The Redress of Poetry
Metadata
- Author: Seamus Heaney
Highlights
He convinces us that the playhouse has the measure of the other house, that the entranced focus of the activity that took place as make-believe on one side of the yard was fit to match the meaning of what happened in earnest on the other side, and in doing so Frost further suggests that the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it. What Virgil called lacrimae rerum, the tears of things, can be absorbed and re-experienced in the playthings in the playhouse – or in the words of the poem. — location: 106
Moreover, it is in the space between the farmhouse and the playhouse that one discovers what I’ve called ‘the frontier of writing’, the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representation of those conditions in literature, and divides also the world of social speech from the world of poetic language. — location: 113
But in the end, the poem is more given over to the extraordinary than to the ordinary, more dedicated to the world-renewing potential of the imagined response than to the adequacy of the social one. For part of the time, the reader is confined to the company of the neighbours where all that is on offer is conventional wisdom in untransfigured phrases. But then consciousness is given access to a dimension beyond the frontier where an overbrimming, totally resourceful expressiveness becomes suddenly available; and this entry into a condition of illuminated rightness becomes an entry into poetry itself. — location: 136
The poem, in fact, is a showing forth of the way that poetry brings human existence into a fuller life. It is obviously less extravagant in its rhetoric than, say, Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’, but it is no less fully alive to the excitements and transformations which poetic activity promotes. In fact, we could even bend to our purpose here the words which conclude Rilke’s first sonnet in the Orpheus sequence; we could say that the opening lines of each of the five stanzas of ‘Afterwards’ ‘make a temple deep inside our hearing’, a temple which stands on the other side of the divide created by the passage of the god of poetry himself. — location: 146
The nobility of poetry, says Wallace Stevens, ‘is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without’. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. — location: 164
The heckler, therefore, is going to have little sympathy with Wallace Stevens when he declares the poet to be a potent figure because the poet ‘creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it, and … gives life to the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of [that world]’ – meaning that if our given experience is a labyrinth, its impassability can still be countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and presenting himself and us with a vivid experience of it. Such an operation does not intervene in the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. — location: 173
The heckler, therefore, is going to have little sympathy with Wallace Stevens when he declares the poet to be a potent figure because the poet ‘creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it, and … gives life to the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of [that world]’ – meaning that if our given experience is a labyrinth, its impassability can still be countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and presenting himself and us with a vivid experience of it. Such an operation does not intervene in the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. — location: 173
a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation … It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don’t think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favourable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are … It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. — location: 213
unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. — location: 375
The sense of guilt and unworthiness