Abstract.
Poetry, especially in times of social, cultural, and political upheaval, has always been under immense pressure to justify its existence. Yet perhaps this too, is violence, and the value of poetry does not simply derive from what it can do to effect change in the actual — to make it only serve such a purpose is to in fact enact a ‘misinterpretation, misapplication’ (OED, ‘violence’ 5c) of it and thus ‘unduly constrain’ (OED 5b) poetry. Heaney thus mounts his defence of poetry in his critical essay ‘The Redress of Poetry’ (1990), building upon Wallace Stevens’s characterisation of poetry’s force deriving from ‘violence within’, acting as a counterweight to the violence of reality that exerts, in kind, its own pressure. Drawing on Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s theory of poetic artifice, this essay argues that Heaney’s poetics is one of artifice, foregrounding the formal elements of poetry to assert its own self-generative potential distinctive from the realm of the actual. Heaney, by pointing up his own poetic technique, transforms the poetic text into an imaginative topography whereon landscapes of the real might be unwritten, reshaped, synthesised — a fecund inward territory written to recover the poetic identity denied by the history of reality.
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[The nobility of poetry] is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.
— Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’
Poetry, especially in times of social, cultural, and political upheaval, has always been under immense pressure to justify its existence, to ‘say something’ to effect change to the situation — or else what is its purpose? Heaney mounts his defence of poetry in his critical essay ‘The Redress of Poetry’ (1990) by building upon Wallace Stevens’s characterisation of poetry as a form of ‘violence from within’, suggesting in turn that poetry finds its full potential in being a ‘counterweight’ to reality, rather than direct response to reality (‘Redress’ 8). Poetry’s counteracting force to the violence and atrocities in reality can thus be understood as an imaginative ‘vehemence or intensity’ (Stevens 7; OED, ‘violence’ 4) seeking to construct an imagined, recuperative landscape in answer. But, as earlier suggested, there is also the violence of reality, which is the impulse to put poetry to work in reality, or otherwise to find how it may be ‘of present use’ (Heaney, ‘Redress’ 1). It is, in other words, an ‘undue constraint . . . restrict[ing] development’ (OED 5b), thus reducing the force of poetry by limiting the scope of its imaginative potential. Poetry, through its imaginative capacity, resists the violence of limitation that reality exerts on it.
I argue, therefore, that this imaginative vehemence of Heaney’s poetry lies in his foregrounding of poetic artifice, affirming its existence ‘of poetry as poetry’ (‘Redress’ 6) and resisting the violence of reality which threatens to reduce it. This essay first turns to Heaney’s engagement with the bogland as a poetical site of response, and suggests that the emphasis on its own artifice works towards redressing his own marginalised history through a reimagined poetic landscape. Metaphorisation becomes, for Heaney, not only a process of reshaping and synthesising poetic landscapes, but a way of ‘unwriting’ place (Heaney, ‘Pre-Natal Mountain’ 465), a means by which one might return to the beginning, an imaginative, inward territory on which a counterimage to reality might be written, thus recovering a poetic identity that has been denied by the history of reality.
What might arguably be the most conventional sense of poetic ‘violence’ is the manner by which a poet goes about writing of historical tragedies and atrocities, risking becoming a partaker of the violence that has been acted out on real bodies. This risk, as well as the ethics of writing, are not lost on Heaney: his collection North (1975) is a meditation on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, though one might be surprised to discover that he does not write directly about the subject of Irish history or the contemporary victims of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Instead, he contemplates as his subject matter the bodies found in the bogs of Jutland, preserved in the peat since the early Iron Age. As Neil Corcoran observes, Heaney’s sequence of metaphors is pointed for the way it exposes the ‘appropriation of the human victim into the poem’s own form and order’ (Corcoran 116), acknowledging the way in which the poet potentially becomes a collaborator in the violence acted upon the bog body. While this is not a literal violence, and may not cross over into the realm of the actual, it is nevertheless a poetical one that Heaney recognises is no less deleterious. The Grauballe man’s body, with its ‘twisted face’ and ‘bruised’, now ‘lies / perfected in my memory’ (OG 116), highlights the twisting enacted by poetic method, shaping it into other things through metaphor and in so doing even ‘bruising’ it. In this sense, then, that reshaping is a form of ‘lying’ — as ‘he lies’ is enjambed twice in the poem — a creative violence, and indeed artifice, that allows the poet to contemplate that ‘complex burden of experience’.
In a final metaphor, the poem closes by likening the Grauballe man to the statue of the ‘Dying Gaul’ in the Capitoline Museum, considering in explicit terms the way in which the poem may have aestheticised the body to the point of undue constraint, ‘too strictly compass[ing] it’:
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped. (OG 116)
That weighing between ‘beauty and atrocity’ speaks to the ‘counterweighting function’ of poetry: poetry is not only a counterweight to reality but must also balance and weigh itself. While the aesthetic contemplation seems to come undone in the last stanza, where the lyricism of the poem is slashed by the monosyllables of ‘slashed and dumped’, it in fact further foregrounds the poem’s artifice. It emphasises, then, the prominence of the role of poetic form and artifice itself in enacting violence. The words’ lexical contemporaneity shock and jolt us back to the present, evocative of news reports of crime and murders — even more particularly as Ramazani points out, the words appear in reports of victims of violence at the hands of the UVF in the Irish Times (98). Precisely because the poem is not explicitly contemplating the violence, victims, or other specificities of the Troubles, instead focused on its own poetic body born out of the preserved Iron Age body on which it dwells, the poem all the more ‘powerfully evokes the specificity of the Troubles’ victims — people whose killings exceed the compass of both aesthetic and journalistic representation’ (Ramazani 99). In other words, by returning the land to a prehistoric era, Heaney points up the analogous way in which the violence of the Troubles surpasses documentability. Similarly, the description of the Windeby girl in ‘Punishment’ threatens to overwrite the body with metaphor and turn the body into a mere vessel for the poet’s words, a ship travelling through historical time: the description of the girl’s ribs as ‘rigging’ becomes an extended nautical metaphor when combined with ‘the wind on her front’ and the ‘bough’ (OG 117), which is not only aurally but etymologically linked to the ‘bow’ of a ship. Yet the body in ‘Punishment’ is more overtly paralleled to the female victims of the IRA, and Heaney compares the poetic endeavour with the brutality of reality, where the poet becomes the ‘artful voyeur’ who would have cast ‘the stones of silence’ (OG 118). Here, poetry’s force is metaphorised as in collusion with the actual violence. As Heaney suggests from his very first poem ‘Digging’ in the image of the ‘squat pen rest[ing]; as snug as a gun’, there is a disquieting unease with which the ‘pen’ could metamorphose into ‘gun’. Yet, the ‘momentary stay’ of the semicolon checks such an impulse, containing the gun’s violence within the pen (Ang, ‘Through-Otherness’ 10) in contrast. Thus, the fact that in ‘Punishment’, the pen does not resist the ‘violence without’ suggests that, for poetry to retain its force and speak to an ethical redress, its violence must resist the violence of reality and find recourse within itself.
This recourse found within is not a nebulous nor abstract quality, but the very composite parts which make poetry a medium definable and distinct from others: in fewer words, poetic artifice. It is, as Veronica Forrest-Thomson defines, poetry’s formal devices, the components of poetry that set it apart from the realm of ordinary speech and prose. She argues that:
[c]ontemporary poetry has suffered from critics’ disposition to make poetry above all a statement about the external world, and therefore it is now especially important somewhat to redress the balance, to stress the importance of artifice. Poetry can only be a valid and valuable activity when we recognise the value of the artifice which makes it different from prose. (Forrest-Thomson xi)
Significantly, Forrest-Thomson and Heaney use similar vocabulary in their respective characterisations of the value of poetry, further setting poetry apart from the ‘external world’ or ‘reality’. One might be inclined to think that by foregrounding its artifice, poetry ostensibly enacts violence upon itself, where the poem is ‘unduly constrained’ (OED) and its potential limited by the reminder that it does not affect reality. Yet the goal is not to affect reality, because such a goal would be to place poetry in a subordinate position to it. Instead, poetry must ‘press back against’ reality, and foregrounding its artifice, as Forrest-Thomson and Heaney suggest, is precisely that which strengthens the force of poetry.
Thus, when Heaney uses the bog bodies as subject matter, he firmly situates his poems not as literal addresses to reality, but as experiments of imagination that, while drawing upon the ‘coordinates’ (‘Redress’ 8) of the actual, exert its resistance against it by leaning into the full generative ‘violence’ of poetry. Heaney himself notes that his encounter with the translation of P. V. Glob’s The Bog People (1965) was appositely in ‘the year the killing started, in 1969’ (‘Feeling’ 57), and undercurrents of the Northern Irish conflict and violence linger beneath the surface of the bog poems, but what is particularly significant is their engagement with poetry itself. The first words to ‘The Grauballe Man’, as Jahan Ramazani observes, indicate the poem as such, transforming it into ‘a speculative excursion stretching beyond the literal’ (97). The Grauballe man’s body which ‘seems to weep // the black river of himself’, is figured as self-produced, mirroring the many self-reflective, generative images in Heaney’s poetry: ‘like an eel swallowed / in a basket of eels, / the line amazes itself’ (OG 102); ‘a quill flourishing itself’ (‘In Memoriam: Sean O’Riada’). It thus underscores the poet’s imaginative remaking of the body and announces the poem as a metapoem. ‘As if he had been poured / in tar’ (OG 115) thus foregrounds the poem’s artifice from the outset, and the poem never lets us forget its artifice as it moves from one simile to another:
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root. (OG 115)
The repeated ‘g’ and ‘b’ consonants from ‘Grauballe’ also echo significantly in the poem’s aural landscape in ‘grain’, ‘bog’, ‘ball’, and ‘basalt egg’, calling to attention its artifice (Ramazani 97). Still, as the image of the ‘wet swamp root’ seems to emerge not from the image but the sounds of the preceding simile of the ‘swan’s foot’, the poem further gestures not only to its artifice but its self-generating capacity. In rhyme and the repetition of sounds is an act of memory, a way of the poem ‘creating and answering its own voice’ (McDonald 28-9), turning within itself to construct its artifice as both a ‘resistance and response’ (McDonald 30) to the actual; in the same way, Heaney’s engagement with the bog and digging into it is a way to reclaim his poetic inheritance to Ireland’s history: the bogland, for Heaney, is where the memory of the landscape is preserved (‘Feeling’ 54).
In other words, Heaney does not suppress the metaphorical and figurative qualities of his poetry ‘in favour of newslike transparency’ (Ramazani 97), but doubles down on them in resistance to the ‘pressure of reality’. Thus, in its intense metaphorisation, as the poem runs on with more metaphors in the subsequent stanzas, the poem points up its own technique of metaphor as that which resists the actual:
His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat
that has tanned and toughened. (OG 115)
Heaney’s characterisation renders the photograph of the Grauballe Man in remarkable detail, but more critically it resists reduction to a newslike account of the image. ‘The head lifts, / the chin is a visor / raised’ as though in defiance, the metaphor becoming resistance. Its power thus ‘transcends particular circumstance’, associating metaphor with metamorphosis (Tobin 119). Metaphor, after all, from the Greek ‘metaphora’, ‘is literally a “carrying across” or transference from one point to another’ (Kirby 532). Thus, the Grauballe man is no longer the body in the actual, but has been brought into the realm of the imagined through metaphor; it has been transformed from historical artefact — from Latin ‘arte’ and ‘facere’ meaning ‘to make art’, it is a cognate of ‘artifice’ (OED) — into poetic artifice. The fertility myth, therefore, has been reworked into the poetic form: where the Grauballe man was one of the ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring (Heaney, ‘Feeling’ 57), here it is a fecund body from which images and poetic ideas are metamorphosed, as suggested by the images of rebirth in the ‘basalt egg’ and ‘forceps baby’ (OG 116). Yet it is critical to consider that metaphor is ‘not a proper analogy but an imperfectly analogous resemblance’ (O’Rourke 13), and further still is predicated on its ‘anomalous’ elements, as Earl Mac Cormac theorises in A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (1985). It is precisely this ‘contradictory’ quality that generates ‘emotive tension’ and stimulates the expression, generation, and suggestion of new concepts (Mac Cormac 5-6; Ang, ‘Nostalgic Metaphor’ 2-3). We might thus understand Heaney’s conceptualisation of the relationship between reality and the imagined in light of the workings of metaphor. The ‘coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure’ in a kind of analogous resemblance to reality, even as it generates tension with the actual. In so doing, the imagination fulfils poetry’s ‘counterweighting function’ (‘Redress’ 8), thereby affirming poetry’s value as poetry. Furthermore, as metaphor takes dissimilar elements to be ‘yoked by violence together’ (Johnson 16), the poem, through its vehement artifice, reshapes the coordinates of the actual into an imaginative experiment that takes us beyond reality and firmly into a new place seen through the mind’s eye.
It is thus the ongoing process of self-examination and trial of the poet that drives the force of imagination, pushing back against reality through what Heaney calls the ‘mind’s capacity to construct a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity’ (‘Joy or Night’ 159). By suggesting that ‘one perceptible function of poetry is to write place into existence, [and] another . . . is to unwrite it’ (‘Pre- Natal Mountain’ 465), Heaney puts forth the imagined plane as that which ‘unwrites’ places of the actual, against the reality which tries to diminish it, in so doing creating a new poetic position liberated from the constraints of history and politics. In ‘Bone Dreams’, Heaney winds the bone fragment in a poetical pitch against colonial England:
I touch it again
I wind it in
the sling of my mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields. (OG 107)
The poet thus retaliates against the violence of historical reality, reimagining the potential of poetry’s acoustic effect in its evocation of David and Goliath, ‘turning the auditory core of English against England’ (Williams 117). The fact that David was also a harpist strengthens the metaphor of the ‘scop’s / twang’ (OG 108), where Heaney figures himself as the Anglo-Saxon poet: the ‘twang’ of the pitched bone fragment in the sling, then, is conflated with that of the stringed instrument, illuminating, therefore, that poetry’s ‘violence within’ is its imaginative potential and the retaliatory force of that potential. It is not just Heaney who assumes a defensive position against the imperial aggressor, but the force of poetic imagination pressing back against reality, opening up into a new territory as one follows the ‘drop / to strange fields’. Thus, in ‘Hailstones’, this setting-out to strange fields becomes an act of creation:
I made a small hard ball
of burning water running from my hand
just as I make this now
out of the melt of the real thing
smarting into its absence. (OG 302)
The making of a poem, then, ‘involves a death’ (Tobin 225), but a death which then gives rise to a presence, something new. The poet is up against the violent pressure of reality, just as the speaker endures the hailstones and creates something ‘out of the melt of the real thing’. Poetry is thus in an ongoing process of unmaking and making itself, indeed even a destruction and re-creation of the inward landscape of consciousness. Heaney thus embraces absence and ‘clearance’ (a term that figures significantly in Heaney’s oeuvre) in place of presence: against a world that demands ‘simplification’ in the form of stability, this is a destabilisation that ‘add[s] a complication where the general desire is for a simplification’ (‘Redress’ 2-4). Simplification, as Geoffrey Hill has articulated elsewhere in the Paris Review (2000), is a form of violence and tyranny (277). That Heaney metaphorises the liminal or ‘in progress’ state as a way to understand his poetry speaks to that resistance to external demands for that which is stable, certain, and straightforward. Poetry, like the hailstones, ‘rattl[es] the classroom window’, as though striking against the pane of reality, evoking that image of the intense pressure of creation pushing back against the suggested restrictiveness of the classroom. Yet these hailstones are ‘perfect first // and then in no time dirty slush’ (OG 302-3). The melting hailstones, then, gesture to that destabilisation, clearing just as the car’s ‘perfect tracks in the slush’ are created before eventually being cleared by the snow. It suggests, then, that the poetic self likewise takes shape in each new poem before clearing the slate and creating another new poem, moving on again. In a similar manner, the ‘wide pre-reflective stare’ of the child-poet in ‘Alphabets’ who writes ‘our name there / With his trowel point, letter by strange letter’ (OG 294) reflects poetry’s ‘unwriting’ capacity, returning us to the beginning point. Like the ‘risen, aqueous, singular lucent O’, poetry’s process of unwriting and rewriting circles an unknown space, an absence or liminal zone formed wherein one might set up poetry ‘as its own category’ (‘Redress’ 6), and find ‘a course for the breakaway of innate capacity, a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential’ (‘Redress’ 15).
Poetry, therefore, gains its force not from avoiding the actual, but working through it, testing itself against the actual. In ‘From the Frontier of Writing’ (1987), Heaney evokes an emotional landscape suffused with the stifling experiences of oppression, but finds in that experience an ‘analogue for the growth of conscience and consciousness’ (Tobin 231). Furthermore, its allegorical mode distances imagination from the event, a strategy that enables imagination to become part of the utterance, antithetical to the real (Tobin 233):
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration —
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient. (OG 297)
Heaney likens the Ulster experience of interrogation at a military checkpoint to creative experience, the drive through the military roadblock as analogue to the barriers to consciousness and conscience that might hamstring him in his journey of imaginative generation and growth. The experience of being held at a military checkpoint is transposed to a television interview, reflecting the poet scrutinised by and caught up in the pressure of the public to justify his poetry:
So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk. (OG 297)
In conflating the commonplace violence of his native Ulster with the violence of scrutiny, with the ‘marksman training down . . . like a hawk’, Heaney turns the violence inwards, as the poet passes through the ‘frontier’ in a trial of identity. Thus the frontier becomes a liminal space that resides between oblivion and creation, further emphasised by the terza rima of the poem, as the journey into the frontier parallels one through a modern hell (Tobin 231). If poetry, for Heaney, is ‘a principle of integration within such a context of division and contradiction’ (‘Frontiers’ 190), it is at the frontier that the poet abruptly breaks through and finds the path for recourse: ‘And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed’ (OG 297). His pen is freed beyond the limits of the restrictive zone, moving into the world beyond where things are ‘flowing and receding’. He is released into a clearance between imagination and reality, where the reality of the ‘posted soldiers’ is merged with the metaphor in ‘flowing and receding / like tree shadows into the polished windscreen’ (OG 298). In so doing, poetry, as Heaney articulates in his similarly titled critical essay ‘Frontiers of Writing’, becomes ‘a vehicle of harmony’, ‘both socially responsible and creatively free’ (‘Frontiers’ 193). The poem, then, as a chronicle of a political, cultural, and historical hell into which writing enters, does not solipsistically ignore the events of the actual, but directly confronts them, in so doing confronting itself in an ongoing process of testing. As Richard Russell argues, quoting Heaney’s words in ‘Redress’:
the most original poetry will redress a given vision of reality and transform it into another equally plausible representation of reality. Moreover, it is only through the discovery of this other liminal zone, ‘the frontier of writing, the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representation of those conditions in literature’, that the poet can create, not merely occupy, this new position. (Heaney qtd. in Russell 37)
Thus, Heaney sees this ‘unwriting’ of place as that which gives way to a liminally enabling position — it is an active engagement with and simultaneous resistance of reality, leaning into poetry’s imaginative force to unwrite and thus rewrite.
The force and value of poetry does not simply derive from what it can do to effect change in the actual — to make it serve such a narrow purpose is to enact a violence upon it, to in fact enact a ‘misinterpretation, misapplication’ (OED, ‘violence’ 5c) of it and thus ‘unduly constrain’ (OED 5b) poetry. Its force derives, then, from its ‘violence within’, which is to say it acts as a counterweight to the violence of reality, exerting in kind its own counteracting pressure in the form of its imaginative intensity. By engaging with and thereby resisting the actual, the imaginative force of poetry is strengthened through the pressure, thus creating a ‘another truth to which we can have recourse’ (‘Redress’ 8). It is in this new imagined territory, always in the process of clearing and rewriting itself, that one can ‘sweep ahead into one’s full potential’ (‘Redress’ 15).
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