Hi Kit,
Part of the problem here is that if you start with the poems you have
to kind of pretend that all the other stuff about 'schools and groups
and influence and power-politics' doesn't exist, as if you were coming
to the things in a state of innocence, which of course we're not. In
my experience the pretense cannot deal with the pressure - you end up
pulling the poems apart but in a vacuum, without anything to back up
your opinions.
I like your description of the 'swotty sensibility' - that tone that
runs through his work is a real turn-off for me, true. There are
plenty of postmod writers too who have a 'swotty sensibility', but
they don't have that suffocating sense of possessing earthy wisdom,
something else that rubs me up the wrong way. Your comment about him
being offputting for people under a pensionable age and those over who
came out of the 60's is very funny.
Happy Easter
Tim A.
On 10 Apr 2009, at 10:34, Kit Fryatt wrote:
> Fair enough, if you're just not interested. And I can see that the
> Establishment-logroll-Festschrifty side of Heaney is a powerful
> disincentive
> to interest. & even when he's not writing in offeeshal mode he can be
> "literary" in a sort of earnest 11+, matriculatory way that is
> offputting
> and alien to a) people under pensionable age b) people over that age
> who to
> some extent bought into the complex of thought and general stuff we
> sometimes vaguely refer to as "the 60s" c) so just about everyone,
> really.
> I think Heaney's fans generally ignore this stuff, but it occurs in
> worrying
> volume from _Field Work_ on. Is this sort of swotty sensibility
> what people
> mean when they call Heaney a Georgian, I wonder? Because the poetry
> isn't;
> but there is something sort of dominie about the intelligence behind
> the
> worst of it.
>
> But the thing that struck me and dismayed me about the Jacket debate
> was
> just how little poetry got discussed. It was all schools and groups
> and
> influence and power-politics. I'm not saying those things don't
> matter, or
> that poetry takes place somehow transcendentally above or apart from
> them,
> but if you want to make a point about a poet, it seems to me the
> poems are
> the best place to start, better even (especially) than interview
> material.
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