Seamus Heaney

[Nally Stand]

"Stage two", "ad hominem" and "Godwin's Law" all in the one post. You're on fire muppet.

[muppet]

"Stage two", "ad hominem" and "Godwin's Law" all in the one post. You're on fire muppet.

Stage two, yes, not quite ad hominem though. In this case you use dubious 3rd party sources to discredit rather than the full frontal attack of a stage one.

[stibhan]

I didn't suggest that he 'makes shit up' in interviews. I suggested that he is and has been happy to contradict himself on a number of occasions, which I think is sneaky in the 'furtive'  or 'mischievous' sense. That sneakiness, ostensibly, is sometimes considered what being a poet is about, and the fostering of a public persona is intrinsic to most writer's works. I mean, here is a poet - chief of the idealists, chief of the formalists - asking for reason and pragmatism. By way of example, Yeats, too, was a phenomenal poet and an awful politician. His beliefs regarding race, fascism and eugenics among others would astound you in equal measure to his brilliance as a writer. But as he himself said, 'Even when the poet seems most himself ... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.' Also, reappropriating a poem - even if you have written it - for a political purpose changes its original meaning, since context is the key to its unlocking.

Heaney's 'Punishment' is a great example of this, since there's a bit at the end where the voice of the poem 'understands the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge' of a Derry/Belfast woman being tarred and feathered by her own community for fraternising with British Soliders, all the while being crudely compared to ancient rites of violence. There is, admittedly, a bit more to it than that, but do those last lines mean that Heaney sympathises with that kind of act, that he sees it as natural? In this regard, I don't think O'Brien was praising Heaney [in his criticism for this poem and others in North] but I see it more as an attack upon him from both flanks by Carson and him. This excerpt from the Cambridge Companion to Heaney sums up O'Brien's position nicely: 'Heaney, according to O'Brien, has used his exceptional capacity for exact description of 'the thing itself' to evoke in an unbalanced way the suffering of the Catholics of Northern Ireland: 'there is no equivalent Protestant voice'. In each case the poet is being accused of using fraught public events to serve a personal cause.' These 'fraught public events' are the 'grim currency' I referred to earlier; the defence of this poem is of course that this poetic voice is not an endorsement but an artistic venture which does not openly moralise.

Whether these particular remarks are mischievous or a personal cause or not, at no point did I suggest that Heaney didn't have a right to his opinion - his opinions just don't cohere, since a poet is often forced to take on a number of different personae in search of a putatively greater truth. Reading his Nobel acceptance speech in comparison to his comments last week reveal a world of differences. And I would say that I don't believe that an artist's work should disbar him from political views and the right to express them; I do think that an artist should be mindful of the fact that he/she has been given a platform on something other than these political views. That isn't to say that art can ever be separate from politics or history, nor vice versa - it's just that poets, novelists, painters, musicians should not consider themselves what Shelley called the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world' because they, and especially poets, lead lives of imagination rather than practicality. They generally adopt poses and personae rather than solid political stances and convictions; that is why they are good poets rather than good career politicians.

You have the gift of using 100 words where 1 might do.

This is what you said:

Whatever he has said in this instance, I don't trust his viewpoint on anything else other than literature and history.

The reason I picked up on this is because I have noticed it is a standard reaction of the long term republicans on here. That may or may not include you, that of course is your business. But the reaction is typical: announce that the source of the discourse that doesn't fit into republican mantra has been discredited, somewhere, anywhere. Witness Nally Stand's claim that the SDLP were created by the NIO on another thread.

To a certain part of his own community, Heaney's opinion can be lightly dismissed (very few would find it 'untrustworthy'), to the rest of the world it would be held in very high regard.

I've already explained my standpoint at length, and my point was that plenty of people find his opinion trustworthy which is the fulcrum of this issue. Heaney is in Dublin and has been since the 1970s, so whatever sense of community he had/has is completely irrelevant in the contemporary political scene of the 6 counties.

As for using too many words, it's pretty clear that this is a complex issue which needs that kind of attention. And trying to shoehorn me into some form of republican stereotype isn't going to work either.

[muppet]

I didn't suggest that he 'makes shit up' in interviews. I suggested that he is and has been happy to contradict himself on a number of occasions, which I think is sneaky in the 'furtive'  or 'mischievous' sense. That sneakiness, ostensibly, is sometimes considered what being a poet is about, and the fostering of a public persona is intrinsic to most writer's works. I mean, here is a poet - chief of the idealists, chief of the formalists - asking for reason and pragmatism. By way of example, Yeats, too, was a phenomenal poet and an awful politician. His beliefs regarding race, fascism and eugenics among others would astound you in equal measure to his brilliance as a writer. But as he himself said, 'Even when the poet seems most himself ... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.' Also, reappropriating a poem - even if you have written it - for a political purpose changes its original meaning, since context is the key to its unlocking.

Heaney's 'Punishment' is a great example of this, since there's a bit at the end where the voice of the poem 'understands the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge' of a Derry/Belfast woman being tarred and feathered by her own community for fraternising with British Soliders, all the while being crudely compared to ancient rites of violence. There is, admittedly, a bit more to it than that, but do those last lines mean that Heaney sympathises with that kind of act, that he sees it as natural? In this regard, I don't think O'Brien was praising Heaney [in his criticism for this poem and others in North] but I see it more as an attack upon him from both flanks by Carson and him. This excerpt from the Cambridge Companion to Heaney sums up O'Brien's position nicely: 'Heaney, according to O'Brien, has used his exceptional capacity for exact description of 'the thing itself' to evoke in an unbalanced way the suffering of the Catholics of Northern Ireland: 'there is no equivalent Protestant voice'. In each case the poet is being accused of using fraught public events to serve a personal cause.' These 'fraught public events' are the 'grim currency' I referred to earlier; the defence of this poem is of course that this poetic voice is not an endorsement but an artistic venture which does not openly moralise.

Whether these particular remarks are mischievous or a personal cause or not, at no point did I suggest that Heaney didn't have a right to his opinion - his opinions just don't cohere, since a poet is often forced to take on a number of different personae in search of a putatively greater truth. Reading his Nobel acceptance speech in comparison to his comments last week reveal a world of differences. And I would say that I don't believe that an artist's work should disbar him from political views and the right to express them; I do think that an artist should be mindful of the fact that he/she has been given a platform on something other than these political views. That isn't to say that art can ever be separate from politics or history, nor vice versa - it's just that poets, novelists, painters, musicians should not consider themselves what Shelley called the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world' because they, and especially poets, lead lives of imagination rather than practicality. They generally adopt poses and personae rather than solid political stances and convictions; that is why they are good poets rather than good career politicians.

You have the gift of using 100 words where 1 might do.

This is what you said:

Whatever he has said in this instance, I don't trust his viewpoint on anything else other than literature and history.

The reason I picked up on this is because I have noticed it is a standard reaction of the long term republicans on here. That may or may not include you, that of course is your business. But the reaction is typical: announce that the source of the discourse that doesn't fit into republican mantra has been discredited, somewhere, anywhere. Witness Nally Stand's claim that the SDLP were created by the NIO on another thread.

To a certain part of his own community, Heaney's opinion can be lightly dismissed (very few would find it 'untrustworthy'), to the rest of the world it would be held in very high regard.

I've already explained my standpoint at length, and my point was that plenty of people find his opinion trustworthy which is the fulcrum of this issue. Heaney is in Dublin and has been since the 1970s, so whatever sense of community he had/has is completely irrelevant in the contemporary political scene of the 6 counties.

As for using too many words, it's pretty clear that this is a complex issue which needs that kind of attention. And trying to shoehorn me into some form of republican stereotype isn't going to work either.

I know nothing of you. It is the tactic I recognise. When someone says something Republicans don't like, point to anything or anyone that ever disagreed with the author and shout 'discredited!'. While this is patently absurd it does actually seem to reassure their supporters, much the same way as the 'Go on Wullie' chanters reassume both Frazer and his lemmings.

Heaney (imagine we might now actually get to discuss what he said) made observations in two main areas. He said he didn't believe there would be a United Ireland (hence the attack from the Shinners) and then he made some observations regarding the fleg warriors.

The former is an opinion and a prediction. He is entitled to it as we all are. We might disagree but the word untrustworthy is irrelevant here.

The later is also subjective and doesn't require one to be living in East Belfast.

As for living in Dublin, well O'Snodaigh, Mary Lou, Ferris and even Jurry all live in the 26 so obviously there are 'completely irrelevant in the contemporary political scene of the 6 counties' too? In fact this idiotic premise rules the whole world from having an opinion on the wee 6.

[stibhan]

Sorry but the whole premise of your argument is that Heaney is entitled to his opinion. Newsflash: so am I. Sin é and no more.

[muppet]

Sorry but the whole premise of your argument is that Heaney is entitled to his opinion. Newsflash: so am I. Sin é and no more.

But you are denying Heaney his opinion based on his alleged untrustworthiness.

[stibhan]

That doesn't make an iota of sense. I'm giving an opinion denying the credibility of Heaney's opinion, and if you're saying that that undermines his entitlement to that opinion then the same argument can be turned upon yourself, since you would logically be denying my own entitlement to hold an opinion.

The point is that if Heaney's words had have been said by any politician they would have been dragged through the mud. What is it exactly about being able to write a sonnet or an elegy that makes you better poised to commentate on contemporary politics and society? Why should Heaney's viewpoint be championed above longtime bloggers or even elected representatives?

[Main Street]

That doesn't make an iota of sense. I'm giving an opinion denying the credibility of Heaney's opinion, and if you're saying that that undermines his entitlement to that opinion then the same argument can be turned upon yourself, since you would logically be denying my own entitlement to hold an opinion.

The point is that if Heaney's words had have been said by any politician they would have been dragged through the mud. What is it exactly about being able to write a sonnet or an elegy that makes you better poised to commentate on contemporary politics and society? Why should Heaney's viewpoint be championed above longtime bloggers or even elected representatives?

Afaics, the people who are championing a quote from Heaney's interview are creationists and we know about their ability to select pieces of dogma and run with it.
What I suspect is that you have reservations about Heaney's comments in general, because they (in part) conflict with the decision taken by Belfast City Council on the flying of the Union flag and the possible influence Heaney's opinion will have in the general debate.
You recognise Heaney's right to have a comment but at the same time you are saying he shouldn't comment.´

Fwiw, I didn't foresee an armageddon of sorts over this issue, there will be no progress without conflict and you can't always map out a path of least resistance and achieve the same results.  I found Heaney's comments to be interesting because their reality (the loyalist protest) is that they are the ones getting kicked around. But it's just their entitlement which is taking a bit of a battering. Maybe the loyalists will run with this all summer and go even more crazy?

[muppet]

That doesn't make an iota of sense. I'm giving an opinion denying the credibility of Heaney's opinion, and if you're saying that that undermines his entitlement to that opinion then the same argument can be turned upon yourself, since you would logically be denying my own entitlement to hold an opinion.

The point is that if Heaney's words had have been said by any politician they would have been dragged through the mud. What is it exactly about being able to write a sonnet or an elegy that makes you better poised to commentate on contemporary politics and society? Why should Heaney's viewpoint be championed above longtime bloggers or even elected representatives?

The words were not said by a politician. That is precisely the point. We have heard so much from politicians that they are entirely predictable in their utterings. You now seem to be condemning Heaney because of what would have happened if he were a politician?

Also I am not championing Heaney's viewpoint above anyone (what longtime bloggers?) in particular, what is happening is that you are denying anyone the right to agree with Heaney. To me this appears to be a familiar tactic of claiming someone is discredited and therefore his opinion is invalid.

[seafoid]

It is hard to see someone like Heaney as a slave to Shinner ideology


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/living-ghosts/

When North was published Heaney came in for criticism, especially in southern Ireland, for what seemed to some a too easy and even dangerous comparison between the ritual Iron Age slayings that Glob described and the sectarian slaughter being carried out almost daily among Catholics and Protestants in the North. Already, however, in "The Tollund Man," an early "bog poem" from his 1972 collection Wintering Out, he had declared that "some day I will go to Aarhus" to see the body of this sacrificial victim preserved by peat-acids:


Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.


I didn't know he had a stroke. Some great stuff afterwards when he recovered , from the same link $



In two of the poems, "Chanson d'Aventure" and "Miracle," it is the poet himself who is being transported, "strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked/In position for the drive," not to the land of Pluto but to a more mundane but no less frightening destination, the hospital where this stroke victim's life will be saved. The third section of "Chanson d'Aventure" is a resplendent evocation of the ancient statue of the charioteer in the museum at Delphi, who




holds his own,
His six horses and chariot gone,
His left hand lopped

From a wrist protruding like an open spout,
Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead
Empty as the space where the team should be,

His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own
Doing physio in the corridor, holding up
As if once more I'd found myself in step

Between two shafts, another's hand on mine,
Each slither of the share, each stone it hit
Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.

In "Miracle" the place of the bronze charioteer is taken by the paralyzed man saved by Christ in the New Testament, a passing glimpse of whom we are given in the phrase "the one who takes up his bed and walks," and just as the paralytic, summoned back to health and vigor, finds himself at first dazed and bewildered, so the poet stretches out an infirm hand to steady himself, as in the ambulance he and his wife "careered at speed through Dungloe,/Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected/By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula." Here, now, the old certainties are gone—"Where can it be found again,/An elsewhere world, beyond/Maps and atlases...?"—but out of the new uncertainty a marvelous poetry springs.

[Rossfan]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/living-ghosts/

When North was published Heaney came in for criticism, especially in southern Ireland, ]

Very easy to upset them Munster folk right enough.

[glens abu]

The men of art have lost their heart,they dream within their dreams.
Their magic sold for  price of gold,amidst a peoples screams.