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  • Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose by Eugene O’Brien
  • Daniel Tobin
Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose by Eugene O’Brien, pp. 368. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016. $65 (cloth); $39.95 (paper).

In the introduction to Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in an Age of Media (1992), the noted literary theorist and advocate for postmodernist poetry Marjorie Perloff recounts the question that spurred her then-recent study on poetry and “indeterminacy.” Why, she asks, is it inadequate for poets to write “like Kafka, or at least like Robert Lowell, or in our own time, Seamus Heaney?” That was some twenty-five years ago—five years before Heaney won the Nobel Prize. In a twenty-first century in which media has become something like a perpetual gale battering our senses to which we have become numbingly habituated, Perloff’s question appears even more relevant—or is it more irrelevant? The thesis of Perloff’s then cutting–edge study assured the reader that poets of “the luminous detail” (of which Heaney was, and is still even in death, the great contemporary exemplar) somehow fails to recognize that the fractious climate of the time requires radical artifice. Mere thematic approaches and conventional poetics “of the official verse culture” will not stand up to the task. Behind such claims resides the presumption (which might more than a little condescending) that even a poet of Heaney’s achievement is somehow naive in his aesthetic thinking, sadly and a little pathetically out of step with our postmodernist condition.

Careful readers of Heaney’s prose, notwithstanding his poetry, would have found such judgments unsustainable if not grossly biased in their own aesthetic judgment. In the most rewarding and incisive of the many critical works written on Seamus Heaney the limitations if not distortions of such high-handed views come through at least implicitly. Taking strict aim on the issue, in this tour de force reading of Heaney’s poetic thinking, Eugene O’Brien has done the admirable and necessary job of demonstrating just how sophisticated Heaney’s aesthetics have been and remain.

Eugene O’Brien is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Heaney’s work, author among other books of Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (2002) [End Page 144] and editor of last year’s The Soul Exceeds its Circumstance, an exemplary collection on the laureate’s late poetry. As such, he is perfectly suited to the task of clarifying the slate with reference to the complexity of Heaney’s, in fact, formidable aesthetic engagement. O’Brien’s contention is that Heaney’s prose carries significance beyond any commentary it might offer to his own oeuvre—though surely it does that—and must be viewed as “part of an ongoing aesthetic and linguistic exploration of the world, and of our knowledge of that world, and of the nature of the human being.” He places Heaney’s aesthetic thinking alongside such philosophical and theoretical luminaries as Heidegger, Adorno, Lacan, Derrida, Ricoeur, and Deleuze. O’Brien maintains that for Heaney, as for Heidegger, poetry is a form of thinking, and Heaney’s prose about poetry is nothing less than a meta-commentary on poetic thought.

O’Brien makes the strongest case for repositioning the general assessment of Heaney’s theoretical acumen, and draws the reader’s attention to broader understandings of the poet’s earliest prose reflections, like “Mossbawn” from Preoccupations, and not just the later essays collected in The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry, and the generously selected Finders Keepers. As O’Brien points out, readers understand an early essay like “Mossbawn” as evidence of Heaney’s attachment to “groundedness” and “locality,” though what is most valuable in O’Brien’s approach is his efforts to reposition Heaney’s idea of home in light of “broader temporal, spatial, and imaginative contexts.”

Another helpful concept is the move toward “deterritorialization” in Heaney’s poetic thinking. The counter-movement or centrifugal dynamic within Heaney’s aesthetics forces one to consider the unheimlich or un-homely at least as much as the heimlich, or the home-bound, in every sense. O’Brien...

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