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April 30, 2014 at 10:02 pm #415Eric BermanParticipant
I agree with you, Joe, that Heaney is attempting to absolve the Fisherman/drunk of his guilt in “Casualty”. He is creating a living and breathing man for we readers, one of the rare cases that he aestheticizes without feeling guilt as an artist for doing so. In our in-class discussion on “Casualty”, Professor Doggett advised us to look at the conscious parallels that Heaney made between this poem and Yeats’s “The Fisherman”, which I think is important in this discussion. Yeats’s fisherman was created “<span style=”color: #404040;”>a wise and simple man,” a man who Yeats imagined, “</span>A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream.”
Perhaps it is too simplistic to read “Casualty” as a response poem to “The Fisherman”, but at least for the purposes of the idea that you raise, it works very nicely. I think that Yeats’s poem idealizes a man who is both peasant and aristocrat, a wise yet simple man who is necessarily immaterial, since he is Yeats’s idea of a true representation of Ireland.
Conversely, Heaney’s analysis of the Irish Fisherman isn’t frightened to show his negative qualities. He is originally portrayed as a drunk, and this vice can be considered his ‘tragic flaw’ that leads to his demise. However, it is clear that Heaney aims not to portray this alcohol dependency as a condemnation of the man as a whole – instead, he appears to ally himself with him. The Irish fisherman we see is through Heaney’s appreciative eyes, conversing on the level of an equal with him, carefully avoiding the discussion of poetry that may alienate the two. Instead, Heaney shows himself to be part of the tribe with this fisherman, saying that “<span style=”color: #000000;”>We would be on our own / </span><span style=”color: #000000;”>And, always politic”. With the fisherman’s “deadpan sidling tact” and a “turned observant back”, Heaney allows us to know they are both aware of the politics going on around them, yet consciously avoid the discussion with the rest of society.
I think that you’re incredibly right about the fisherman being a stand-in for Heaney, and he’s worried about creating his own tribe of people who don’t engage with the Irish political situation, knowing what happened to his friend. This homage is melancholic and respectful, owing to the fact that Heaney wants to include we readers with the human being that was his distant friend.</span>
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April 30, 2014 at 12:52 pm #414Eric BermanParticipantI particularly like this topic in context of the essay that we just read, where Heaney examines “Yeats as an Example?”. You each are touching on the dangerous idea of poets – Yeats, in particular – taking their external realities and aestheticizing them into a symbol to work with in their poetry.
As we talked about in class quite a few times, Yeats and Heaney both struggle with this- trying to toe the line between paying homage to a dead person vs. the selfishness of the poet to take a person’s life and make it into art without their consent. As Joe Figliolia stated, “In this case, [Yeats’] poetry is something inherently selfish and tied up with pride,” and Heaney’s “vision need not necessarily conform with the social expectations expected by the poet from others.” Both artists cultivate their art through practice, and repeatedly utilize the same themes because these are the only things that they have practiced doing. Yeats, for example, wrote “<span style=”font-family: Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;”>The Circus Animals’ Desertion,”</span> noting how he would work for 6 weeks and fail to create anything new, instead just managing to “<span style=”font-family: Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;”>but enumerate old themes</span>”. Heaney’s bog poems deal with this same issue.
I think that both Yeats and Heaney were human, despite Yeats’ attempts to transcend the normal definition of what a human is. Both are observers, and both are poets. And violence, as Joe Fennie says in the intro, “pervades the poetry and lifetimes of both Yeats and Heaney in Ireland.” I think that since violence pervades their environment, both poets are compelled to make some comment on it. No poet exists in a vacuum, particularly those that seek to have an effect on the world.
Yet both Yeats and Heaney acknowledge that whatever they create will inherently be flawed. The violence, simply by being mentioned, invites the author to take some sort of stance on it. If the language is beautiful, then the violence is condoned or the victim is made into a martyr. If the language is curt, one may offend the memory of the dead. Even aside from the frightening prospect of inspiring men to fight to the death for some unreachable symbol, as in Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the poets consciously cultivate this ambivalence towards violence since they cannot take any ‘correct’ stance.
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