Today in class we talked about what exactly the responsibility of a poet is, because this struggle is apparent in a lot of Heaney’s poetry. Should he for example be a poet that addresses the nation and actively takes a stance, like Lorca, the poet he mentions in Summer 1969? In this poem we certainly get the sense that some people wanted him to be like this, for it says “’Go back’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’ Another conjured Lorca from his hill”. However, especially the phrase ‘from his hill’ conjures up an image of him, again, being distanced from the people he is trying to ‘touch’. It seems then that Heaney is saying that even if he is like Lorca, he cannot get close to the people, he will always be on top of his own hill. Which then of course also explains his statement in “Exposure” that even though he was in Ireland, he still felt like an exile, like “an inner émigré”.
However, this sense of him always being in exile relates him directly to James Joyce, whom he mentions in “Summer 1969” and who is a rather big poet to compare yourself with, same goes for Ovid whom he alludes to in his poem “Exposure” by mentioning Ovid’s tristia. It thus seems that Heaney sees these two men as his models, not Lorca at all. Joyce and Ovid are those whom he desires to live up to and seeing that they were both representative of exile, this seems to be what Heaney desires to be, a poet who looks from a distance and describes whatever is happening. He does not want to be like Lorca, and incite people. And in this sense he certainly does not want to be like Yeats when we consider that he co-wrote something like Cathleen ni Houlihan.
Keeping all this in mind, I found it interesting to watch an interview with Heaney called ‘Making Sense of Life” (The link can be found on the bottom of this post). It is an interview with Heaney himself in which he talks about the fact that he likes to make ‘a play’ on two words that sound the same, but have very different meanings. In the interview he specifically talks about the two words ‘heard’ and ‘herd’. I wanted to share this video with you all because it ties in with all the things we talked about in class today and all the other classes in which we discussed what Heaney would believe to be the responsibility of the poet and Heaney’s references to being an insider or an outsider of a particular group.
The following quote from Heaney is what struck me most in the interview, and which, I feel, is the most significant to the particular point that I am making, which is that he most definitely and consciously saw himself as someone who needs to distance himself in order to analyze and accurately portray the violence that is going on around him.
“ The writer is there to be h e a r d. Singularly. Not to be part of the tribe”.
Link to the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7sskc1pi_k
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