The Pursuit of Good Writing - Seamus Heaney and Finders Keepers

What are we, as writers, in relation to our work? How do we write? Why do we write as we do? What do we do as we write? And, most importantly, what makes for great writing?

To begin to try and answer these questions we need to look from a sense of the indigenous, the childhood upbringing - the 'the hiding place' of the works that are to come.

'The hiding place of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now, when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration.'

A voice, the basis of all poetry is created in the past. It is where we can get our own feeling into our words and make our words have the feel of us about them. For Heaney the process of writing is one of 'digging,' and with his shovel, the pen, he comes up with memories of pastoral Northern Ireland and the local slang of his school days. It is a recognition of the self in words, rather than a recognition of the self - then words.

To dig, is to find the self in the written words, to find what is worthwhile, what has meaning, what you want to keep. Writing is not about a mysterious creation of new thoughts and new language, it is about searching through ones thoughts and expression, to best reflect the meaning of the self and its relation with the world around it.

Heaney moves his thoughts to the work of TS Eliot, a writer whose work he confesses to have found cryptic to the point of confusion, but with some patience and interpretation discovered a larger, greater meaning.

'It is the double capacity we possess as human beings - the capacity to be attracted at one and at the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and the entrapments of what is beyond us - it is this double capacity that poetry springs from and addresses.'

Eliot puts down the first yardstick in the creation of great poetry - to create a habit of expression in life to an extent that it creates a synthesis with work, to become the entrancer to mere humans. Without a life, or habit, behind it, the manner of expression becomes meaningless. Poetry is not just a means to reflect collective consciousness in our world, it is to create a language away from it, and to then re-start and re-interpret the world from there.

'It was on Long Island in 1979, after my first semester at Harvard, that I suddenly started one morning to shape stanzas from scratch, rhyming them and keeping my eyes as much to the left, on the Irish, as to the right, on O'Keefe's unnerving trot.'

It is through a re-interpretation of language that Heaney is looking to create that challenge to the reader, of the known and the unknown, entrancing them towards what is new to them - his own voice.

So how does a poet achieve this, this new voice, or what Eliot describes as the 'auditory imagination,' invigorating every word, going back to the origin and bringing something back?

Well the answer is not simple. Great poets all do it, but all do it in completely different ways. For instance if we compare three writers - Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, all 'hoarders and shoarers of what they take to be the real England' - we see three completely different approaches taking place, three contrasting auditory imaginations. Hughes is the mythologian and West Yorkshire realist, Hill the solemn mason of words and Larkin the Mediterranean humanist. The all have a piety to their local origins that gives them the potential to bring something new back. Through their techniques they reflect Englishness and its interpretation in their minds, and in this way they are linguistic revolutionaries (of the Kantian kind) seeing the world, seeing how it ISN'T how it is, and considering how it is for them. It enables them to consider not the matter of England, but what is the matter with England.

It is therefore a question of ignoring what appears to be there - England, Ireland; a forest, a girl - going back to the start in a Cartesian way, ignoring what appears to be to find what is, gaining understanding, and then re-interpreting from the perspective of the self.

The self though, does not necessarily re-interpret in the manner of great poetry. It requires a 'habit of expression,' a manner of existence, and to think about how one should go about this, Heaney looks to Yeats, and his particular approach to poetry, to life and to life as a poet.

'The man who sits down to breakfast is a "bundle of accident and incoherence" and the man reborn in his poem is "something intended, complex."'

There is a definitive lifestyle choice required here, a life as a poet or not as a poet, but not both.

'Above all it is necessary that the lyric poet's life be known, that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man; that it is no little thing to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go on a path no other man has gone, to accept one's own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it...to give one's own life as well as one's words to the criticism of the world.'

The implication is therefore that the artist is the bodily representation of his work's vision; a self defined and set in stone, 'Yeatsian' in this case. However, this does not remove any room for change, development or complete re-interpretation. The self is malleable and the work changes accordingly. As Heaney notes:

'In order to defy the philistinism of his own class and the pious ignorance of another creed Yeats remade himself, associated himself with cold, disdainful figures of whom Parnell was the archetype and 'The Fisherman' was a pattern:

'Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began
In scorn of this audience
Imagining a man...
...And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have him one
Poem as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'

For Heaney, Yeats represents a challenge like Eliot in that he 'reminds us that revision and slog work are what you have to udergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish, and that if you manage to do one kind poem in your own way, you should face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly.'

I like to think of it in terms of man panning for gold in the American West. He diligently stands, day after day, sifting through the mud and the sand, until one day he finds some particles of gold. Then a day later, the price of gold plummets and he moves to South Africa to mine for diamonds.

Yeats's attitude is without doubt an admirable one and there can be no doubt that an artistic work must be juxtaposed by a certain ethic of existence. However it does leave the sense of self-understanding that comes through the work itself somewhat redundant. As Heaney begins in his exploration of the poetry of his Northern Irish contemporaries:

'The only reliable release for the poet was the appeasement of the achieved poem. In that liberated moment, when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in those moments of self-justification and self-obliteration the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments. It is this deeper psychological compulsion which lies behind the typical concern of the Northern Irish poets with style, with formal finish, with linguistic relish and play.'

We must emphasise here that it not so simple to consider poetry as aloof from its original political and linguistic habitat. It is not merely a kind of transcendent expression that has no concerns for the problems of our time. To quote Heaney's wonderful metaphor:

'It is one of the urban myths that there is a recognisable rise in the birth rate after a power-cut.'

The poets of Northern Ireland comprehend the violence and the bloodshed of the past from separate places - Mahon from great historical distance, Langley in sexual analogy, Muldoon in a precipitate of language - and they still comprehend its causes and effects without being 'deliberately provocative nor culpably detached.'

There is something about this sense of enforced detachment and stance that seems wrong as the motivation for the artist's vision. It feels to me that it should perhaps not begin with any innate 'position' at all, but rather from an emptiness of the self, and the feeling and expression that emanate from this.

Heaney considers this in his analysis of the 'placeless heaven' of Patrick Kavanagh:

'Unable to bear the warm breath of success from his initial work, Kavanagh took to walking the fields of Innisken, to lose himself, and to find a new artistic method - a direction, yes, but not one with a need for a destination, a nonchalance in exploration.'

This seems more on the right lines, and Heaney concurs:

'This then is truly creative writing. It does arise from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but the overflow is not a reactive response to some stimulus in the world out there. Instead, it is a spurt of abundance from a source within and spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self.'

Bu then in a background of say...Eastern Europe, can a situation of violence and political unrest, like that of Northern Ireland, be resigned into a nothingness of self. Surely there are some empirical stimuli that will always be the source of work, no matter if we like it or not?
Heaney confronts through the writing of Zbignew Herbert, a Polish poet who plied his trade with works such as 'Report from a Besieged City,' and whose perspective could be related to Yeats, in the sense that his work stands before the political, but unlike Yeats does not actively participate.

'The impassiveness, the perspective, the impersonality, the tranquillity, all derive from his unblindable stare at the facts of pain, the recurrence of injustice and catastrophe; but they derive also from a deep love for the whole Western tradition of religion, literature, and art, which have remained open to him as a spiritual resource, helping him to stand his ground.'

The poet's work must not just be taken into the political, but at the same time it must also not lurch away from it, like a horrible meaning to be repressed in the subconscious. Poetry must see the world in all its forms and express itself from there. As Heaney continues:

'Herbert is as familiar as any twentieth century writer with the hollow man and has seen more broken columns with his eyes than most literary people have with their imaginations, but this does not end up in a collapse of to this trust in human endeavour. On the contrary, it summons back to mind the whole dimensions of that endeavour...something that stands before our understanding once again like a Cathedral in the wilderness.'

If the poet ignores the whole world of human goodness, and its attempts to better the world then surely his artistic vision is lacking, is swayed to the point of superficiality.

Perhaps we need to consider a combination of these methods, of looking to the great works and achievements of previous cultures and then looking inside, to that great romantic ideal of unfettered self-expression. Eliot again is probably the best example of finding a way to combine these two approaches, as stated in his essay of 1929:

'There is something more local about languages on which Shakespeare and Racine had to express themselves...Medieval Latin tended to concentrate on what men of various races and lands could think together. Some of the character of this universal language seems to me to inhere in Dante's Florentine speech; and the localization (Florentine speech) seems if anything to emphasise the universality, because it cuts across the modern division of nationality.'

While much of Eliot's earlier work owes an obvious debt to this form of language, many of his latter pieces seem more localised in their phrases. For example if we take this famous excerpt from the Waste Land:


Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout?

The language shows a sharp contrast to the mythological considerations of his past, and for Heaney it his debt to Dante that has given Eliot this capacity to express in a less formalised manner. He has 'the freedom to surrender to the promptings of his own unconscious, because of his willingness to accept Dante as the basis for his thoughts.' He is submitting his intelligence and sensibility to a framework of beliefs which were inherited and communal and thus his imagination has a new sense of autonomy 'bewildered on the flood of its own inventiveness.'

This inventiveness is the key to great artistic expression, but part of Eliot's brilliance is that at the same time he will always look back to the past. If we are to express the realities of the human condition it seems churlish to suggest that we do so by ignoring the thousand years of thought that went before.

So we understand that we must write with a separate individual expression, and an understanding of cultural tradition. From this then, a further question is prompted. What is the point? Why do we write what we write? Should there be a reason, a philosophical grounding? As Eliot himself said:

'It is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is justified activity.'

Heaney considers this through another wonderful poem by Zbigniew Herbert called 'A Knocker.'

'There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities

it's easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down from their foreheads

my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick

I strike the board
it answers me
yes - yes
no - no

for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens

I thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralist's dry poem
yes - yes
no - no

Should poetry abandon its 'freedom and fluency' and barber its luxuriant locks down to a stubble of moral and ethical grounds?

I suppose the answer to this is simple. Poetry is poetry. It is not a science lesson. To an extent it should convey a sense of the moral and the political - this is what existence is all about after all - however it must do so in its own manner, through the lyric and the aesthetic. If the poetry is written with enough skill then its fundamental ethic or politic should come across anyway. In fact, it should be more powerful for being expressed in such a way, holding far tighter to the mind of the reader than any opinion of aphorism. As Heaney states:

'In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil - no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.'

The lyric poem must be separate from ordinary speech to exist as it is. As Eliot says on the reading of poetry:

'It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a great number of experiences; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or deliberately.'

In this respect we can view the abrupt unfamiliarity of a poet such as Auden in a less frustrating light. Heaney excuses his elaborate crypticness from an experienced eye as he suggests:

'This lyric is not meant to fill into steps with our usual commonsensical speech-gait, nor is it eager to stimulate the emotional and linguistic normality of 'a man speaking to men;' rather it presents us with that 'new thing' which abides adjacent and parallel to lived experiences but which, in spite of perfect sympathy for those living such experiences, has no desire to dwell among them.'

Auden has parallels to Eliot, channelling the reader to the different, the individual and the new. To this effect the poet should not be didactic; it should not speak from above the reader, but should take their thoughts somewhere else, manoeuvring their minds from the initial required concentration.

To emphasise this point Heaney looks at the writing of Lowell, and the manner by which his work progressed through his career. Lowell had an initial overwhelming belief in the impulse that starts a poem and the utilisation of craft to express this - an 'igneous rock,' to borrow Heaney's metaphor, hardened straight out of the earth from an explosion of thoughts and ideas. Lowell is looking to reflect collective consciousness but is doing so through a megaphone on top of skyscraper:

'When the whale's viscera go and the roll
Of its corruption overruns this world
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole
And Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars sing out together
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers
The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide,
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.'

The reader cannot sit in that required state of empty concentration while this tirade of voices is being forced upon it. The thoughts of a poem cannot be vociferated over and over, they must 'rise towards their own surface.' If we compare the above work to Lowell's later, more ambivalent pieces, the difference becomes obvious. Here we read in Ulyssees and Circe:

'After so many millennia,
Circe,
are you tired
of turning swine to swine?

How can I please you,
if I am not a man?

I have grown bleak-boned with survival -
I who hoped to leave the earth
younger than I came.

Age is the bilge
we cannot shake from the mop

Age walks on our faces
at the tunnel's end,
if faith can be believed,
our flesh will grow lighter.'

The writing feels natural and organic, and its meaning forms in us as such, growing and laying root in our minds rather than flying in one ear and out the other.

It would seem that reaching this stage of creative licentiousness is the practice of all poets, and that the former stages are perhaps a part of this. Heaney provides a perfect depiction of this through Wordworth's memories of his younger self:

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! - many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him. And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

The poet begins by learning how to place his hands together so the sound of the whistle comes put right, where the poetic making itself is an end and an anxiety. Then there is the second stage of social relation and emotional persuasion, 'where the owl-cry of the poems stimulates the answering owl-dream in the audience and strikes as a remembrance.'
Finally there is the third kind, developed in Wordsworth's eyes (and encompassing a wider rule of the artistic experience) where the boy has his skills mocked, and stands in silence, sensing something on a higher plain than mere owl calls, where the 'poem's absolute business is an unconceding pursuit of poetic insight and poetic knowledge.' Heaney notes that third stage in The Elm by Sylvia Plath, a poet who combines craft with the over-elaboration that comes from an uncertainty of destination:

'Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow,
How you live and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.'

So what exactly is it? What is this new level of 'poetic insight and poetic knowledge?' Where does it take the reader and how do we see that it is there? Let's take an example of a piece where these qualities are unmistakable, Marlowe's Hero and Leander:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should love, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

There are two ways we can analyse this slice lyrical perfection. Heaney begins with the technicalities of the piece and how its power is created that way:

'In a poem,' Joseph Brodsky writes, 'the testimony to spiritual tension is intonation; or, more accurately, intonation in a poem - and not in a poem only - stands for the motion of the soul.' The motion of the soul, then, in Hero and Leander is forward towards liberation and knowledge, but it is a motion countered by an implicit acknowledgement of repression and constraint. This dialectic is expressed formally by the co-existence of a supple voice within a strict metrical pattern, and tonally by a note that is modulating constantly between the scampish and the plangent.

In simple terms, Marlowe is showing off and being spontaneous at the same time, and as we have realised from earlier exploration of Eliot in particular, this is the path to greatness in poetic expression. Incredible talent, but talent drawn from technique and from the technique of others, combined with an artistic spontaneity and autonomy derived away from the framework of tradition - that is where great poetry lies, beyond the traditional core of imagination. The writer must be prepared to access this place, to go to levels deeper than they may have expected 'extending the alphabet of emotional and technical expression,' so that tradition, politics, national boundaries, childhood memories and technique are all included, but are also moved away from, to somewhere different, somewhere new, a place where poetry can be something great. As Heaney states in his own simple terms:

This is how poems help us live
They match the meshes in the sieve
Life puts us through, they take and give
Our proper measure
And prove themselves most transitive
When they give pleasure.'