Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T13:36:03.690Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Heaney and Eastern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2009

Bernard O'Donoghue
Affiliation:
Wadham College, Oxford
Get access

Summary

The poetry of Eastern Europe had a deep and wide-ranging influence on anglophone poetry for a good deal of the Cold War, and the division of the world by two superpowers necessarily created interest among poets about the status of their opposite numbers. The differences across the divide were profound: to varying degrees, the states of the Soviet bloc did not tolerate dissent, and many poets died or spent a long time in jail as a result of this. Poets of the Western world, on the other hand, could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle by teaching literature at university (either as professors of creative writing or academic critics). However, they were haunted by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s aperçu that ‘Poetry is respected only in this country – people are killed for it’; the corollary of this was that although Western poets could write and publish what they wanted, readers did not care as much about what they wrote as, say, Russian readers did about their poets. A story is told that during a public reading Boris Pasternak forgot the lines of a poem, and the audience were able to complete it; a similar situation is difficult to imagine in any English-speaking country during the same period. Such is the background to Seamus Heaney’s statement in 1986 that ‘poets in English have felt compelled to turn their gaze East and have been encouraged to concede that the locus of greatness is shifting away from their language’ (GT 38).

Only now that the dust has settled are critics beginning to document these Cold War poetic transactions. A key element of this critical work is to examine the influence of the East on the poetry and criticism of Seamus Heaney. His position as one of the most important and publicly acclaimed poets in the anglophone world made his advocacy of these poets extremely significant. He wrote about Russian poets including Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) and Joseph Brodsky (1940–96), Polish poets including Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Zbigniew Herbert (1924–98), and the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923–98). Most of these were viewed as ‘poets under pressure’, which meant that they suffered under political regimes and that this conditioned the poetry they wrote as well as its reception. Heaney’s engagement with these Slavic poets was, paradoxically, both profound and superficial.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×