995).
>
>First he quotes from the *Spenser Handbook* to summarize the "'rough work
>for Lord Grey'" done by Raleigh and Spenser. Then he dons Yeats' mantle:
>
>"We have been forced to cast a suspicious eye on the pretensions of
>Renaissance humanism by having its sacred texts placed in the context of
>their authors' participation in such brutally oppressive escapades; we
>have been rightly instructed about the ways that native populations and
>indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing
>enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the
>conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions,
>rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of
>cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication
>of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue
>correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and
>solely as a function of an oppresive discourse, or as a reprehensible
>masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the
>presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called 'the !
>grand elementary principle of pleasure', and that pleasure comes from the
>doing-in-language of certain things. One has to allow for the fact that,
>in the words of Ezra Pound:
>
>'the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less
>like electricity or radio activity, a force transfusing, welding and
>unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright
>sand and sets it in swift motion. You may make what image you like.'
>
>Pound's image does not preclude art's implication in the structures and
>shifts of power at any given moment, but it does suggest a salubrious role
>for it within the body politic; and another image which the Czech poet
>Miroslav Holub uses about theatre may also be adduced here. Holub sees
>the function of drama, and so by extension the function of poetry and of
>the arts in general, as being analogous to that of the immunity system
>within the human body. Which is to say that the creative spirit remains
>positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the
>indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and
>written in over the good optative mood of human potential." (23-4)
>
>Amen (now if only Heaney would keep writing prose!). Those of us on the
>field trip to Raleigh's house in Youghal, during the Kilcolman conference
>of 1999, will remember the hostess' story about Heaney's visit to the same
>place; upon entering the oak-paneled room with a dormer windor, where once
>in legend Spenser sat composing his verse, Heaney reportedly quoted
>Spenser at length by heart (the hostess didn't say what). Yeats, also
>aware of politics, called Spenser's poetry "bars of gold thrown down one
>upon another" (to paraphrase); hardly a defeatist view.
>
>[For Heaney on Yeats' relation to Spenser and the hierophanic literary
>"quincunx" of Ireland, i.e., Kilcolman, Tor Ballylee, Joyce's Martello
>tower, MacNeice's Carrickfergus and (in the center) "''the pre-natal
>mountain''" of ancient Ireland, cf. *Redress* pp. 199-200; of note also is
>McCabe's recent discussion of Heaney in his bookreview of Hamilton's new
>edition in the recent Sp N] --TH
>
>
>----------
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