A story which is likely to be very familiar to Irish readers is told in Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney (HarperCollins, £15.99 in UK). It is an uncontroversial description of the stages of a development that has led to an indisputably impressive achievement. And it is precisely the indisputable nature of Heaney's gift that characterises Vendler's examination of his work. She admonishes Heaney's politically motivated "adversary critics" in her introduction: To read lyric poems as if they were expository essays is a fundamental philosophical mistake; and part of the purpose of this book is to read the poems as the provisional symbolic structures that they are.
Vendler's approach is unabashedly New Critical; she even goes to the lengths, in her examination of "The Haw Lantern" and "St. Kevin and The Blackbird", of breaking the poems' syntax down into its component units, a process which she calls "graphing." This emphasis on the nuts and bolts of Heaney's technique is occasionally illuminating, but more often has a curiously reductive effect, as though the poem were reducible to the sum of its parts. Vendler's method is respectfully descriptive, rather than critical, but it could be argued that Heaney's work suffers from its decon textualisation. A simple example of this occurs in the chapter on Death of a Naturalist. Vendler pays misty-eyed tribute to Heaney's description of the agricultural labourers of his childhood:
. . . the young poet erects a memorial to the generations of forgotten men and women whose names are lost, whose graves bear no tombstones, and whose lives are registered in no chronicle. Soon even the tools they used will be found only in museums, and the movements they made in wielding them will be utterly lost.
What Vendler omits to mention here is Heaney's obvious debt to Patrick Kavanagh. Her approach, admiring though it is, is strangely mystifying, as though Heaney were an Antaeus figure whose genius sprang directly from the earth, instead of being heavily influenced in this first volume by Kavanagh and Hughes, among others. Surely a critical acknowledgment of sources should serve to enrich rather than diminish a strong poet? This omission leads directly to the exaggeration of Vendler's description of Heaney as "an anthropologist inventing a notation for an unrecorded dance". On the publication of North, in 1975, Heaney was harshly criticised for what some regarded as his "irresponsible" aestheticising and mythologising of sectarian violence. Although Vendler's emphasis on the provisional nature of the "Bog Poems" is valuable, since it is useful to read the individual poems as stages in a meditative process, she does not acknowledge that it is precisely the accomplishment of Heaney's descriptive technique that is at issue here. Instead, Vendler declares the fascinating uneasiness of "Strange Fruit" to be "less successful" than those literary monuments "The Tollund Man" and "The Bog Queen". Vendler steers clear of a detailed examination of the adequacy of Heaney's archaeological metaphor in North, sometimes seeming to forget that is a metaphor. There is a startling confusion of terms in Vendler's description of "the objectivity of history", by which she means Heaney's description of the bog bodies, and "the insult of the actual", meaning "the actual weight/ of each hooded victim,/ slashed and dumped" at the end of "The Grauballe Man". What Vendler seems to be missing is the fact that both parts of this poem are metaphorical. The poems in North are not expressive of "the objectivity of history" or even of prehistory, rather they are the willed outcome of a number of artistic choices.
Vendler's study is a skilful example of its kind, and will no doubt be a godsend to undergraduates everywhere. Its advocacy is already unnecessary. What remains to be seen is how Heaney's best work will respond to a more inclusive critical approach.