Why we still need poetry in our lives

Famous Seamus, Heaney mocked himself, after he’d won the Nobel Prize. This is worth pointing out, particularly in a cultural context in which mindless celebrity worship is increasingly — and perhaps mercifully, the alternatives are worse! — the dominant religion. Heaney’s death, aged 74, was an occasion for a nations-wide outpouring of grief, a festival of mourning and remembrance that was at once personal and — let us reclaim that beautiful word! — communal.

Heaney grew up, one of a whole brood of siblings, in rural Ireland. In time, through sheer dint of genius, he rose clear of the limiting circumstances of his inheritance. His father worked on the farm, as Heaney recalled in what is perhaps his most famous poem, Digging. Heaney went on to become the Oxford Professor of Poetry. His death was mourned by heads of state. And yet, it is important to understand the meaning of this trajectory because, in a deep sense, Heaney also saw himself as carrying forward the tradition that he had inherited, of patient, useful work, albeit with a different instrument:

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Heaney’s great strength lay in his organicity, his steady habitation of the places where the life of his time and his people was being lived.

Heaney’s poetic career overlaps with one of the most fraught periods of Ireland’s troubled, turbulent history. An Ulsterman born, sectarian conflict was an inescapable part of Heaney’s portion. The terrible, wounding conflict between Protestants and Catholics, the civil war that pitted neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend, was the stuff of daily living. This was not something that anyone could, in conscience, escape. And it is one remarkable part of Heaney’s achievement that he meticulously noted the human effects of that inhuman conflict and, without succumbing to the seduction of partisanship, embodied through his poetry the possibility of humane survival — but recorded also, with a bleak clarity, that which had been lost, was being lost.

Writing about the function of poetry in the closing years of the 19th century, Matthew Arnold had enunciated a rather noble vision of poetry as a kind of secular — to rescue the word from its Indian inflection — religion, an archive of the “touchstones of civilisation”, a spiritual museum. Heaney’s view of the function of poetry is altogether more modest — and more demanding. Like his famous ancestor, the poet Heaney too aspires to become “the conscience of his race”, to process, in and through language, the intricate passages, the cunning corridors through which a society passes as it lives, and dies.

The breadth — and depth — of the way in which Heaney’s passing was mourned is a measure of what it means to a society — collectively but also individually, personally — to have a poet, have poetry. By the same token, Heaney’s death provides an occasion to us, as Indians, to reflect on what it means to not have poetry, to not have a vibrant, alert literature, a literary culture. Of course India is a vast country, and I can speak only of my little corner of it. But here, alas, the condition of poetry is truly pathetic — and, indeed, symptomatic of the stunted spiritual life of the people. (Rascally “godmen” are further confirmation.)

The fate of poetry is, alas, multiply sclerotic. On the one hand, there is the pedagogic absurdity. Here, pedestrian and hortatory verse is laboriously complicated to suggest “hidden” meanings. Poetry, as millions of children can confirm, becomes a sterile exercise, is puzzle-solving, a heavy-footed revelation of the obvious, miles removed from pleasure and consequence. On the other hand, there is a kind of public poetry. Once again, the pressures and crises of our time are such that there are endless polemical possibilities.

These are, we know, exploited blatantly by our TV channels every evening — verbal slugfests, a WWF in words. However, for poetry to succumb to the lure of polemics, of shallow posturing is a betrayal of its true calling. It should however be said in fairness that this kind of vapid rhetoric is found right across the ideological divides, in “nationalist” camouflage and in “revolutionary” garb. And, god knows, it can be pleasant enough if you like the tune, but it does not deserve the high name of poetry.

Writing on Nazism, George Steiner noted how its authoritarian, goose-stepping beat had perverted the dense and thoughtful music of classical German. The linguistic consequence is a kind of ‘soundproofing’: words are used to arrest the wayward and playful rhythms of natural language, and chain-ganged into parade ground drills.

The literary concomitant of this is a kind of posturing, a histrionic performance against a mythical/historical backdrop, from which the materiality of actual history is carefully filtered out. Many will have a painful familiarity with this kind of poetry; declamatory verse, patriotic stuff suitable for earnest schoolboys. This is marked by a kind of loud attitudinizing, abstracted from context and specificity:
Main Shankar ka vah krodhanal kar sakta jagat kshaar kshaar

Damru ki vah parlay-dhwani hoon jisme nachta bhishan sanhaar

Ranchandi ki atripta pyaas, main Durga ka unmatt haas...

Heaney’s poetry, on the other hand, lives — and loves too — among the ruins, the inevitable debris of history.

The writer was formerly with the Department of English, University of Delhi