The 1998 Norton Scholar's Prize Winner

To be a poet in a culture obsessed with politics is a risky business. Investing poetry with the heavy burden of public meaning only frustrates its flight: however tempting it is to employ one's poetic talent in the service of a program or an ideology, the result usually has little to do with poetry. This is not to condemn the so-called "literature of engagement"; eye-opening and revealing, it has served its purpose in the unfinished story of our century, and now is certainly no time to call for the poet's retreat into the "ivory tower" of the self. Preserving the individual voice amidst the amorphous, all-leveling collective must be the first act of poetic will, a launching board from which each poet must start the effort of poetry.

A mere glance at recent Irish history suffices to show a place where this preservation is particularly difficult. The pressures that the bifurcated Irish society exerts on its poets are enormous: taking a political stance is no longer a temptation (this implies a certain luxury of choice on behalf of the tempted) but rather an inescapable reality imposed by the agora of public discourse. Thus the condition of exile becomes the poet's only way out, the sole means of retaining the autonomy of his poetic voice. More than merely a survival tactic, however, it is a strategy of finding home "elsewhere," whether in the original language of the island (and today's minority), as in the case of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, or in the larger reality of poetic imagination. Seamus Heaney, who occupies the precarious position of being Ireland's most famous and accomplished living poet while refusing to become its bard, calls our attention to the role of exile in today's poetry. Whereas in his prose he discusses that role in the context of other poets, primarily those of Eastern Europe and Russia, his own poetic work testifies to the vital importance of the detachment of exile which makes an otherwise impossible vision possible. It is this distancing, this voluntary flight from the political community of the moment, that I propose to examine here. The importance of exile goes well beyond Heaney's poetry and the Irish experience altogether, and the following discussion will place it in the global context of the late twentieth century, thus underscoring the significance of Heaney as a truly universal poet.

In order to understand the role of exile in Heaney's poetry, we must not take that exile literally (for in that sense he is an exile only part of the year) but rather comprehend it as a form of categorical imperative mandating that the poet "stay clear of all procession," as Heaney's alter ego is told by Simon Sweeney in Section I of "Station Island." Heaney did indeed move out of Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s, and there were those vehement enough in their nationalism to see his move as an act of betrayal. That these critics failed to realize the most basic thing about Heaney, and poetry in general, should be obvious enough. In one of the essays included in his Government of the Tongue, Heaney wrote about Mandelstam in terms that could well define his own poetic creed: "the essential thing about lyric poetry . . . was its unlooked-for joy in being itself, and the essential thing for the lyric poet was therefore a condition in which he was in thrall to no party or programme, but truly and freely and utterly himself" (xix). It is precisely this condition that I am referring to when I speak of "exile" in this article.

At the same time, it would be a gross misunderstanding to claim that Heaney's poetry is devoid of the political. Rather than discarding the political altogether, the poet assumes an ongoing dialogue with it, full of the ambiguities and uncertainties which only an honest self-examination can produce. With the possible exception of his earliest work, Heaney constantly positions himself face-to-face with the community. And I can think of no poet better versed in the art of self-accusation than Heaney; by attacking himself and his own views first he forestalls all potential attack by others. "Station Island" (included in Heaney's Selected Poems 1966-1987) is illustrative here: not merely an act of exaltation and an ambitious effort to put himself in the company of Virgil and Dante, it is perhaps primarily an excursion into that territory of the poetic self which inevitably attracts critics' attention and tempts them to pass judgment (mainly moral judgment, as critics tend to do). Thus the most interesting and effective critique of Heaney's political non-commitment can be found in his own poetry.

It is said of Rachmaninov that, regardless of whose compositions he happened to perform, they all invariably sounded as if they were written by Rachmaninov himself. Similarly, the voices of Joyce, Carleton, and others present in "Station Island" speak with Heaney's own diction and frame of mind. This appropriation is fortunate insofar as it is informative, and enables us to speculate as to the reasons behind Heaney's choice of exile:

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the wide circle, it's time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures of your own frequency . . . (212)

Here Joyce's ghost clearly reiterates old Sweeney's insistence on the poet's singleness: the "decent thing" is implicitly linked with the community and as such is compromised, as it serves to justify the need for expressing that which is uniquely Heaney's own. This defiance points back to the much earlier "Personal Helicon": "I rhyme/ To see myself, to set the darkness echoing" (11). The pilgrim of "Station Island" still firmly stands by what the "big-eyed Narcissus" of Heaney's youth proclaimed: the utter autonomy of the poet, the privacy of his obsessions, writing poetry "for the joy of it" (211).

This disarmingly simple agenda is clearly in line not only with Heaney's own spirit, but also with Joyce's, whose useful ghost in fact utters it. In its simplicity lies its effectiveness. Joyce himself of course set up this paradigm of exile, as it were, as he struggled to transcend his being an Irish writer by being a writer simply (or "at least" a European writer). It is no coincidence that in the process of dismissing the perceived (and/or potential) parochialism of Irish society, Seamus Heaney has increasingly turned toward the larger contexts of first the mythological North, and then the equally ancient if somewhat more literate culture of the Mediterranean basin (think of Joyce's Trieste). To these we must of course add the physical distance that separates Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Derry, or for that matter from Dublin. As Askold Melnyczuk observes, Heaney, together with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, "formed the triumvirate of ‘exiled' poets who presided over the relatively tame literary communities of New England for more than a decade" (Seamus Heaney: A Celebration, 108). And not only over New England, one is tempted to add.

Just like Brodsky or another "exiled" artist, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, Heaney enjoys expounding his views on poetry in the essay form, and nothing is perhaps more instrumental in understanding poets' oeuvres than what they have to say in prose, even if that prose has as its explicit subject someone other than the poets themselves. And so we read Heaney on Mandelstam: "He was the vessel of language. His responsibility was to sound rather than to the state, to phonetics rather than to five-year plans, to etymology rather than to economics" (Government, xix). We need only think of Heaney's own obsession with the tracing of place-names to realize not only that Heaney the poet practiced what Heaney the essayist preached, but also that it is the notion of exile as political dispossession that is operative here, while of course the very root of culture, language, is wholeheartedly embraced and even celebrated. Heaney never abandons his language (or both his languages, though he writes in only one of them). On the contrary, language (rather than mere personal distaste) is the very reason for his programmatic escape from politics.

Any analysis of Heaney as exile would be incomplete without a mention of his reworking of the old Irish story of mad Sweeney (the king, not Heaney's neighbor). Sweeney's apparent disdain for authority forces him into exile, a state of perpetual flight, and it is song that comes to sustain him. The way Heaney links the myth with his own agenda is so brilliant that the connection seems self-evident, and it almost feels as if the ancient story's sole purpose was to define the contemporary poet's quest (even Sweeney's alleged place of birth corresponds with that of Heaney!). In his last song, Sweeney once more justifies his decision to flee and forever wander (though originally it was not his decision--this determinism echoes the notion of poet as vessel of language):

You are welcome to your salt meat
And fresh meat in feasting-houses;
I will live content elsewhere
On tufts of green watercress. (Selected Poems, 162)

It would go against Heaney's legendary geniality to have Sweeney speak in harsher terms to those whose destinies differed from his, yet what deserves our attention here is the peace of mind that follows from the decision to go into exile: it is not forced upon the poet but rather originates in his very will (in this aspect it is fundamentally different from the tragic experience of political exile that defined so many great voices in this century's literature). Heaney himself chooses (and defines) his own exile because the distance that removes him from the oppressive noise of sectarian politics is inversely proportionate to the distance still separating him from the reality his poetry aims at depicting. As he says in the title essay in The Government of the Tongue, echoing Yeats, poetry at its greatest moments attempts "to hold in a single thought reality and justice" (108). Interestingly, "justice" is one of the words politicians enjoy abusing most, whereas the very word choice here reveals Heaney's concern both with what is and what should be. At its heart, his poetry aspires to something better than that which exists, and as such remains faithful to the ideal of politics as well. For Heaney, the role of poetry is primarily curative (to say "redemptive" would perhaps betray a lack of understanding of the essentially tragic nature of Irish politics). He admits to having been "struck" by the presence of some of Milosz's lines on the memorial to the Solidarity workers outside the Gdansk shipyard (97), yet he takes it to be an appropriate gesture insofar as it expresses the belief in the inherent goodness of poetry, a belief that certainly informs his own work, despite, or maybe because of, the frequent reservations he himself voices about it.

The decision to avoid the limitations of dogma (political, religious, social) frees Heaney and enables him to attain "visions of air" (in Seamus Deane's phrase). Yet, as I have already suggested, his poetic visions never lose sight of the physical, the immediate, the local. His is a poetry of nouns. Exile serves as a way to bypass the political which constantly inserts itself between us and the world around us. These triumphs over the dictates of the community are only momentary, but they must suffice, for "poetry is more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from" (Government, 108). This threshold does not lead the poet to lofty heights of abstractions or the solipsism of complete withdrawal from the community, but rather returns him to a source, a point of origin, one that is both private and communal, and even universal, as Heaney's global recognition aptly demonstrates. (A similar escape from the political into the concrete characterizes the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, though in her case the concrete is certainly less pastoral, less earthy--Szymborska never left her native Krakow.)

The love of language and the love of place are one for Heaney, and the ideal of justice entails a certain democracy of language, as well as a common subject matter. Heaney is well aware that his is a "tentative art," and he understands those who are somewhat skeptical about poetry's special status (Selected Poems, 116). His poems abound in such voices, mostly drawn from Heaney's own experience, and they never shy away from speaking their minds, even if what they have to say about the poet's tactics is not always flattering: Heaney's cousin accuses him in Section VIII of "Station Island" of fabricating the actual death so it fits the artistic form: "you whitewashed ugliness and drew / the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio / and saccharined my death with morning dew" (203).

Although the condition of exile deterritorializes the poet politically, he reclaims the native realm with the poetic word, with honestly voiced conviction rather than convention (the poet identifies with the mad king, draws wisdom from "an old Sabbath-breaker," while, characteristically, both bear the same name). Yet the sense of belonging goes well beyond both the place and the language, as we see in the closing lines of "The Tollund Man": the poet, encountering the country people of Denmark, "not knowing their tongue," feels "lost / Unhappy and at home" (40). Heaney realizes the paradoxical nature of exile, the freedom and the isolation it entails, and welcomes it in no uncertain terms. He feels at home in the state of homelessness, speaks even if those around him fall short of comprehending him, for to fail to do so would be to betray his vocation as a poet.

To choose exile, to let oneself operate within the mechanics of removal, to speak from a distance is both challenging and liberating. The all-pervasive realism of Heaney's work keeps him firmly anchored in the ground of commonality, while his talent and intense sensitivity allow him to achieve a vision that he feels it his duty to pass on to the rest of us. Heaney never disdains the so-called "common man"; to accuse him of arrogance would be completely misguided. Hence, perhaps, his popularity: today's reading public is infinitely more democratic and sensitive to the issues of power and hierarchy than those of previous epochs. Heaney is the voice we love to hear, for his talent ultimately serves the common good. Paradoxically, then, we can talk of a return from exile, a homecoming, with one major qualification: it is now the world at large, the community of readers everywhere, to which the poet returns. The universal appeal of Seamus Heaney happens in a larger context of the late twentieth century, in which exile has become a major shaping force: what long ago was a source of shame and despair has now evolved into something positive and empowering (the reasons behind this development merit a separate discussion; here we can only briefly note a uniquely Irish aspect of it: the fact that the vast majority of the seventy million people who claim to be Irish live in diaspora).

In celebrating Seamus Heaney we celebrate the condition of exile. As he recognizes it as life-giving and necessary for his work, so should we recognize the intellectual freedom and the scope of vision that it grants to those who choose it. Again, a clear distinction has to be made between voluntary exile and political exile--often the only natural response to the unthinkable atrocities that continue to plague the unfree parts of the globe. Great poets, such as Brodsky or Milosz, have learned how to transform the latter into the former, although we cannot expect the everyman of exile to emulate them. The voluntary form of (often internal) exile remains something of a luxury. Yet it does present us with a certain intellectual ideal, as Edward Said writes in his article "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginal":

Exile is a model for the intellectual who is tempted, and even beset and overwhelmed, by the rewards of accommodation, yea-saying, settling in. Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities toward the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable. (124)