Abstract
How should the relationship between poetry and politics be understood? In this paper, I argue that the poets Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney—in their speeches, interviews, and essays—make a significant contribution to our understanding of this question. Each poet agrees, though for somewhat different reasons, that poetry can play an important political role by supplementing political life from a transpolitical standpoint. I elaborate and evaluate their claims in defense of this argument, which may cast new light not only on the relationship between politics and poetry, but on the relationship between politics and art more generally.
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Notes
- 1.
In her New York Times essay “Political Poetry is Hot Again,” former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith describes the rise of political verse in twenty-first century poetry, as contrasted with the less political poetic culture of the nineties (Smith, “Political Poetry is Hot Again,” New York Times [December 10th, 2018]). Consider also Jesse Lichtenstein, “How Poetry Came to Matter Again,” The Atlantic 322, no. 2 (2018): 90–99; and Carl Phillips, “Toward a Politics of Mere Being,” Poetry Magazine (December 2016).
- 2.
On the complexity and subtlety of Socrates’ argument in this section of the Republic, see Timothy Burns, “Philosophy and Poetry: A New Look at an Old Quarrel,” American Political Science Review 109, no. 2 (2015): 326, 328–332.
- 3.
Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), p. 46; hereafter abbreviated GR.
- 4.
In addition to eroding solidarity and political engagement, poetry may have a natural tendency to undermine political stability. While a stable community seems to depend upon some measure of agreement, uniformity, repetition, and cliché, art abhors repetition, and its development is determined only “by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality” (GR, p. 48).
- 5.
“With a poet, one’s ethical posture, indeed one’s very temperament, is determined and shaped by one’s aesthetics. This is what accounts for poets finding themselves invariably at odds with the social reality” (Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986], p. 139); hereafter abbreviated LTO.
- 6.
Brodsky: “I think that for the writer who first of all concerns himself with his own work, the deeper he plunges into it, the greater will be the consequences—literary, aesthetic and of course political as well” (Cynthia Haven, Joseph Brodsky: Conversations [Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi, 2002], p. 10); hereafter abbreviated JBC. See also David-Antoine Williams, Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; hereafter abbreviated DP), p. 74: “Brodsky’s elevation of poetry over the institutions of man allows him to make the highest of social claims for it.”
- 7.
From a 1993 interview: “I believe the duty of the poet is to make things clearer” (JBC, p. 173).
- 8.
From a 1973 interview: “I would say that people are equally capable for good and for bad. But people as far as I know prefer easy solutions and to commit evil is much easier than to make something good, that’s all” (JBC, pp. 26–27).
- 9.
As Brodsky puts it, “in my opinion it is a complete nonsense when the writer is forced to become a political activist” (JBC, p. 11; compare Joes Segal, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016], 72; hereafter abbreviated AP). Cf. Lev Loseff (Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), who writes that Brodsky’s relative apoliticism “lay not in an avoidance of political issues but in his refusal to see them in any other way that sub specie aeternitatis” (p. 140). In his insightful book Defending Poetry, David-Antoine Williams discusses and compares the defenses of poetry made by Brodsky, Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. The major differences between my argument and Williams’ are (1) my primary thesis is that according to both Brodsky and Heaney, it is precisely the transpolitical standpoint of poetry that enables it to realize its salutary political role, and (2) my task is to elaborate the various ways in which this realization occurs. In arguing for this thesis, and in presupposing a broad conception of the political role played by poetry, I disagree with, for instance, Williams’ claim that, “It is evident that the moral primacy and authority that Brodsky ascribes to poetry result in a purely confrontational—even retributive—approach to any relationship between it and politics” (DP, p. 78, compare pp. 80–81).
- 10.
In a 1979 interview, Brodsky says: “if there is any deity to me, it’s language” (JBC, p. 90). And in 1986: “I would say that the poet worships perhaps only one thing in the final analysis, and that has no embodiment except in words, that is ... language” (p. 109). This theological motive for writing may be closely connected with a devotion to Beauty: “In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they’re not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they’re doing is simply talking back to the language itself—as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony—those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror” (p. 100).
- 11.
Cf. the essay “Less Than One,” where Brodsky mentions “the usual reason why a writer writes—to give or to get a boost from the language” (LTO, p. 4).
- 12.
See also Williams, Defending Poetry, p. 95: “Isn’t Brodsky’s autonomous ‘I’ an unabashedly egotistical self, concerned only with itself, detached from and insouciant of the others who make up the world? In other words, isn’t Brodsky’s ‘I’ a totalizing ‘I’, attempting to incorporate existence into itself just as ravenously as the State attempts to incorporate existence? Hasn’t Brodsky only countered one totalization with a competing totalization?”
- 13.
Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), p. 31. Brodsky’s own autonomy may have engendered a nihilistic detachment with regard to most human endeavors. In a 1979 interview, after setting aside “writing itself, listening to music, perhaps a little bit of thinking,” as well as friendship and food, Brodsky characterizes the rest of human activities and pursuits as meaningless: “other things you’re forced to do—paying taxes, counting the numbers, writing references, doing your chores—don’t all those things strike you as utterly meaningless? It’s like when we sat in that café. The girl was doing something with the pies, or whatever—they were in that refrigerator with the glass. And she stuck her head in and she was doing all those things, the rest of her out of the refrigerator. She was in that position for about two minutes. And once you see it there’s no point in existing any more. (laughs) Simple point, ya?” Interviewer: “Except that the minute you translate that into an image or a thought you’ve already taken it out of uselessness.” Brodsky: “But once you’ve seen it the whole of existence is compromised” (JBC, p. 96).
- 14.
As Richard Russell puts it, Heaney developed “a poetics that thrived on indecision, on being ‘in-between’ politically and poetically” (Russell, “Poems without Frontiers,” in Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], p. 38). Cf. also Heaney’s essay “The Government of the Tongue”: poetry’s “self-gratification must be perceived as a kind of affront to a world preoccupied with its own imperfections, pains and catastrophes. What right has poetry to its quarantine? Should it not put the governors on its joy and moralize its song?” (p. 99). Yet “the fact is that poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and promise of the artistic event” (Heaney, The Government of the Tongue [London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1988], p. 101; hereafter abbreviated GT). Consider also Michael Kochin’s critique of the claim that literature promotes empathy; Kochin asks “whether the writing itself is conducive to the alleviation of suffering, or whether it merely affords the reader a view of the spectacle of that suffering from a safe aesthetic distance” (Kochin, “How Bodies Read and Write: Dostoevsky’s Demons and Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg,” in Dostoevsky’s Political Thought [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013], p. 232).
- 15.
Heaney, Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1996), pp. 415–16; hereafter abbreviated OG.
- 16.
Heaney: “at last I’m more relaxed. And in this particular book [The Haw Lantern], and this is a political position, I’ve just taken enormous pleasure in the writing, which is what I would like to do more and more, just to—as Mr. Joyce said in Station Island—write for the pleasure of it. I mean, we all know that is the true thing to do, but I happen to have gone through a period of sullenness against it. Now I write in any form that presents itself as a source of pleasure and possibility and isn’t just an exercise” (David Montenegro, Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics [Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991], p. 193); hereafter abbreviated PD.
- 17.
Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), p. 2, p. 6; hereafter abbreviated RP.
- 18.
“Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life” (GT, p. 107).
- 19.
See also Dennis O’Driscoll, “Heaney in Public,” in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 59: “it is because Heaney is an inclusive, non-factional poet of second thoughts, of two minds, of the ‘in-between’ and undogmatic, that he is so trusted whenever he adopts a firm stance on a public issue.” According to David-Antoine Williams, the very word “between,” which is the first word of the first poem in Heaney’s first book, “establishes a paradigm followed throughout the Heaney corpus. Its recurring function is to locate the poet in relation to but equidistant from two social or civic states of mind” (DP, p. 149). Cf. also Edna Longley’s review of Heaney’s North: “If they [literature and politics] simply take in one another’s mythological laundry, how can the former be an independent long-term agent of change?” (Longley, “‘Inner Émigré’ or ‘Artful Voyeur’? Seamus Heaney’s North,” in Seamus Heaney [London: Macmillan Press, 1997], p. 61; cf. Longley, “Northern Ireland: Poetry and Peace,” in Ireland: Towards New Identities? [Oxford, UK: Alden Press], p. 112, p. 118).
- 20.
In Art and Politics, Joes Segal argues that because the political status quo forms every human being’s point of reference, “the concept of pure and autonomous art can only be a theoretical illusion” (p. 129, cf. pp. 9–10). By contrast, Heaney, who seems to understand the autonomous or transpolitical perspective of the artist to be a matter of degree, and to be something for which the artist actively strives, says in an interview: “I’ve said this about Derek [Mahon] before, that I see him as a kind of Stephen Dedalus of the north, withdrawing from the nets of solidarity and spokesmanship for his group. And the minute I say his group—northern Protestant Unionists—I understand exactly why Derek withdraws. Not to do so would coarsen and reduce the scope not only of the poetic endeavor but the human possibility. So Derek’s cosmopolitanism, to give it a glib name, his refusals of local representation, are not just refusals; they are embraces of larger possibilities, as he sees it, for the spirit in the world” (PD, p. 183). Heaney would thus likely agree with, and stress more emphatically, Segal’s more optimistic conclusion that even without complete purity, art retains a power to call our politically biased projections into question (AP, p. 136).
- 21.
Williams argues persuasively (DP, pp. 151–154) that some of Heaney’s own “engagements in public debates over geopolitics make the mistake of patronizing the audience, and worse, that they fail the criteria of poetic integrity he himself articulated in ‘The Redress of Poetry’” (p. 153). But Williams finds in these very failures a kind of test and confirmation of Heaney’s own thesis defending the value of “poetic integrity” as “essential to the other, indirect uses poetry may have” (pp. 102–103, 154). As Williams puts it, discussing Heaney’s idea of “redress”: “Poetry must be preserved itself on its own terms before it can be of true use to anyone or anything... Once this basis of independence is established, commerce between poetry and the ‘real’ world can be profitable” (p. 105).
- 22.
Brodsky, for his part, would presumably argue that all philosophic investigation must begin from a clarification of the phenomena, since “in the last analysis, appearances are all there is” (Brodsky, LTO, p. 19); “There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomena” (JBC, p. 174).
- 23.
“For Heaney poetry works on our conscience; it does not influence the machinations of the political world, and even though poetry is at times visibly bedaubed with political concerns its goal should always be that of aiding our moral growth” (Daniel Xerri, Seamus Heaney’s Early Work: Poetic Responsibility and the Troubles, Irish Research Series #59 [2010], p. 83).
- 24.
“As though it is aware of the fragility and treachery of man’s faculties and senses, a poem aims at human memory. To that end, it employs a form which is essentially a mnemonic device allowing one’s brain to retain a world—and simplifying the task of retaining it—when the rest of one’s frame gives up” (Brodsky, GR, p. 143).
- 25.
Gordana Crnković, discussing the difficulty of “translations of sound” in poetry, distinguishes between “conceptual cognition and sensual apprehension. Art apprehends the world and we apprehend the art through our humanized senses—our ears, eyes, touch. This sensual apprehension profoundly affects us and changes our minds, but in ways different from those caused by clear concepts” (Crnkovíc, “The Poetry of Prose, the Unyielding of Sound,” in The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], p. 94). See also the last two lines of Heaney’s poem “Postscript”: “As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
- 26.
An example of a poem capable of producing such a swerve is Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist.” The sensory description, rhythm, and sonic links of the first stanza (“clotted,” “slobber”) draw the reader into the young Heaney’s attitude of contemplative receptivity to the natural world; the second stanza then replaces that contemplative receptivity with fear, disgust, condemnation, and anger (directed toward the “invading” frogs and their spawn); and before the reader knows it, she has absorbed (in a pleasant, particular, and defamiliarized form) an abstract insight about the tension between scientific contemplation and political passion or partisanship.
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Fallis, L. (2024). The Transpolitical Role of Poetry According to Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Political Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52026-6_4
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