Sherry Chandler

More on the politics of meter

sort of.

Consider this passage from Seamus Heaney’s essay “Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander,” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995):

…we have been rightly instructed about the ways native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,” and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things. …Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential.

…for it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically “above the brim,” beyond the established norms. These things are the artistic manifestation of that affirming spiritual flame which W. H. Auden wanted the good person and the good poet to show, a manifestation which has less to do with argument or edification than with the fact of articulation itself. (pp. 24-25)

A clarification about grammar: the indicative mood says “she did,” optative mood says something like “if she had done” or perhaps “she might have done.”

As an Irish poet, Heaney is saying that it is good to know that works in the canon of English literature are based on certain empirical assumptions, and that their actions don’t always look all that noble from the point of view of the conquered “barbarians.” Same with Latin literature or Greek.

Even so, says Heaney, there is something about the literature that rises above the politics of the time and that something is found in its music, its form, its art, in the joy it brings us from its playfulness and audacity.

1. On the politics of meter
2. On the nature of meter
3. On Meter and Patience
4. May Sarton on poetry and politics
5. Frye on Poetry and Religion

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