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PARTISAN REVIEW
The State of Poetry
THE REDRESS OF POETRY. By Seamus Heaney.
Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. $22.00
PROOFS AND THEORIES: ESSAYS ON POETRY. By Louise
Gluck.
Ecco Press. $22.00
THE CURE OF POETRY IN AN AGE OF PROSE: MORAL
ESSAYS ON THE POET'S CALLING. By Mary
Kinzie.University
of Chicago Press. $54.00
In
his criticism, T.S. Eliot once asserted, a poet "is always trying to defend
the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to
write." Far from deploring this lack of disinterestedness, Eliot felt that the
critical writings of poets "owe a great deal of their interest" to this implicit
self-reference, and no doubt many readers are led to Seamus Heaney's prose
out of a desire to learn more about the writer of the poems. A good deal
about Heaney's poetics is to be learned,
if
somewhat obliquely, in
The Redress
if
Poetry;
readers will also find that the qualities of sympathy, generosity, and
curiosity that mark his poetry are equally on display in Heaney's prose.
Readers who come to Heaney's essays to learn more about their writer will
find themselves led outward by his sensitive appreciations to new worlds of
poetic pleasure.
The gates to pleasure, though, in our moment seem guarded by some
severe angels indeed, and Heaney clearly feels he must take cognizance of
them at the outset. The volume's first essay, which shares its title, sees poetry
pressured between the immediacy of political demands, and the corrosive
skepticism that characterizes the postmodern intellect. Against these pressures
Heaney asserts an ideal of poetry not as "an agent for proclaiming and cor–
recting injustices" but as "a working model of inclusive consciousness," "a
revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circum–
stances." Heaney defines the mode of "redress" he argues for as one that
would "set [poetry] up as its own category, an eminence established and a
pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means." This perspective, of course,
is conditioned by Heaney's situation as an Irish Catholic poet who never–
theless refuses to put his poetry into the service of a sectarian program.
But
if
Heaney has declined to become a spokesman for the nationalist
cause, he has just as firmly resisted being defined as a British poet, as an
untroubled member of an imperium centered on England. Heaney's own
experiences have made
him
particularly sensitive to the ways that "in emer–
gent cultures the struggle of an individual consciousness towards affirmation
and distinctness may be analogous...with a collective straining towards self-
