Governing the tongue: Heaney among the philosophers

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes From ‘Flight Path’, in Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). According to the poem, the encounter occurred ‘One bright May morning, nineteen-seventy-nine’. This shift in IRA strategy led, for example, to the election of Bobby Sands as an MP in 1981. The man's demand for (presumably) a poem makes sense in light of the continuous use of poems (and ballads) as a feature of political action on both sides of the conflict in Ireland, since at least the seventeenth century. ‘Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?’ W.B.Yeats, ‘Man and the Echo’ (in Last Poems, 1939). See W.B.Yeats, The Poems, ed. D. Albright (London: J.M.Dent & Sons, 1990). A classic Irish example would be Patrick Pearse, but Yeats and the Field Day group (including Heaney himself) could also be mentioned. Michel Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in Essential Works, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion (Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 343. French text in Dits et écrits 1954–1988: II 1970–1975, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.), (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Translation modified. Foucault's essay is a review of Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), two books which set themselves the task of ‘overturning Platonism’. Final lecture series, ‘Le courage de la vérité’, Collège de France, 1984. Unpublished; recordings available at Fonds Michel Foucault, l'IMEC, Caen. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1989, p. xvi. Henceforth GT, with page numbers given in the text. This is Heaney's gloss. See The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 2. Henceforth RP, with page numbers given in the text. We can note that this quote is also used by Yeats as an epigraph to his strangely quietist poem ‘Politics’ (1938). Auden praises Yeats' poetry, but seems to deny its political efficacy. It is, however, debatable whether the poem as a whole is committed to such a blanket denial of the efficacy of poetry: ‘Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still/For poetry makes nothing happen’. W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, in E. Mendelson (ed.), W.H. Auden: Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, London, 1979), p. 82. I have principally used the following translation: Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1983). Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). The title of this collection refers to a builder's or carpenter's tool for measuring balance – which may be known to some readers simply as a ‘level’. By Carolyn Mulholland, a Northern Ireland sculptor. See, for example, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in which Yeats uses the phrase ‘once out of nature’; these poems also echo ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by Keats. In ‘Poet's Chair’ the word shoulder-blades is hyphenated, while in ‘The Swing’ it is not. I shall assume that this has no significance. Heaney is drawing on Plato's account of Socrates' last days. See, especially, the Phaedo. In the days before his execution, Socrates has been composing poetry in his cell (verses in praise of Apollo, and versions of Aesop's fables). No doubt this is the kind of poetry of which Plato could approve. See, Plato, Phaedo, 60d–61b. In Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (1991; London: Faber and Faber, 1966). The cultural and political relevance of excavation becomes central especially in the collection North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). See the works cited in note 3 and 4 above. And also: Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980; and, Heaney's Nobel acceptance speech ‘Crediting Poetry’ in Nobel Lectures (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). Heaney is here quoting from Robert Lowell. A damson is a soft red fruit, a kind of plum. ‘Damson’ from The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1996 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC; and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The heraldic description of the badge of Ulster: ‘Argent, a sinister hand erect couped gules’. I would like to thank Dan Robins, whose detailed comments on an earlier draft helped to greatly improve the paper; and the anonymous referees for Textual Practice whose comments helped me to clarify my argument.