Glimpse into a Poet's Mind

This is a very cool article from The Economist on the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney - a review of a new book of interviews with poet.

Book details

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
By Dennis O’Driscoll

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 522 pages; $32. Faber and Faber; £22.50

Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

Glimpse into a poet's mind

Dec 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition

BORN a Catholic in Unionist Ulster, this eloquent son of a taciturn cattle-dealer is one of the most celebrated poets of the post-war era. For all that, there is no biography of Seamus Heaney, and no edition of his collected poems. These interviews by Dennis O’Driscoll, an old friend, were carried out over many years mainly by post and must, for the time being, serve as biography and autobiography.

The book is both an account of the poet’s life, which began in 1939 at Mossbawn Farm in County Derry, and an examination of his verse. Perhaps most of all it is a foray into the workings of a poet’s mind, a “journey into the wideness of language”, as he said in a speech accepting the Nobel prize. Poetry crept up on Mr Heaney in 1962, and never let go.

He is best known for the way in which he has mined his own life for the matter of his poems. What he writes about is solidly grounded in a sense of place; his language is rooted in the speech patterns of Ulster, with something of that Derry quality of “phonetic grunting”. He recalls, lovingly, the old black leatherette sofa on which he and his siblings played; the magical dial of the radio; the horse which rubbed its flanks along the wall.

He has a strong purchase on earth-bound things, an enduring commitment to places that, as he says, “unlock the word-hoard”. He speaks of what a poem does for its author, restoring something to the self. Good poems are not willed into being but come from things remembered with a certain aura. “It is a matter of waft rather than word-choice,” he tells us, with a characteristically musical turn of phrase.

Poems can also be unpredictable and unbiddable creatures. They can arrive at all hours of the day or night, and woe unto to the poet who is not ready to receive them. The first line of a poem called “Bogland”, for example, came to him as he was putting his right leg into his trousers, he recalls. But when a poem has come through, and has been tested to its limits by revision and repeated re-readings, it can seem as solid as an iron bar.

His engagement with the politics of Ulster in particular, and Ireland in general, has been marked by caution. There is too much point-scoring and too much fervour. A poem is a truth-telling place and not a killing field. And what, in short, would Mr Heaney say that poetry was good for in an age which reads so little of it? “Poetry”, he tells us, “constitutes a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”

Tags: Glimpse into a Poet's Mind, The Economist, Seamus Heaney, poetry, literature, books, interviews, Stepping Stones, Dennis O’Driscoll