Seamus Heaney and the Modern Irish Elegy

Abstract

In his highly illuminating study of the English elegy, Peter Sacks recalls Wordsworth’s definition of a poet as someone with a peculiar disposition to be moved ‘by absent things as if they were present’. Acknowledging the fact that critics today are likely to be sceptical of Wordsworth’s faith in the representational powers of language and in the consolatory powers of literature, Sacks nevertheless pursues a fundamental and persistent concern in poetry with the passion of deprivation. His interest is in ‘those absences which the use of language may seek to redress or appease’.¹ This is an interest that also preoccupies Seamus Heaney in both his poetry and his prose. ‘The redress of poetry’ has, of course, become a familiar part of his critical idiom in recent years. In the first of his Oxford lectures, Heaney cites the OED definition of ‘redress’ as a noun: ‘Reparation of, satisfaction or compensation for, a wrong sustained or the loss resulting from this.’ He then ponders one of the many obsolete meanings of ‘redress’ as a verb: ‘To set (a person or a thing) upright again; to raise again to an erect position. Also fig. to set up again, restore, re-establish. ’² Although Heaney’s broad concern in The Redress of Poetry is with ‘poetry’s possible service to programmes of cultural and political realignment’, his definitions of ‘redress’ have a particular significance for his work as an elegist, and especially for what is arguably his most impressive and memorable elegy, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’.