Heaney and the feminine

In the 1960s, and at a formative point in Seamus Heaney’s career, the influence of Robert Graves - as both poet and critic - was profoundly felt. His images and ideas echo through Heaney’s early writings (as do those of another Gravesian acolyte of the 1950s and 1960s, Ted Hughes) and a glance at Graves’s 1960s love poems is to see the source for some of Heaney’s emerging ‘word-hoard’. More than this, Heaney formulates his own emergence as a poet, and his views on poetic craft, in Gravesian terms, and his early 1970s essays are indebted to Graves’s 1960s Oxford poetry lectures. In an oft-quoted passage from the 1972 essay ‘Belfast’ Heaney writes: I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies out of a bog… surfacing with a touch of mystery. They certainly involve craft and determination, but chance and instinct have a role in the thing too. I think the process is a kind of somnambulist encounter between masculine will and intelligence and feminine clusters of image and emotion. I suppose the feminine element for me involves the matter of Ireland, and the masculine strain is drawn from the involvement with English literature. (P 34) Leaving the Ireland-England politics aside for the moment, this is an endorsement of a Gravesian aesthetic. The first poetry collection by Graves that Heaney acquired was the uncompromisingly titled 1964 volume Man Does, Woman Is, a title that Graves glosses in terms strikingly similar to those found later in Heaney’s criticism: ‘Ideally women are, meaning that they possess innate magic… but theirs is not doing in the male sense. Whenever men achieve something magically apt and right and surprising, their duende has always, it seems been inspired by women.’ For Graves, as for Heaney, the distinction between men and women (or in Heaney’s more diplomatic terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’) is also implicated in an understanding of poetic technique. ‘Would-be poets’, Graves argues, merely ‘experiment in loveless Apollonian techniques’, whereas true poets ‘who serve the Muse wait for the inspired lightning flash of two or three words that initiate composition and dictate the rhythmic norm of their verse’. He then quotes in illustration of the principle his own poem ‘Dance of Words’, from Man Does, Woman Is: ‘To make them move, you should start from lightning /And not forecast the rhythm: rely on chance /Or so-called chance for its bright emergence…’.