![]() ![]() This is what Heaney means by redress, whereby "the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions", offering "a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances."ĭavid Constantine developed this theme in his essay The Usefulness of Poetry (2000), showing how Bertolt Brecht's dogmatic requirement that lyric poetry should be "useful" was subverted in his own work. He wasn't calling for straightforwardly uplifting verse, but saying that he valued poetry's "response to conditions in the world at a moment when the world was in crisis". Heaney's personal mantra is a phrase by an earlier Nobel prizewinner, the Greek poet George Seferis, who felt that poetry should be "strong enough to help". He calls this "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality". Seamus Heaney thinks that poetry has a special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. But we should start from a position that poetry, like music or art, is not supposed to make anything happen, except in our responses to it. The wide spectrum of poetry does of course include polemical poetry which lends its voice to political and cultural debates, and I included a good many such poems on environmental issues in my anthology Earth Shattering: Ecopoems - by poets from Gary Snyder to Heathcote Williams (and at least one angry poem I chose by Ted Hughes might fall into that category). ![]() Yet Auden's own phrase in his Yeats elegy - 'A way of happening' - defines the only social and political role available to poetry as poetry." Neverthless MacNeice, knowing Yeats and Ireland, did not follow Auden into his post-Marxist conviction that 'poetry makes nothing happen': 'The fallacy lies in thinking that it is the function of art to make things happen and the effect of art upon actions is something either direct or calculable.'. ![]() "Thus what Derek Mahon calls 'An eddy of semantic scruple / In an unstructurable sea' might as well concentrate on 'semantic scruple'. Writing during the Irish Troubles in her study Poetry in the Wars (Bloodaxe, 1986), Edna Longley observed that all Northern Irish poetry since 1969 had "shared the same bunker": For war spares neither the poetry of Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons." My friends had been writing for years about guns and frontiers and factories, about the 'facts' of psychology, politics, science, economics, but the fact of war made their writing seem as remote as the pleasure dome in Xanadu. "If the war made nonsense of Yeats's poetry and of all works that are called 'escapist', it also made nonsense of poetry that professes to be 'realist'. In his book The Poetry of WB Yeats, written during the conflict and published in 1941, Louis MacNeice wrote: But what does it mean to be 'a way of happening'? Does it mean anything at all?"Īuden wrote his elegy after Yeats's death in January 1939, as the world was preparing itself for war. "Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of the above: that poetry is itself a way of happening. ![]() Raw towns that we believe and die in it survives, Would never want to tamper it flows southįrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, In the valley of its making where executives The quotation about poetry making nothing happen is, in fact, half-remembered from the second part of Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats, that goes:įor poetry makes nothing happen: it survives Whether they actually made anything happen is not clear. Listing various poems which had worked towards such change, Szirtes continued: "The subject of poetry being life, and politics being a part of life, poets have written as they thought or might have voted. What does music make happen? Or visual art? The writer might have been thinking of social change." It is not a new question, if a bit Gradgrindish in nature. "'If poetry makes nothing happen what use is it?' scoffed a recent letter in a serious newspaper. Previewing his lecture in the Guardian, he wrote: George Szirtes gave this a sharper focus in his 2005 TS Eliot lecture, Thin Ice and the Midnight Skaters. ![]()
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