Cairo: “The Gulf”
Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939 – February 11, 2009) is one of the most important Irish poets and critics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1995 as a culmination of unique creative achievements in the field of poetry and criticism. In this book, entitled “The Power of the Tongue” (translated by Osama Esber), Heaney highlights It sheds light on poets who suffered from political repression, and revisits the experience of great poets such as Auden, Eliot, Sephia Plath, Mandelstam, Lowell, and others, approaching their experiences from new perspectives.
In this book, he declares that the act of writing must be free from ideological constraints and restrictions, and that poetry must rescue truth and justice from the ruins of history, and reject all forms of tyranny and oppression.
The book consists of critical lectures in which Heaney dealt with many contemporary poetic and critical experiences, under the title “The Restless Beat of Hoofs.” He talked about the peculiarity of writing of the American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide by gas. He also reads in the experience of the American poet and critic Robert Lowell, showing his ability to Special part of the literary heritage and educating the illiterate ear, achieving his authority through the formulation of his verses, in harmony with the traditional practice of writing, reaching a degree of tension and intensity, through what he calls the musical climax, or dramatic gesture. He compares the works of the Russian poet Osip Mendelshtam with the works of Lowell, By refusing to adapt to reality instinctively and forcibly, and to stand up to political totalitarianism; The Russian poet wrote a collection of angry, revolutionary poetic works that he called Fourth Prose. Although the two poets dared to present themselves through their texts, they were the focus of attention for their confrontation with imprisonment, death, and exile, especially after the famous American poet’s statement about personal responsibility.
In the chapter entitled “The Power of the Tongue,” Heaney points out that reading Eliot, and reading about him, were two important experiences for his generation. One of the books written about him was “The New Poetics” by the New Zealand critic C. K. Stead, and one of his goals was to show how Eliot created In “The Waste Land” there is a complete break with the famous poets of the time, who were contemporaries of Eliot, whom the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam would call “purveyors of ready-made meaning,” deceptive interpreters of poetry.
Stead also provided guidance and pleasure by surveying the titles and reviews of books against which the “New Poetry” had revolted, pointing out that the poem was immune from the angle of audience expectations, and its early defenders said that if poetry was a meaningful discourse, then The Waste Land was actually a discourse, except for those missing pieces. Of these, Stead asserted that this is a mistake, as the poem cannot be understood correctly if it is read as a speech “from which certain links in the sequence are omitted.” “There is no critic interested in meaning who can touch the true nature of the first poetry.”
The poem The Waste Land – in Steed’s reading – is a defense of the poetry of image, structure, suggestion and inspiration, and of poetry that writes itself. It represents a defeat of the will and the emergence of what is irrefutable, of what is symbolically composed from the depths of the unconscious. The poem penetrated the mental structure, or crossed it, as if It is a breach of the wall of sound, as the poem does not disdain the mind.
Heaney speaks of the poet’s need to transcend his ego in order to become the voice of something more than autobiography, and when this happens, at the level of poetic language, voice and meaning rise as a linguistic tide, to carry individual expression away on a stronger, deeper current than can be expected, and poets have Different people have different ideas about how to accomplish this matter. Robert Frost believes that there is a rhythm that he called “the sound of meaning” and considered it the prerequisite for poetry, because the rhythms of individual poems must represent this sound before they can be heard as an inevitable matter.
Eliot was more supportive of the idea that poetry contains levels of energy that are more ancient and profound than those provided by clear meaning and direct rhythmic stimuli. This is his formulation of the auditory imagination, it is the feeling of syllable and rhythm, which penetrate to the lowest conscious levels of thought and feeling.
