Heaney speaks on poetry's power to link cultures, consciousness

There is a photograph of Seamus Heaney in Firestone Library. In it, Heaney — with a mop of white hair, thick black eyebrows and ruddy cheeks — squints at the camera as he poses at Lion's Gate.

Beyond Heaney and beyond the stones of the Mycenean archaeological site, the Greek countryside rolls over the plains to the horizon.

In many ways, Heaney is an anachronism — a contemporary Irish poet among the monuments of ancient Greece. In just as many ways, however, the scene is appropriate. In many of his works, Heaney has found parallels between the struggles de-picted in Hellenic texts and the strife occurring in his homeland of Nor-thern Ireland.

Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, visited campus this week to give a public reading and to meet with faculty and students.

Heaney has visited Princeton four times in the past and holds a special connection with the University through his friendship with fellow Irish poet Paul Muldoon, director of Princeton's creative writing program.

Stories of a poet's discovery are embedded in literary folklore. For Muldoon, the story runs like this: As a young poet, Muldoon sent a sheaf a poems to Heaney, asking, "What is wrong with these?" Heaney replied, "Nothing."

"I don't actually remember how the correspondence went except that he was extremely welcoming and supportive," Muldoon said. "He's just an extraordinary person as well as an extraordinary poet. Those two things don't always come together."

Today, Heaney will deliver a lecture titled "Hellenize It: Poets, Poems, Predicaments in Greece and Ireland."

An abstract of his address explains that Greece and Ireland share similar histories and mythologies. Both countries, he says, have gained independence through "romantic nationalism" in both politics and culture. In the development of both countries, poets have played public roles.

"There is a call to poetry to make a link between the inner world of feelings and thoughts of the unconscious and the world of events," Heaney said in a telephone interview from Ireland last week. "Poetry's responsibility hasn't changed."

"Think of the desolation, destruction and disasters during World War II," he added. "The art is a human art. The humanity that surrounds it has had a face since the beginning."

In several of Heaney's works, scholars find allusions to the conflict in Northern Ireland. In "The Cure of Troy," for example, Heaney takes Sophocles' play "Philoctetes" and adapts it in verse form.

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In the play, Philoctetes is abandoned on an island by the Odyssean fleet en route to Troy. Alone, he thinks:

"History says don't hope/On this side of the grave/But then, once in a lifetime/The longed for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme."

For many, the stanza is a call for justice in Ireland.

"That's not translation; that's pure Heaney," said Michael Cadden, Princeton's theater and dance program director, who also is involved in the Fund for Irish Studies. "He was trying to imagine an Ireland present and future, in which hope and history rhyme."

About a decade after "The Cure of Troy" premiered, Heaney published another translation, this time of the Anglo-Saxon epic "Beowulf." The book spent several weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, a Grendel-slaying feat for a poetic work.

Heaney had translated parts of the epic in the past but hesitated about undertaking the whole project until he was invited by W.W. Norton and Co., a publishing firm well-known for its anthologies.

"In 1995, an editor called me and said, 'OK, I know you don't want to do this,' " Heaney said. " 'Give me the name of two poets who could do it.' So I did it."

A readiness in his language and writing matched the Anglo-Saxon writing, he said.

There was a "certain elegy, certain tragic adequacy, certain grimmer side of experience," he added. "That was all there lying in the back of my mind."

In a way, Heaney has brought the canon of English literature full circle. An oft-heard joke in the first lecture of English literature survey courses is that the course will span from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.

Now, however, Heaney has reconciled the temporal and lingual extremes, bringing one of the first texts of the nascent English language into the context of the 21st century.

"The Anglo-Saxon poem remains of course," said Dan Blanton, a Princeton English professor, who specializes in modern poetry, "but it is recast in the process of its movement into an Irish context and through an Irish idiom — figuratively 'carried across' categories of time and language."

In addition, Heaney has been a prominent figure in the new class of what has become an Irish literary tradition. In the early 20th century in Ireland, a group of writers, of which William Butler Yeats figured most prominently, set out to create a national literature.

For Heaney, Yeats was the representative Irish poet of his times. Likewise, Cadden said, Heaney is now the representative Irish poet of his time.

"Both have been able to reinvent themselves from book to book," Muldoon said. "There is a sense of the possibility in Ireland of a poet having a public position and to comment on political matters for example. I think Seamus has followed in this tradition of a public role of poetry."

Similar to Yeats, Heaney has a strong sense of lyricism. And similar to Heaney, Yeats drew on the myths of ancient Greece in his poetry.

"Here's a poet of great distinction who is working in the Irish literary tradition, but he's drawing from the classical myths," Dimitri Gondicas, executive director of the Hellenic studies program, said of Heaney.

Greece and Ireland, he said, are "both small countries with long traditions going back to ancient times and both countries where questions of language and religion are important elements to the formation of a national consciousness."