Orwell and Heaney on W.B. Yeats

Heaney by Portuguese cartoonist Andre Carrilho 

W.B. Yeats died in 1939, 9 months before the start of war. Orwell wrote in 1943 (via Kevin Kerrane, 'Orwell's Ireland'):

Northern Ireland's Dance

By Ian Knox

I remain very confused about Belfast and Northern Ireland. So much of it is progressive, cultured and astonishingly metropolitan. Yet the politics is feudal and tribal and certain estates are ominous and intimidating.

The inglorious Twelfth

John Hewitt, Ulster poet, at a 12th July march

Seamus Heaney wrote a poem, 'Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966', about his experience of the Twelfth July:

'The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs
Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder
Grossly there between his chin and his knees.
He is raised up by what he buckles under.

AWIT - 'Articulating What I Thought'

'Portrait de poètes' (1942) by Serge Ivanoff: Yanette Delétang-Tardif, Maurice Alphonse Jacques Fombeure, Jean Follain, Rémi Masset, Eugène Guillevic

When I read Orwell, I am reading someone who has written what I'm thinking. I read:

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is war minus the shooting."

And thought, 'finally someone has expressed and articulated exactly what I felt about sport and the culture around it!' Seamus Heaney wrote:

"One perceptible function of poetry is to write a place into existence." 

That is the role of the writer and poet: to put reality and the everyday experience into words. Jean Follain, friend of Francis Ponge, who Ciaran Carson introduced me to, said:

"Le mot fait corps avec la chose." (The word makes body with the thing)

Roddy Doyle, deviating a little, said:

"Like a lot of writers, I knew I wanted to write but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. When I wrote The Commitments, it clicked. I felt this was the world that was familiar and I could make it a bit unfamiliar and sparkling."

But the point remains. The role of the writer is to articulate what everyone thinks; doing it in a way that adds spice and energy. They make it everyday but with excitement. They make the mundane profoundly readable.

Except the funny thing was that while I recognised this phenomenon I didn't have the words or terms to express this phenomenon.

That represents a great irony. So I propose 'AWIT' - Articulating What I Thought.

The greatest writers work with the same 26 letters, good writing is just putting one word after another

Philip Roth by Zach Trenholm

Writing is putting one letter after another letter; one word after another; one sentence after another. As Margaret Atwood said:

"A word after a word after a word is power."

The two worlds of Northern Ireland, Ctd Heaney and O'Brien

Conor cruise O'Brien knew in the 1990s that it was a matter of moving beyond nationalism and unionism. Fintan O'Toole explained O'Brien's philosophy for Irish politics in The Irish Times here:

"He does not accept that the really important challenge at the moment is not to move from nationalism to unionism, but to move beyond both."

Seamus Heaney said the same thing in a 1997 interview with The Paris Review here:

"But listen to what I’m saying! Protestant, Catholic—the point is to fly under or out and beyond those radar systems."

My earlier posts on Heaney here and here. My earlier posts on Conor Cruise O'Brien here, here and here.

Seamus Heaney for Protestants Too

Poets produce work that speaks not only for themselves but also give voice through which others can find articulation. Seamus Heaney does this for Protestant and Catholic alike. Fintan O'Toole commented on Heaney's conflicting impulses and how he gave expression to them.

"He was drawn to both Irish and English poetic traditions. He also lived through the death of the ancient rural world into which he was born and the emergence of a globalised modern Ireland. He struggled with contradictions, paradoxes, conflicting impulses. 

His genius lay in his ability to hover between them, to give each side of a political or emotional equation its full weight and proper due without becoming the prisoner of either. WB Yeats, the poet whose influence he both absorbed and transcended, wrote in a time of Irish violence that “we are closed in and the key is turned/ On our uncertainty” . 

Heaney humanised uncertainty, made ambiguity rich with possibilities. As he put it in the beautifully homely metaphor of Terminus: 

“Two buckets were easier carried than one./I grew up in between.”"

Fintan continued: "He was not, in that sense, a national poet. He knew too much about the dangers of tribalism and the foolishness of slogans to ever want to be a spokesman for the collective. He would have agreed with Yeats’s dictum that “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”