Seamus Heaney
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE
Reading T. S. Eliot and reading about T. S. Eliot were
equally formative experiences for my generation. One of the books
about him which greatly appealed to me when I first read it in the
1960s was
The New Poetic
by the New Zealand poet and critic, C.
K.
Stead. The title referred to that movement, critical and creative,
which was instituted in the late nineteenth century against discursive
poetry, and which Stead judged to have culminated in England with
the publication of
The Waste Land
in 1923. One of his purposes was
to show how in
The Waste Land
Eliot made a complete break with
those popular poets of the day whom Eliot's contemporary, the Rus–
sian poet Osip Mandelstam, would have called "the purveyors of
ready-made meaning" - bluff expositors in verse of arguments or
narratives which could have been as well conducted in prose . Stead
also provided instruction and delight by sussing out titles and
reviews of books which "the new poetry" was up against: such as
Anna Bunston's
Songs of God and Man,
perceived by the literary pages
to have "freshness and spirituality;" Augusta Hancock's
Dainty Verses
for Little Folk
which were "written in the right spirit ;" and Edwin
Drew's
The Chief Incidents in the Titanic Wreck,
which "may appeal to
those who lost relatives in this appalling catastrophe." These popular
volumes (of February 1913) were possessed of a strong horsepower
of common-sense meaning. The verse was a metrical piston de–
signed to hammer sentiment or argument into the public ear. This
was poetry that made sense, and compared to its candor and decent
comprehensibility,
The Waste Land
showed up as a bewildering aber–
ration. In fact, it was hardly available enough to the average reader
even to be perceived as an aberration .
Stead also pointed out that the poem was therefore defended or
promoted in terms of the public's expectations. Its first defenders
Editor's Note: This essay is based upon the first of the 1986 T . S. Eliot Memorial
Lectures, delivered at Eliot College, the University of Kent. It will be included in
The Government ofthe Tongue. Selected Prosel9
78-1987
by Seamus Heaney. Copyright
C
1988 by Seamus Heaney. To be published by Farrar, Straus,
&
Giroux. Used by ar–
rangement with Farrar, Straus,
&
Giroux, Inc.
