SEAMUS HEANEY
297
It is even more instructive to remember that Hopkins abandoned
poetry when he entered the Jesuits, "as not having to do with my
vocation." This reveals a world where the prevalent values and
necessities leave poetry in a relatively underprivileged situation, re–
quiring it to take a position that is secondary to religious truth or
state security or public order.
It
disclos~s
a condition of public and
private repressions where the undirected hedonistic play of imagina–
tion is regarded at best as luxury or licentiousness, at worst as heresy
or treason. In ideal republics, Soviet republics, in Vatican and Bible
Belt, it is a common expectation that the writer will sign over his or
her individual, venturesome, and potentially disruptive activity into
the keeping of an official doctrine, a traditional system, a party line,
whatever. In such contexts, no further elaboration or exploration of
the language or forms currently in place is permissible . An order has
been handed down and the shape of things has been established.
We have grown familiar with the tragic destiny which these cir–
cumstances impose upon poets and with the way in which "un–
governed" poetry and poets, in extreme totalitarian conditions,
can become a form of alternative government, or government in ex–
ile. I was struck, for example, to learn that lines by the poet Czeslaw
Milosz are incorporated into the memorial to the Solidarity Workers
outside the gates of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. But I was stunned
by the image which Andrei Siniavski provides of the subversive
and necessary function of writing as truth-telling, when he tells how,
at the height of the Stalin terror, Alexander Kutzenov used to seal
his manuscripts in glass preserving jars and bury them in his garden
at nighttime.
It
is all there, the suggestion of art's curative powers,
its stored goodness and its ultimate appeal to "the reader in
posterity." The scene has the perturbing oneiric reality of an actual
dream and could stand for the kind of ominous premonition which a
dictator might experience, waking in the small hours and remember–
ing the reality of the poetry he would constrain.
For the moment, however, I am concerned with states of affairs
less repressive and less malign . I am thinking not so much of
authoritarian censorship as of an implacable consensus in which the
acceptable themes are given variously resourceful treatments, and in
which the felicity or correctness of a work's execution constitutes the
conspicuous focus of attention for both audience and artist. It is not
right to assume that such conditions always produce inferior art. As
a poet, for example , George Herbert surrendered himself to a
