the pathetic sigh of the self for itself

I think a lot of writing that passes under the name of poetry is actually self-indulgent, and too self-satisfying, and kind of profiles itself in a flattering way. You can hear the pathetic sigh of the self for itself, which is the voice of the decade or of the times. Much that is being written doesn't place enough scrutiny upon itself; it's not aware of the demands which are there in the art. On the other hand, having said that, poems have absolutely no ethical duty to stand between the goalposts of history and save all the balls that are flung at them. They can stand and be umpire and watch them go past, put up a flag, or they can turn their back. But the poem has to know at least that there is a game going on. The poem has to understand its place and its placing, even if it is a poem of total harmony, total beauty, and apparently total innocence.

- Seamus Heaney, in interview with Harry Thomas' class at Davidson College, as published in Talking with Poets.

we are in a new world of understanding and character

Courtney Robertson: Last year I was studying a University College, Cork. I took a poetry course, and your name came up a number of times. We were talking about the idea of women as nature and men as culture in looking at "Digging." How do you respond to that critical argument?

Seamus Heaney: Well, it's a critical language, it has a new approach. Patricia Coughlan has written an article, a polemical article, about that. And it's necessary that those inherited tropes be interrogated. Nevertheless, poetry isn't just its thematic content. Poetry is in the musical intonation. What is missing in a lot of that criticism is any sense of the modulation, the intonation, the way the spirit moves in a cadence. It deliberately eschews the poetryness of poetry in order to get at its thematic and its submerged political implication. That's perfectly in order as a form of intellectual exercise and political protest, but it is not what the thing in itself is. Within this new critical dispensation, Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus," you know, could be taken to task for silencing the little girl who is the occasion of them - the child who died. You could see a fierce political point being made against Rilke for this, At the same time, the Sonnets refuse the terms of that argument. This is the old argument between, if you like, truth and beauty, put in another way. Or between the Puritans and the playwrights. That criticism is very Puritan: extirpate the mistaken because we are in a new world of understanding and character. This is a pattern that keeps repeating.

- Seamus Heaney, in interview with Harry Thomas' class at Davidson College, as published in Talking with Poets (Handsel Books, 2002).

our very solitudes and distresses are credible

In one of the poems best known to students in my generation, a poem which could be said to have taken the nutrients of the symbolist movement and made them available in capsule form, the American poet Archibald MacLeish affirmed that "A poem should be equal to/not true." As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it...


Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

- Two excerpts from Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel Lecture. Heaney died today at the age of 74.

beating the gold out further

Dennis O'Driscoll: Do you ever feel burdened by the sheer amount of work you know it will require to do justice to a particular inspiration?

Seamus Heaney: One of the difficulties is to know whether a little quick flash of lyric is sufficient. You have the invitation and the inspiration, for want of a better word, but the question that I can never answer is this: to what extent the will should do the work of the imagination, as Yeats said; how far you should push a thing...

When you're starting out as a young poet, you love the high of finishing. So you do the lyric quickly and that's a joy. As you go on, the joy of actually doing it, of beating the gold out further, is what you ideally want. But then the doubt comes in: Am I killing it? Am I deadening it?... Another question to which there are different attitudes is whether imperfection hasn't got its imperatives also, or whether you should make the poem as trim and as perfect as possible...

DO: What are your thoughts about accessibility and obscurity in poetry?

SH: ... I am a slow reader myself and have to be convinced that there's a chance a payload is going to be delivered... If I encounter difficult poems, I listen - that's the only way I can read - for an indication of somebody who knows the score poetically, who's after something beyond all this fiddle.

- from an interview in the December 2008 issue of POETRY, which also includes these fantastic poems by Todd Boss, some of my favourite poems from POETRY in 2008.