SEAMUS HEANEY
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argued that if poetry was discourse that made sense, then
The Waste
Land
was indeed discourse, except that bits of it were missing.
Wrong, Stead averred. This poem "cannot be seen accurately if it is
read as a discourse from which certain 'links in the chain' have been
omitted." "No critic concerned primarily with 'meaning' could touch
the true 'being' of the early poetry."
The Waste Land
in Stead's reading is the vindication of a poetry
of image, texture, and suggestiveness; of inspiration; of poetry
which writes itself. It represents a defeat of the will, an emergence of
the ungainsayable and symbolically radiant out of the subconscious
deeps. Rational structure has been overtaken or gone through like a
sound barrier. The poem does not disdain intellect, yet poetry, hav–
ing to do with feelings and emotions, must not submit to the
intellect's eagerness to foreclose. It must wait for a music to occur,
an image to discover itself. Stead thus rehabilitated Eliot as a roman–
tic poet, every bit as faithful to the processes of dream and as suscep–
tible to gifts of the unconscious as Coleridge was before he received
the person from Porlock. And so the figure of Old Possum, netted
for years in skeins of finely drawn commentary upon his sources, his
ideas, his criticism of the modern world and so on, this figure was
helped to rise again like Gulliver in Lilliput, no longer a hazy con–
tour of philosophy and literary allusion, but a living principle, a far
more natural force than had been recognized until then.
When I thought of "the government of the tongue" as a title for
this essay, what I had in mind was this aspect of poetry as its own
vindicating force. In this dispensation, the tongue (representing
both a poet's personal gift of utterance and the common resources of
language itself) has been granted the right to govern. The poetic act
is credited with an authority of its own. As readers, we submit to the
jurisdiction of achieved form , even though that form is achieved not
by dint of the moral and ethical exercise of mind but by the self–
validating operations of what we call inspiration - especially if we
think of inspiration in the terms supplied by the Polish poet Anna
Swir who writes of it as a "psychosomatic phenomenon" and goes on
to declare:
This seems to me the only biologically natural way for a poem to
be born and gives the poem something like a biological right to
exist.
A
poet becomes then an antenna capturing the voices of
the world, a medium expressing his own subconscious and the
collective subconscious . For one moment he possesses wealth
