Poems of W.B. Yeats: The Rose Forum

The poet, and the poetry of, Seamus Heaney is not a product of the Northern Ireland conflict, except in the sense that his is a sensibility that seeks to assuage and to heal.  It would not be true to say of Heaney, as Auden wrote of Yeats, that "mad Ireland hurt Heaney into poetry," or that the conflict in his native province, as has been suggested, has significantly stimulated him as a writer. Unlike the early Auden, whose genius was sharpened by the revolutionary currents of the thirties, Heaney would prefer not to have lived in a time of violence."  On the other hand, if Heaney is seen as a symbol of rapprochement and healing, then the political symbolism of his Nobel Prize is brilliantly apt. -Richard Tillinghast, "Seamus Heaney's Middle Voice" The Criterion Online, Vol. 17, No. 9, May 1999.

When Heaney was 14 his family left the farm where he had been reared from his birth in 1939.   His life since then, since 1953, has been a series of moves farther and farther away from his birthplace.  But these departures have been more geographical than psychological.  Rural County Derry, the "country of the mind" is where much of Heaney's poetry is still grounded. Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was in his mid-twenties. Heaney always had a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world.  His poetry was poised, such was Heaney's view, between his need for creative freedom and the pressure he felt to express his sense of social obligation as a poet and as a citizen. -Ron Price with thanks to "Biography of Seamus Heaney,"  Nobelprize.org.

I, too, moved further and further away
from my birthplace and, by the end of
my years, I was about as far away as I
could be and still be on the planet Earth.

The country of my mind was not the land
where I was born, though it often appeared
in my mind's eye unannounced without even
knocking at the door and making its own cup
of tea in the kitchen before sitting down to chat.

My poetry came much later that yours, Seamus:
poured out of me about the time I was fifty and
still does in these early years of late adulthood1
And yes, it's all about poetry's responsibilities
and prerogatives and my social obligations in an
Order that is the structure of a moderate freedom2
for humanity in the tempest of this antediluvian Age.

And was I hurt into poetry as Yeats way back then?
Well, partly Seamus, partly--then there was healing
and the river flowed down to the sea quietly at times
often in swirling-white currents going every which way.

1 developmental pscyologists define late adulthood as the years 60 to 80.
2 Letter to the Followers of Baha'u'llah in the United States of America," The Universal House of Justice, 29 December 1988

Ron Price
10 July 2007

Sometimes the experience of writing my memoirs is like the experience of life--euphoric; sometimes it is homely and domestic; sometimes there is the sense of the ceaseless surge of the sea, of a fierceness of energy; sometimes I feel as if I am in possession of the heart's foul rag and bone shop, as the elder Yeats poignantly described his inner life. Sometimes I feel as if I am obsessively preoccupied with refining perceptions, with analysing. Sometimes I feel my agenda is in some basic ways one that is similar to Yeats who once said the only two things that should concern a serious writer is: death and sex. Well, like so many things, there is some truth here.

I feel no need to continue the external journey, occupied as it was with living in some two dozen towns over the last forty years, but I do not want my life to end. This tinkering in the world of thanatos, of the death wish, does occur for short periods late at night, a residue of this bi-polar disorder.  But life's journey does not show any signs of ending in this my 63rd year, so continue it I will, as we all must to the end of our days. As Emily Dickinson puts it:

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
the one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do--

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--

Many autobiographers and analysts of autobiography examine their lives and the field of autobiography in the context of postmodern theory.  Postmodernism is a movement, a theory, an approach, to life which encapsulates the arts, the sciences, society and culture, indeed every aspect of day to day life, but outside the context of a metanarrative.   I find this theory useful because it exists as a polarity, one of the ubiquitous, multitudinous, polarities that define who we are and what we do.  Postmodernism suggests, sees the world, the external world as one of ceaseless flux, of fleeting, fragmentary and contradictory moments that become incorporated into our inner life. The modern hero is the ordinary person and the world is filled with abstract terms. This postmodern society could indeed be called 'the abstract society.'  It is a society filled with a commercial, private, pleasure-oriented, superficial, fun-loving individual. This type of society and this type of individual began to appear, or at least the beginnings of post-modernism, can be traced back to the 1950s. 

The post-modern in autobiography tends to doubt everything about both self and society. After examining more than fifty biographies of Marilyn Monroe the postmodernist is left with plausibilities and inscrutibilities but not unreserved truth. This school of thought sees, deals with, multiplicity.....-Ron Price, Tasmania