Book Review : Heaney’s Essays on Poets With Courage and Vision

The Government of the Tongue by Seamus Heaney (Farrar Straus Giroux: $17.95; 170 pages)

The poetry that matters most to Seamus Heaney is a kind of heroism; it is the heroism of listening to yourself. But it is a naked and open self; naked to its own deepest terrors and open to the terrors of the world around it.

So, in this collection of essays, Heaney writes mostly of poets who put themselves in danger.

There are those who have maintained their personal vision in a totalitarian world, not shutting themselves away from this world, but addressing it. Thus Osip Mandelstam, soon to die in a Soviet labor camp, writes about Stalin so distinctively that, in a century’s time, our only remaining graphic image of the man may well be the poet’s “mountaineer of the Kremlin.”

Open to the Darkness

And there are those who struggle to maintain their voice while staying open to their inner totalitarian darkness. Thus Sylvia Plath, soon to die in her kitchen oven, becomes the Delphic Oracle of her own anguish.

“To stand by what you write is to have to stand your ground and take the consequences,” Heaney tells us. He is referring to the Eastern European poets, but it could apply to a Plath, a Robert Lowell or a John Berryman as well.

Heaney, whose Northern Irish nationality informs his work with a sense that poetry gravely matters, writes of other poets as comrades. Comrades-in-arms, comrades-in-danger. Only poets can do that; Lowell did it in his astonishing essays on William Carlos Williams and Berryman.

Heaney’s own essays are largely astonishing. When he writes about Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Plath, Lowell, he knows just what is happening in every line. In his essay on Plath, he gives the richest and most lucid account that I know of a poet’s evolution from a gifted apprentice to a master of her own voice.

But more than what is happening to the poetry, Heaney knows what is happening to the poets. Old soldier on older soldiers.

Poets of Danger

He contrasts his poets of danger with many of those writing now. He doesn’t name the latter--soldiers have a certain reticence; and who knows how or when danger may crop up?

With the Eastern Europeans, he writes: “The mood of writing is the indicative mood, and for that reason they constitute a shadow-challenge to poets who dwell in the conditional, the indeterminate mood . . . of so much of the poetry one has grown used to reading in the journals and new books, particularly of the United States.”

In one of the essays, “The Impact of Translation,” Heaney suggests that because of the deeper existential concerns of many non-English-speaking poets, “The focus of greatness is shifting away from (our) language.” One of the best among many splendid things in the book is his treatment of Herbert, the Polish poet.

In “Barbarian in the Garden,” Herbert visits the cathedral at Senlis. He writes of a depiction of Eve: “Coarse-grained, big-eyed, and plump. A heavy plait of hair falls on her wide, warm back.”

Art and Landscape

Herbert was intoxicated with the beauty of the art, the landscape and the civilization he found on his first trip to Western Europe. Heaney remarks on his “sense of enjoyment.” But, he adds, Herbert kept “a skeptical historical sense of the world’s reliability”; he kept describing the pain of history beneath its beauty. “About suffering he was never wrong, this young master,” Heaney writes, adding:

“Herbert is continually wincing in the jaws of a pincer created by the mutually indifferent interaction of art and suffering.”

It is a theme for the author, too; one that recurs throughout these essays, and in the title piece. “The Government of the Tongue” has a double meaning, of course.

Poetry has to be “its own vindicating force,” he writes. It is “the self-validating operation of what we call inspiration.” The tongue must “govern,” in other words. Yet poetry needs government, as well; a moral, social, perhaps even a religious dimension.

He contrasts Mandelstam’s view of Dante as a spontaneous lyricist--”a lyric woodcutter singing in the dark wood of the larynx” in Heaney’s witty phrase--and T. S. Eliot’s view of him as a constructor of allegory along doctrinal lines.

Contrasting Eliot

In another splendid phrase, Heaney goes on to contrast the Eliot of “The Wasteland,” which he sees as an instinctive, sonambulistic outburst, with the poet of the grave quartets, informed by his Christian beliefs.

“The inspired, spontaneous, essentially lyric tongue has been replaced as governor by an organ that functions more like a sorrowful grand seigneur, meditatively, authoritatively, yet just a little wistfully aware of its lost vitality and insouciance.”

Heaney explores the contradiction in a fashion whose refreshing openness never becomes bland or sententious. He is always the poet, and always the partisan. But he is a partisan on both sides; and finally, there is a compromise that resembles a Christmas truce more than a treaty of peace.