Leaning “well beyond the plumb” of His Native Language: Heaney’s Tone and the International Style

Abstract

In the last decades of his life Seamus Heaney occupied the position of "world poet" and outsold--or so it was widely held--all other poets writing in English. Such popularity, accessibility--such transferability--would suggest, among other things, that his work manifests at least some semblance of an "international style". Admittedly, it is a pretty slippery term. But it is worth asking, by what other means than manifesting a "style" with an "international" appeal could Heaney have attracted such a large international audience? What would make readers as far-flung as West Texas and Eastern Siberia find his work so compelling? Roy Foster, professor of poetry at Oxford and a Heaney scholar, calls him flatly "an international poet" (2013), and as much as one may want to associate Heaney with a small farm in Co. Derry, Northern Ireland, it is hard to argue that Foster is not in some sense correct. But Foster also acknowledges that as much as anything else Heaney's tone--"the worlds below" (2013), as he glosses his use of the term--may be the most important characteristic of his work. One might reasonably argue that many aspects of Heaney's poetry are worthy of consideration and contribute to its overall success: its linguistic richness, for instance; its pleasing balance of strict and loose formalism; its social, ethical, and moral consciousness; its striking vividness and immediacy, to name but a few of the many. My argument is that, seeking to identify the keystone element, the one that separates Heaney from the field--including the impressive field of talented poets from Northern Ireland, who were his contemporaries, his rivals and friends--we should name tone as that single most important characteristic. In interviews and in his own prose Heaney demonstrated how important to him were a wide range of "international poets": the contemporary Eastern Europeans Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Osip Mandelstam and others; American poets like Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop; the classical Greek dramatists; Dante. Further, a stylistic evolution taking place is manifest in Heaney's work, from the early Mossbawn-centered world of the first four books, to the more topically wide-ranging middle and late periods. At some point, maybe around the late 1970s, Heaney became more "cosmopolitan", and the shift seems to have coincided with his growing interest in the Eastern Europeans. Examining the full body of work by that group suggests what seems a reasonable description of the international style, largely by highlighting what it is not: local, obviously, but also historical. It is poetry not set in a specific place and time--at least not on its surface and whose language does not tend to dialect, its images to any particular cultural milieu. Cosmopolitan, universal, and parabolic are other terms sometimes used as roughly synonymous with international, terms signifying a kind of poetry that seems to hover in air, tethered to the globe by invisible cables, shadowy anchorages. The local worlds from which the poets originate are hinted at but not filled out, not given full-blooded life. Of course, in the case of Milosz some poems do make reference to specific places, but they seem the exception rather than the rule. To choose as an example of the rule in Milosz, at least regarding style, I would offer the following, a poem called "What Once Was Great" (1988: 127) which he wrote in Polish in 1959, while in exile near Paris, and later translated into English: What once was great, now appeared small. Kingdoms were fading like snow-covered bronze. What once could smite, now smites no more. Celestial earths roll on and shine. Stretched on the grass by the bank of a river, As long, long ago, I launch my boats of bark. Notice that, whatever cultural baggage the reader brings to Milosz--and certainly his contemporary Polish readers, including fellow exiles in France, would have associated these "Kingdoms" with their beloved homeland--this could be happening anywhere. …