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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
POETRY AND POETICS
The Politics of
Speech in Later
Twentieth-Century
Poetry
Local Tongues in
Heaney, Brooks, Harrison,
and Clifton
William Fogarty
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Series Editor
Ann Vickery
Deakin University
Burwood, Australia
Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, continued by David Herd, and now
headed by Ann Vickery, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics pro-
motes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century
poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the
series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the
construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception
and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the
intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic
authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life,
and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by
poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distin-
guished by its tilt toward experimental work – intellectually, politically,
aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in
the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the
UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work
from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a
crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under
David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding
of the field and its significance.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgments
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Introduction.
Local Tongues: Twentieth-Century
English-Language Poetry and the Politics of Speech 1
2 Troubled
Tongues: Seamus Heaney and the Political
Poetics of Speech 27
3 The
Gwendolynian Tongue: Gwendolyn Brooks’s
Individualized Local Speech 69
4 Tongue-Tied
Fighting: Tony Harrison’s Linguistic
Divisions111
5 Mortal
Tongues: Lucille Clifton’s Local-Speech
Admonitions155
6 Coda.
Lashing Tongues: Twenty-First-Century
Local-Speech Poems201
Works Cited223
Index239
ix
List of Figures
xi
CHAPTER 1
The poem usually cited as William Butler Yeats’s last is a short lyric titled
“Politics.”1 It provides a fitting epilogue to Yeats’s oeuvre in that it capsu-
lizes the poet’s long preoccupation with the relationship between art and
sociopolitical reality, concerns that are central to this book. In fact,
“Politics” is precisely the kind of poem that The Politics of Speech in Later
Twentieth-Century Poetry will scrutinize. Here it is in its entirety:
The poem weighs a certain pressure to “talk” politics during the time lead-
ing up to World War II against another poetic impulse: to ruminate on
personal feelings and emotional experiences. Both inclinations are the
provenance of poetry and in a kind of perpetual conflict that the brief lyric
draws out. Is poetry, to borrow Edward Said’s terms, a “quasi-religious
wonder,” necessarily private and intimate, that evades or even transcends
the material, political matters of the real world, or is a poem “a human
sign to be understood in secular and social terms”? To turn to the poem’s
epigraph by Thomas Mann, is it certain that human “destiny” in the mod-
ern era “presents its meanings in political terms,” or are there alternatives
for that presentation?2 Yeats’s “Politics” suggests poetry’s capacity for
both.3 The poem doesn’t determine whether it should reflect on personal
memories of young love or sound “war’s alarms.” True, it ends with the
poet’s memory of his arms wrapped around his beloved, but the title is,
quite bluntly, “Politics.” Rather than coming out on one side or the other,
the poem folds both instincts in a conversational language that allows it to
strike its two notes at once, dissolving the potentially propagandistic rhe-
torical postures of political statement and the elevated, willfully contrived
pitches of conventional personal reverie in the cadences of a casual,
uncomplicated colloquiality.
“Politics” isn’t primarily about politics or, for that matter, love. Rather,
it is a soliloquy spoken in a local tongue that interrogates a crossed predi-
lection for politics and personal remembrance. That informal local lan-
guage might be described as colloquial standard English, but with Yeats’s
Irish inflection—an Irish English—implied by his reputation as a defini-
tively Irish poet and perhaps even detectable in, at least to those familiar
with the cadences and syntax of English as it is spoken in different parts of
Ireland, the demonstrative and inverted phrasing of “How can I, that girl
standing there/My attention fix,” “here’s a travelled man/That knows
what he talks about,” and “there’s a politician/That has both read and
thought.”4 The contractions—the “here’s” and “there’s”—and the pro-
noun “that” instead of “who” make for an informal-sounding articula-
tion. Moreover, the use of “there” and “here” to emphasize a subject
echoes certain linguistic patterns in Irish English. For example, in an anal-
ysis of the “responsive system” of the language, the way its speakers answer
simple yes or no questions, Gili Diamant observes that “there” is often
placed in the subject position—“there is” or “there isn’t” instead of yes or
no (253).5 At any rate, the mere mention of politics by the Anglo-Irish
author of “Easter 1916,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “A
Meditation in Time of War,” and “On a Political Prisoner,” some of the
most famous English-language political poems about Ireland, conjures the
1 INTRODUCTION. LOCAL TONGUES: TWENTIETH-CENTURY… 3
volatile terrain of Irish independence, despite the fact that Ireland goes
unmentioned in “Politics.”
And yet for all these particularizing local aspects and allusions, the lan-
guage’s ordinariness renders it general, too. The poem observes only “that
girl” (we know not from the poem’s content but from literary history that
the usual object of Yeats’s infatuation is the Irish revolutionary Maud
Gonne). It leaps from Roman to Russian to Spanish politics with no elabo-
ration—and, as with Ireland, no mention of Germany, even as Europe
stood at the precipice of Nazi domination at the time of the poem’s com-
position. It refers casually to “a travelled man,” “a politician,” and “they,”
rather loose authorities on some indeterminate sense of “war and war’s
alarms.”
In other words, the poem’s speech renders it at once specific in its local
facets and general in its commonplaceness. The girl is “standing there,”
located nearby and yet, standing where? The travelled man is characterized
as one who “knows/What he talks about,” lending him a bit of distinction
although what it is he talks about is not disclosed. Even if we take the
speaker to be Yeats himself, we could conclude it is only an approximate
portrayal of him in an undefined state of speculation: “Maybe what they
say is true,” he wonders with an idiomatic flatness uncharacteristic of
Yeats, revealing neither who “they” are nor what it is they say. Further, the
repetition of “on” between the looming, broad national designations that
do get named—on Roman, on Russian, and on Spanish—has the effect of
making the poem sound like the extemporaneous speech pattern of an
individual, perhaps any individual. In lieu of resolving its ambiguities, the
poem proceeds like a discrete and yet abstracted mind in conversation
with itself, tightening rhythmically to its closing cri de coeur, “O that I
were young again/And held her in my arms.” Such lyrical thinking-in-
progress is punctuated by the poem’s two rhymes that emphasize the
terms of the argument: “How can I,” the poem asks rhetorically, “fix” on
“politics” when there exists the possibility of warding off “war’s alarms,”
however urgent, with the enveloping “arms” of lovers—or the memory of
them? Those rhymes produce sonic connections rather than stamp defini-
tive conclusions. Indeed, its last lines conjure the anonymous “Western
Wind” lyrics of a sixteenth-century song that has come to represent the
musical, intimate, first-person aspects of lyrical poetry.6 The poem’s rhyth-
mic colloquial tone produced by its local-speech cadences, its conversa-
tional generalities, and its patterned lineation portray a human being
questioning, talking, thinking, remembering, and loving through “war
4 W. FOGARTY
and war’s alarms.” The poem is the tension between those human activi-
ties on the one hand and the all too human social and political catastro-
phes that sound war’s alarms on the other.
“Politics” doesn’t answer the question it raises because it is itself the
raising of that question. It rehearses a quandary, rather than provides an
answer, one that reflects something of the dilemma about politics and
poetry that engrosses the four English-language poets from the latter half
of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic who are the subjects
of this study: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and
Lucille Clifton. Theirs is a dilemma captured in another famous twentieth-
century English-language poem, this one with Yeats as subject rather than
author, W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” That poem—and
these representative twentieth-century poets in Northern Ireland, the
United States, and England who wrote in the decades after it—asks if
poetry can be effectual in any social sense. Can it make things happen in
the world (Auden 88)? Indeed, Auden’s elegy to Yeats is appealed to time
and again whenever the question of poetry’s relation to politics is broached.
In fact, it has become practically obligatory to invoke the poem’s
equivocation-masked-as-assertion that “Poetry makes nothing happen”
whenever poetry’s social utility or futility is under inspection (an invoca-
tion this very introduction has also just made), and it is often deployed to
concede the political limitations of poetry (a concession this book resists).7
What is consistently overlooked is that Auden’s elegy refers to poetry just
a few lines after its most famous one as “A way of happening, a mouth”
that “survives.” That is, if Auden’s poem argues that poetry is not a rhe-
torical tool to catalyze action, it claims in equal measure that it is an action,
a “happening,” a “mouth” that continues speaking even after its creator
has been elegized.
The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry takes poetry
quite literally as “a mouth” that produces local speech and identifies that
speech as a dynamic, transnational poetic resource with the capacity for
reconciling what is often thought to be an incompatibility between poetic
and sociopolitical realities. Jahan Ramazani has observed that poetry “may
seem an improbable genre to consider within transnational contexts”:
The global mobility of other cultural forms, such as digital media and cin-
ema, is more immediately visible, and most commentary on literary cosmo-
politanism has been on prose fiction, one scholar theorizing cosmopolitan
1 INTRODUCTION. LOCAL TONGUES: TWENTIETH-CENTURY… 5
poetic form from its social and historical contexts, noting that it has even
gone back to “late twentieth-century claims on behalf of the ‘politics of
poetic form’” to reexamine its generalizations against the particular “social
locations that shape the politics and form of poetry” in every time period
(6). This book attends not just to the ways aesthetic and social forms
“overlap and collide” but also to how they collaborate within their loca-
tions. Each can transform and deform the other, but they can animate and
enliven each other, too. The overarching argument here is that local
tongues in poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical
realms because nonstandard local speech is, like any language, amenable to
arrangement and rearrangement. But unlike standard versions of speech,
nonstandard languages can also declare their distinction from the status
quo and bind people who have been subordinated by hierarchical social
conditions. In other words, harnessing nonstandard local speech into
poetic structures can actively counter the very hierarchies that would
degrade those languages. The diverse local tongues of the four poets
under examination here, the colloquial speech of their specific familial and
communal origins marshaled into the forms of poetry, situate them in
those hierarchies, as well as in geographical locales and in literary tradi-
tion, intersections that produce what Adrienne Rich called “the location
of the poet,” a writer’s position within society predicated on such deter-
minants as race, religion, gender, sexuality, and class, a location vulnerable
to “the facts of blood and bread, the social and political forces of … time
and place” (171). Rich describes having learned as an undergraduate from
the highly contentious and often reactionary “dialogue between art and
politics” in Yeats’s poetry that poetry “can, may have to account for itself
politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sac-
rificing intensity of language”—and for either progressive or, as is often
the case with Yeats, regressive political purposes (174). Local speech for
Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton serves as a resource for meeting
the political imperatives and securing the linguistic vigor Rich refers to. If
poems are, as Yeats famously asserted, made from “the quarrel with our-
selves” as opposed to the “quarrel with others” that is rhetoric, then we
might surmise that the local-speech poem is that “quarrel with ourselves”
when the self simultaneously identifies as part of some “other” (Yeats,
“Amica” 285). They are poems that admit some aspects of that outwardly
quarreling rhetoric without sacrificing themselves to it.
10 W. FOGARTY
UIT: MENGELDICHTEN.
Leersame Fabulen.
1) hoogte
2) jongen
3) zich
4) juk
5) de Koran (voor: de Islam)
1) aan
2) woog, gewicht bezat
3) zijn bloed van binnen
4. VAN HET RIET EN EYCKEN-BOOM.
1) snelstroomende
2) tenger
3) lachte
4) praat, verhaal
5) onbeweeglijk
6) ofschoon al.
7) let
8) schimp
UIT: HOUWELICK.
5. CELADON EN GALATHEE.
1) prijzenswaardig
2) begeeft zich
3) huwelijkspand
4) samenzijn
5) schiet mij dan maar dood
6) gesmeek
7) trawant
8) beloond
6. DE WOLFSJONGEN.