Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland by Adam Hanna

Author:Adam Hanna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815655589
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2022-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

Some clearly expected that, on this occasion on which the distance between law and justice appeared to have swung wide, Heaney would fulfill the historic function of an Irish poet and wade in. In his draft reply to Farrell’s letter, however, Heaney gently parried Farrell’s request that he provide an endorsement of the long poem. However, Heaney praised GiB, writing that it was “full of good things and goes along with a terrific zest and intelligence.” He also noted “its head-on energy and its terrible subject matter and its general mixture of fierce feeling and elegant technique” and gave advice on how the poem might be published. On the subject of providing an endorsement, though, Heaney was firm: he wrote that, while he was “happy to facilitate its circulation,” he was “not prepared to ‘plug the thing.’” He went on to advise that

the optimum force would be achieved by having a joint publication in Britain and Ireland. When Bobby Sands’s poems were being prepared for publication, my suggestion was that they be placed with a London or Dublin publishing house. That way many people—reviewers, editors, broadcasters—would have had a chance to approach the subject neutrally (so to speak). If the thing appears from a politically aligned address or organ, many people would take it as propaganda rather than outrage, and the moral force of the thing would be blunted or deflected by the suasion of the “propaganda” label. You’d get the public attention—in reviews etc—of the “converted” whereas the point here would be to raise the consciousness of the half-committed.76

This letter contains both more and less surprising elements. Less surprisingly, it shows Heaney’s famed instinct toward inclusiveness in his idea that the volume be given both Irish and British publication. There are other ways of reading this letter, too, however. By expressing a wish to “raise the consciousness of the half-committed,” it looks as if Heaney is making the point that better propaganda could be had from the poem if it did not look like it was propaganda.

His answer, too, reveals a surprising involvement in the publication of republican poetry, showing that he provided at least one suggestion on the publication of Prison Poems by Bobby Sands, who had died eight years earlier.77 There is a blog post by former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison that contains an account of how Heaney may have supplied his suggestion. In this post, Morrison recollects meeting Heaney on a train and Heaney’s agreeing to read the poetry of Bobby Sands (which was later published as Prison Poems).78 He further remembered that he sent Heaney the poems and that Heaney brought them back to the Sinn Féin offices a week or two later with “a message for me in which he said that the trilogy ‘The Crime of Castlereagh’ read like or was derivative of Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’”79 Morrison says that was the extent of his contact with the poet.

Heaney’s account of meeting Morrison in his poem “The Flight Path”

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