Abstract
In this essay, Brown offers a re-evaluation of Seamus Heaney’s 1973 prose poem collection, Stations, which has been criticised as both a ‘poor relation’ to the poet’s own lineated verse, as well as for the heroic imagery and language utilised. By discussing the generic conventions of the ‘anecdotal tradition’ and its relation to the prose poem, Brown refutes the earlier criticism and shows Heaney’s Stations to be exemplars of the form, as well as of Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’. Brown also shows Stations to be knowledgeably conversant with notions of ‘the Romantic Fragment’, as well as with more postmodern conceptions of the prose poem sentence as an emergent, generative syntactical unit. Brown also discusses the influence of Stations on subsequent generations of British prose poets.
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Notes
- 1.
By 1975, some of the prose poems had already appeared in The Irish Times.
- 2.
Fredman identifies the “generative sentence” of the prose poem as a hermeneutics of emergence: the sentence emerges in relation to its constituent parts perhaps analogously to someone testing their way out on to the ice. It is “an investigative, exploratory poetry” (Fredman, viii), often choosing “to investigate how things arise from the matrix of language” itself (viii).
- 3.
Henry Hart describes Heaney’s time in Berkeley (1970–1971) and discusses how the poet “tried to incorporate the expansive forms of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound , William Carlos Williams , Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder”, and that Heaney was “following the experiments of the Americans” (5). In correspondence with Luke Kennard , Heaney commented, “Early in my Berkeley days, I bought an anthology of prose poems; I may also have been influenced by soft-edge pastoral stuff in early Robert Bly” (Kennard, 46).
- 4.
Heaney defines his prose poems to Kennard as “conceived in a late nineteenth-century symbolist blur”, referring to them as “writings” after David Jones ’ use of the term in In Parenthesis.
- 5.
Heaney publishing 7 of the Stations sequence in his Selected Poems 1966–1987 and a further 2 in Opened Ground, as well as including prose poetry in North, also published in 1975 and District and Circle (2006).
- 6.
See Luke Kennard , The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem, PhD thesis, Exeter University, 2009, https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/49653.
- 7.
Further interest in this sectarian dimension can be found in O’Donoghue (xvi).
- 8.
The final prose poem, “Incertus”, embodies this very “uncertainty”, as Helen Vendler has noted, “his first poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’,” 27.
- 9.
There are, in fact, 7 prose poems from Stations included in the New and Selected Poems 1966–1987, including “Incertus”.
- 10.
“Cloistered” (Stations), for example, contains the phrase “his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane”, a phrase that re-appears almost verbatim 10 years later in the verse poem “Station Island: III”.
- 11.
In Such Rare Citings, when examining the minority status of the prose poem in Britain, Santilli suggests that “subscribing to the cult of the prose poem introduces a dialectic of orthodox/unorthodox with a political and/or aesthetic choice that most have so far refused to take in the manner of form” (Santilli, 24).
- 12.
Again, see “Incertus” (24), which throws doubt on the matter by questioning the poet’s own use of a Latinate pseudonym in his early poems.
- 13.
A cursory glance at the originary, symbolist works of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, for example, should settle the matter.
- 14.
The “suspect” nature of the prose poem might be traced back to fin de siècle decadence , notably the trials of Oscar Wilde already referenced in this volume.
- 15.
The word “anecdote” (in Greek, ἀνέκδοτον, “unpublished”, “not given out”) comes from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Emperor Justinian I, whose work Ἀνέκδοτα (Anekdota, variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs or Secret History), narrated short incidents in the private life of the Byzantine court. Novalis defined the anecdote as an “historical molecule or epigram”.
- 16.
Many of the examples cited by Clements and Dunham show this “tendency towards the autobiographical/historical account” (9), including works by Kenneth Koch, Pablo Neruda, Carolyn Forché, and James Wright.
- 17.
For example, Francis Ponge and Gertrude Stein .
- 18.
See Andy Brown , “The Emergent Prose Poem,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 318–29, for a discussion of the techniques of “furtherance” in John Burnside ’s “Suburbs”, “trailing” in Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”, “leaping”: in Robert Bly’s prose poems and “regression” in Samuel Beckett and others.
- 19.
Anadiplosis: the repetition of the last word in one sentence, clause, or phrase near the beginning of the next.
- 20.
A trope that “Visitant” tackles head on.
- 21.
Lord Haw-Haw was the soubriquet given to the Second World War broadcaster William Joyce. His propaganda broadcasts for the Germans opened with “Germany calling, Germany calling”, in an upper-class English accent, in an attempt to demoralise the Allied forces and home population.
- 22.
The dialectic in question is Beckett’s inquiry into the “essence of the object and the nature of the mind that represents it” (180).
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Brown, A. (2018). ‘I Went Disguised in It’: Re-evaluating Seamus Heaney’s Stations. In: Monson, J. (eds) British Prose Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_11
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