A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
and Irish poets have still continued to land in America with great impact. In fact, to a large degree the genuinely significant influence of British and Irish poetry in America since 1960 is not connected to any similarity of school or movement. There has been no “invasion” akin to Beatlemania c. 1964. Instead, this story has been one of individuals. And, within this story, no character looms larger than Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Also of particular note are British poets Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes as well as Irish poets Paul Muldoon and Eavan Boland. Moreover, both Muldoon and Boland exhibit an instant complication to the supposed Atlantic divide in that both poets came to make their homes at least part of the year within the United States.
Earlier, there was also the interesting case of Denise Levertov, born in Essex in 1923, who moved to the United States at the age of 24, and who by the 1960s had emerged as one of the central figures in American poetry. Connected with the Black Mountain School—Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, etc.—she ended up fashioning one of the key conceptual components of late twentieth‐century American free verse: the notion of organic form. Almost the entirety of Levertov's poetry after her arrival in America was issued by New Directions, a publisher as central to the American literary landscape as the Mississippi River is to the country itself. How can we even conceive of poetry in America toward the end of the twentieth century without thinking of her? And what about W. H. Auden, who was still writing poems after 1960, though his most significant work was behind him? Here, there is even some temporal fuzziness, in that even if we grant Auden's most influential poems were written in an earlier era, a wider reception in America awaited him because of the inclusion of his landmark poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” in the 1976 David Bowie star vehicle film The Man Who Fell to Earth, which exposed this poem to an audience beyond the usual poetry crowd.
When Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) died in the summer of 2013, his obituary in The New York Times referred to a 1995 review in Publishers Weekly stating that Heaney “has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets” (Fox 2013). Here, the reviewer was not singling Heaney out against a backdrop of other UK poetic imports, but was comparing him to all living poets, American or otherwise. In 2008, the year before Heaney celebrated his seventieth birthday, two‐thirds of the poetry collections sold in the United Kingdom were written by him (“Heaney,” Poetry Foundation 2015e), and, in the United States, his literary presence has been almost equally remarkable.
Born on April 13, 1939, in County Derry, Northern Ireland, Heaney published his first major book of poetry Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber) in 1966. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, his other collections include Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), Stations (1975), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), The Cure at Troy (1990, a play in verse), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), and District and Circle (2006). Two earlier collected works, both published by Faber & Faber, were Selected Poems 1965–1975 (1980) and New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990). Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996, published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998, was even on the list of The New York Times' “Notable Books of the Year.” In 2010, his last collection of poetry, Human Chain, was also published in an American edition by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Not only his poetry, but Heaney himself was also present in America throughout much of his later writing life. Among other contacts, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University from 1985 to 1997 and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard from 1998 to 2006. Earlier, he had been a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
In America, however, Heaney is no less “Irish.” The Poetry Foundation's webpage on Heaney even mentions that in large part the poet's impressive “popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule” (“Heaney,” Poetry Foundation 2015e). Yet, Heaney's reach cannot be reduced only to a convenient cause célèbre, a function of Northern Ireland and “the Troubles” being perpetually in the news in the decades toward the end of the twentieth century. Heaney's work goes beyond the documentary and the topical. Instead, Heaney's treatment of this painful period of Protestant/Catholic conflict in his native land is perhaps as complex as the background issues and events themselves. Moreover, his complicated positioning of himself and his poetry vis‐à‐vis such subject matter has perhaps become a source of admiration among American poets and poetry readers, in that his bearing witness to these troubles is expressed in narrative and metaphor rather than doctrinaire statement. The very approach to poetry that might make him seem detached and esthetically anesthetized by some readers directly connected to the conflict might in fact make him seem more honest and genuine by poets and readers who mistrust yoking poetry to politics.
Within Heaney's prolific and influential oeuvre, it is his “bog poems,” especially, that have captured attention; for example, “The Tollund Man” from Wintering Out or “Bog Queen” and “The Grauballe Man” from North. Rather than being an escape into archeological romanticism, however, these poems engage in an intense dialogue with the troubled Irish present. Referring in an interview with The Paris Review to an essay by American poet Robert Pinsky about the responsibility of the poet involving a response or answer to the surrounding world, Heaney asserts:
I see the Bog Poems in Pinsky's terms as an answer. […] Not quite an equivalent for what was happening, more an attempt to rhyme the contemporary with the archaic. “The Tollund Man,” for example, is the first of the Bog Poems I wrote. Essentially, it is a prayer that the bodies of people killed in various actions and atrocities in modern Ireland, in the teens and twenties of the century as well as in the more recent past, a prayer that something would come of them, some kind of new peace or resolution. In the understanding of his Iron Age contemporaries, the sacrificed body of Tollund Man germinated into spring, so the poem wants a similar flowering to come from the violence in the present. Of course it recognizes that this probably won't happen, but the middle section of the poem is still a prayer that it should. The Bog Poems were defenses against the encroachment of the times, I suppose.
(Heaney and Cole 1997)
In this “attempt to rhyme the contemporary with the archaic,” there is an endeavor to find historical resonance, to avoid the shrill or anemic rhetorical frequencies of overt littérature engagée. But there is also a recognition of the anxiety Heaney feels at his own passivity as well as his desire to bear witness, as we can see from his comments about another bog poem, “Punishment:”
But there was always a real personal involvement […]. “Punishment,” for example [is] a poem about standing by as the IRA tar and feather these young women in Ulster. But it's also about standing by as the British torture people in barracks and interrogation centers in Belfast. About standing between those two forms of affront. So there's that element of self‐accusation, which makes the poem personal in a fairly acute way. Its concerns are immediate and contemporary, but for some reason I couldn't bring army barracks or police barracks or Bogside street life into the language and topography of the poem. I found it more convincing to write about the bodies in the bog and the vision of Iron Age punishment. Pressure seemed to drain away from the writing if I shifted my focus from those images.
(Heaney and Cole 1997)
This displacement, of course, might have an analog in American literature in the way that Arthur Miller situated his play The Crucible in the literal witch hunt of 1690s Salem in order to attack the metaphorical Communist witch hunt taking place in 1950s McCarthyite America. Through this displacement, there comes an anchoring of the present conflict in a longer tradition, a way of recognizing its tangled and complex longevity in human conduct. But there is also a type of pressure put upon the contemporary thinker to use knowledge of this history as a tool of illumination to avoid the ongoing trap of inaction in the face of atrocity.
Likewise in poems such as “Bog Queen” we see Heaney articulating another mutual permeation of one thing with another that is more ontological than temporal, where the boundaries of sentience and death themselves become blurred: