SEAMUS HEANEY’S PROSE STYLE

Seamus Heaney is by any reckoning the most prolific writer of the modern era
when it comes to present the views with great force and vigorous logical style.
The lucidity and charm of his style depend largely upon the clarity of his thoughts.
An enormous repository of knowledge made him clear headed and honest in his
opinions. What really served him in his prose style is the fact that he is a teacher
of English literature and poet himself. As William Logom asserts:
“Heaney has the most flexible and beautiful lyric voice
of our age, and his prose often answers his poetry n a
run of subtle and subtly resonant phrasing”.
As a prose writer, Heaney has a nimble, elegant charm and ability to rise suddenly
at his best, from conventional ideas to home truths. He is a poet, critic an
analytical thinker having scientific approach and this all really contributed to
make him a forceful prose stylist. To be an effective writer, one must have a gift
of distinct style and Heaney undoubtedly possessed it in an abundant measure. In
his preface to the “collected essays”, Aldous Huxley defines a good prose style as:
“a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively
within three poles of reference”. For him, the first is the personal and
autobiographical second is the objective, the factual and the third is abstract
universal. Seamus Heaney seems to justify Huxley’s dictum of writing convincing
prose.
The success with which a writer composes every day prose depends on the skill,
patience and experience with which he handles the language. In this regard,
Heaney’s prose style has the precision and conciseness of a mathematician. He
was further aided by vast knowledge, immense reading and unquenchable spirit
of inquiry. In “The Redress of Poetry” he seems to follow the scientific outlook
and manipulates a cautious and exact use of words. He avoids ambiguity and
equivocation and where he perceives the possibilities of those drawbacks he
clarifies his point further. He further uses the words with the greatest possible
economy and avoids the empty meaningless rhetoric. So for Heaney proper word,
in a proper place, in a proper manner, for the proper purpose is the true end of
his writings. These are certain striking and compact statements in the text of “The
Redress of Poetry”: As he tells the course of poetry.
“The movement is from delight to wisdom and not vice versa”.
At another point he comments about poetry:
“Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self delighting inventiveness”.
Commenting on the significance of poetry and how he takes the entity he writes:
“I want to profess the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability”.
This precision and accuracy lends Heaney’s prose a touch of aphorism though not
as allusive as that of Francis bacon.
As we know “STYLE IS THE MARK OF A MAN” and the ‘Man’ that emerges
out of Heaney’s narration is a person with vast knowledge of his field and a reader
of great writers. This allusive style does him Yeoman’s service and the writers he
quotes give a strong foundation to his castle of criticism. We have the views of T.S
Eliot, Havel, Pinsky references from Hardy, Sydney, Borges, Plato, Aristotle and
so on. No doubt, at one hand these literary figures stands for Heaney’s learning
and reading of the ancient and the modern times, at the same time, they make
his ease more forceful and worth pondering. This matter to fact approach and
inclusion of scholarly figures give his prose a touch of ‘high seriousness and
sublimity’. Almost all his writings bear the high seriousness of his approach and
‘The Redress of Poetry’ is no exception to it. In fact, his supreme intellectual
outlook, broadmindedness, objective and impersonal attitude and commitment
with the purpose render him the title of a ‘serious writer’. Heaney was got this
gift to quote the noble writers whose views are not easy to be ignored and this
adds a strength to his defense of poetry. Poetry for Seamus Heaney is not a ‘Pack
of lies’ but something that engenders nobility in life. This is supported by Wallace
Stevens remarks about poetry.
‘a violence from within that protects us form a violence without’. Again to
convey his view about the poetry which is not entire in itself but demands the
intellectual exercise of the mind to be completely enjoyed, this view strengthened
by Borges remarks:
“The taste of the apple lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not the
fruit itself…….”
Heaney’s style is just about suitable medium for the expression of his thought. He
endeavours to avoid all literary artifice, and writes in an unconscious effortless
and unaffected manner. The use of easy and simple language and appropriate
words enables him to convey his meaning effectively. His arguments are lucid,
rational and to the point. As for example the clarity of language and depth in
thought is a typical characteristic of Heaney in the given lines: “It’s just that
governments and revolutionaries would compel society to take on the shape of
their imagining, where as poets are typically more concerned to conjure with
their own and their readers’ sense of what is possible or desirable or indeed,
imaginable”.
This clarity of vision and vast learning, further bestows Heaney’s style with
‘comparison’ and ‘paradox’, thought to be important ingredients of an expert
prose stylist. He talks of the paradoxes and the antitheses like the heaven and
earth, grace and guilt, virtue and sin, imagination and reality, popular and
common and above all the truth and the popular notion. In the text of ‘The
Redress of Poetry’, Heaney artistically delineates the pressures that can be felt by
a poet, this is he does through the technique of comparison. According to him an
Irish poet would be expected to abuse the tyranny of the executing power. An
American poet at the height of Vietnam War would be expected to wave the flag
rhetorically. If a poet does not do so then the matter can turn quite complex. In
the same way, he compares poetry with both philosophy and History and
established the unchallenged authority of the first. Even the views of the two
great philosophers Plato and Aristotle are compared, giving his writings a power
of analysis. This ability of arguments and the counter arguments establish his
reputation as a ‘classic prose anaylist’ much in the line of Francis Bacon. But a
queer mixture of romanticism is not absent from it, saving his prose from being
dull, like romantics, he has a firm faith in intuition and the power of nature to
permeate the world with her light. But the emotions are not let loose in his prose,
they are under the check of a classic restraint and his adherence to the ancient
authorities and the known poets of the ages and the age. This all lends Heaney’s
prose a kind of vitality hardly found in any of his contemporaries.
To sum up we can say that Seamus Heaney is the master of versatile prose
style. There is a smooth unobstructed flow in Heaney’s language. His choice of
concrete and meaningful words helps him in conveying his sense properly. There
is no rambling about the subject and no beating about the bush, nor is there
heaping up of the unnecessary details. He tries to convey his thought and
meaning through appropriate language and words and avoids all superfluous and
vague expressions. Moreover, he combines the scientific, the imaginative, the
romantic, the classic and the neo classic all in his poetry. By his ability to touch
such a complex topic of re evaluating the poetry he has not only created an epoch
but shown his fellow scholars the future of criticism. When he uses words, they
do not remain words but a vehicle for his philosophical ideas. A lot of credit is also
deserved by him for resorting to a language that can sustain the subtle thought
and serious subject matter. However, the beauty of all this is that a reader never
feels his mind being burdened by any intricate philosophy. Tom Paulin rightly
opines in the ‘observer’:

“An inspiriting celebration of what, quoting a beautiful line of George Herbert’s

he characterizes a ‘lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane”.