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This conflict barely had a right to exist and certainly shouldn’t have been moved into the centre of the arena, just as there should never have been a referendum in the EU, which has had similar consequences. I don’t think (for instance) that the Movement was a major influence on subsequent poetry and what was wrong with it wasn't’ that it followed certain poetical formulae; what was wrong with it was that it was feeble. I think the influences on poetry of the 1950s/60s included much more importantly people like Thomas, Eliot, McDiarmid, Graham and Auden and this body of work campaigned for a fullness of content which is now very difficult to recover in the noise and distraction of a conflict of narrownesses. There is nothing unmodern about Heaney, he merely attends to a different perspective of modernity and he rightly belongs in the tradition I sketch above, as does Lee Harwood. It wasn’t his fault that an institutionalised neurosis demanded saints gods and heroes. PR PS I have come across, directly or in print, at least five people who declared that Heaney completely changed their lives and whose regard of him can only be described as worship. The word “saved” was used. On 17 Sep 2017, at 5:40 pm, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote: What's 'narrow' in this context? Well again it wasn't me who introduced the word. It was in the thread. From my perspective, at that time especially (late 60's early 70's) it meant work that did not appear to concern itself with the modern, with the variety, with the creative, with the width of experience that writing could engage with. Probably sounds stupid now, but that is how I felt. Subject wise narrow meant confined, too particular - over-familiar poetry concerns. Creative wise it meant unexciting, traditional. Come on, I was a young man really excited by lots of stuff I was reading and could relate to, but here was this bloke writing about his granpappy down on the farm. Would I call it 'narrow' now? No. But it doesn't make any difference. As for 'laying the blame' I don't 'blame' Heaney for anything, Trying to understand what happened and why is a pretty normal business, maybe not entirely neutral but then what is? Cheers Tim On 17 Sep 2017, at 16:23, Jamie McKendrick wrote: > Tim, your post includes two questions, without question marks, both of which imply a resounding yes, at least from your perspective. > 1. “But isn't it the case that Heaney was always 'narrow'...” > 2. “ but wasn’t it the case that the move to put some distance between the two poetries was made initially by the likes of Heaney, by which I do mean the likes of Heaney, and this happened quite a while before 1977... > > In answer to the first I would say no, very definitely not. You’re as entitled to be unenthusiastic about Heaney’s poetry as David is to find it like viewing paintings from the Royal Academy, but you’ll know that many readers of Heaney, myself included, don’t share this view at all. The notion of ‘narrowness’ in the work of a poet isn’t incompatible with real quality or interest, but even then I find Heaney’s work far from narrow. > > As regards the 2nd question, it’s very hard to make this claim convincingly, and it can’t be done on the basis of one story told about an event 40 years ago. And why do you want to lay the blame of the conflict on one side anyway, as in a kind of ‘he started it’ school playground brawl?