The Poetry and Prose of Seamus Heaney

306 STEPHEN REGAN qualified. Yeats's own conclusion, in a passage Cullingford quotes, was, wholly characteristically, more divided: 'Do I desire it or dread it, loving as I do the gaming-table of Nature where many are ruined but none is judged, and where all is fortuitous, unforeseen?' But her reading of specific poems is not always convincing, partly because the poetry is used to illustrate specific political ideas, raided for odd stanzas or lines, and rarely approached from a literary critical perspective. Nevertheless, Cullingford's own writing is lively and she conducts the reader through Yeats's long and prolific career. The plays are given short shrift, although she includes Yeats's involvement in the theatre, and there are only occasional stylistic or typographical errors - she describes Yeats as having 'successfully pressurized the government'; Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington's Christian name ismisspelled throughout; and Fine Gaelis given the unintended, almost Joycean pun of 'Fine Gale' (p 206). It is also curious, given her considerable reading, that Cullingford found no time to include Fahmy Farag's two essays, The Opposing Virtues (Dolmen Press New Yeats Papers xv), which would have given her arguments further validity and and force. The only 'political category' in which to place Yeats which Cullingford fmds acceptable is 'that of a nationalist ofthe school ofJohn O'leary' (p 234). In the last resort, however, Yeats resists all categories, political or otherwise, turning his intrinsic vacillation into strengths we can all admire, even when we cannot follow him along his chosen political path. Yeats was, in his own words, 'unfit .. . for all politics but his own' (notes to "Three Songs to the Same Tune," The Spectator, 23 February 1934), and, for all CuIlingford's defence, possessed too often a dubious, if not sinister, political judgment. The Poetry and Prose of Seamus Heaney STEPHEN REGAN Seamus Heaney. Selected Poems '965-75 London: Faber and Faber 198 at the same time as it marks the anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Heaney recalls that the rebels were buried in comIDon graves which later sprouted young barley from the pockets of the 'croppies: an image of resurrection which links three stages of conflict. The summerof 1969 marks for Heaney a decisive reconsideration ofthe motives and techniques of the poet: I felt it imperative to discover a field of force in which, without abandoning fidelity to the processes and experience of poetry as I have outlined them, it would be possible to encompass the perspectives of a human reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity. The fruits of this prolonged and earnest inqwry are apparent in the poems of Wintering Out (1972). The influence of Eliot is again suggested in Heaney's renewed commitment to language, in his attempt to render the most primitive and civilized associations of each word. This, in itself, constitutes a political commitment, as Preoccupations is concerned to show. In his Mossbawn essay Heaney establishes the range of language available to the Irish poet, from sectarian schoolyard rhymes to the 'classic canon of English poetry: and counts among the ordinary rituals of life the customary recitation of Irish patriotic ballads. Later, in the essay on Belfast, he insists that 'the English tradition is not ultimately home: and reveals that his study of the Gaelic literature ofIreland as well as the literature ofEngland has confirmed his notion ofhimselfas being 'Irish in a province that insists that it is British: One is led to recall the words of Stephen Dedalus in facing the dean, an English convert: 'His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech ... my soul frets in the shadow of his language: In the same way Heaney is concerned with the voices of his education and the directions in which they pull, 'back through the political and cultural traumas of Ireland, and out towards the urgencies and experience of the world beyond it: While recognizing that one half of his sensibility belongs to place and cwture, Heaney does not desert the concept of poetry as a transcendent consciousness born out of quarrels with the self. In this avoidance of rhetoric...