Heaney, Seamus. Crediting Poetry.”
Opened Ground. Macmillan.
One significant point Seamus Heaney
stresses in his Nobel acceptance speech reaffirms the tenets he enunciated in Preoccupations (pieces written in 1972) and in dozens of poems throughout his career—form and substance prosper from the same roots. The same questions about form and sound that preoccupy him while praising Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost in his essay Feeling Into Words preoccupy him in Stockholm in 1995. Heaney holds that in lyric poetry the saying and the thing said are inseparable, that larynx and lobe jointly officiate in an inner temple of sound.
A poem is a verbal artifact with vocal, connotative, and etymological energies arranged as a pleasing as musical sounds. (Opened Ground 430). The ring of truth in a lyric poem is as much the sound it produces as the discursive meaning it conveys. To borrow William Butler Yeats’s figure of the indivisible tree in A Prayer for My Daughter, Heaney’s organic fusion of sound and sense makes it impossible to distinguish the leaf, the blossom, and the bole on the poem-trees he cultivates. Unlike Yeats, he is a poet of mother earth rather than a poet given to mysticism. There are no hermetic societies in Heaney, just as there are no potatoes in Yeats. Heaney's collections of poetry exemplify his almost palpable contact with the earth as inspiration and as metaphor for his consistently concrete imagery in which the feelings evoked by words awake an identification with the objects in his verse and ring right in his poetic consciousness and and conscience.
Cultivated form is central to poetry’s credit, as Heaney asserts, because it exercises a capacity of conviction of the rightness of consciousness in spite of evident wrongness in the world. Poetry reminds writers and readers that they hunt and collect moral and poetic values—values intrinsic in images and sounds, the conscious coin of humanity's rented realm.