4 results
Chapter 31 - The Archive
- from VII - Legacy
-
- By Rand Brandes
- Edited by Geraldine Higgins, Emory University, Atlanta
-
- Book:
- Seamus Heaney in Context
- Published online:
- 15 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 April 2021, pp 338-347
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Seamus Heaney used his Dublin attic for most of his mature writing years as both a writing space and a warehouse. The poet’s correspondence was acquired in 2003 by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University. His journals and drafts of published works were donated to the National Library of Ireland in 2011. The Heaney archives are a treasure trove of historical and literary documents that have the power to re-energize, refocus and resituate Heaney studies around the world. The theoretical implications and critical potential of the archival materials become clear when one traces the paper-trail of the archives from the pre-natal attic to the postmortem reading room and into the afterlife of textual studies.
Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
-
- By Rand Brandes, Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, NC
- Edited by Catherine E. Paul
-
- Book:
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 27 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2015, pp 216-228
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Since the death of W. B. Yeats, no major poet writing in English deserves his magical robe more than Ted Hughes. None of Yeats's successors have followed him with the discipline and determination of Ted Hughes into the realms of the esoteric. W. B. Yeats's belief in the poetic and political power of magic, mysticism and the mythic gave Ted Hughes the spirit confi dence he needed to push through personal tragedy and global despair. In an unpublished letter from the late 1970s to his daughter Frieda Hughes in which he quotes from Yeats's “The Second Coming,” Hughes writes:
Yeats was a magician: he made rituals to summon up spirits and visions. Spiritus Mundi is the Soul of the World—where all past and future are said to be eternally present. So Yeats is saying that the time of the Second Coming is close but his vision tells him that it is not Christ who is going to be reborn in Bethlehem, but some terrible beast—some terrible uncontrollable energy. Since he wrote that poem in 1920 or so, the atomic bomb, & the possible immediate extinction of the earth, has really become possible. Though we hope human beings will be clever enough to harness this beast, & turn its energy to good. Yes? (Emory, MSS 1014)
To Hughes, Yeats the magician and Yeats the poet were inseparable: “He [Yeats] never really abandoned his early resolution, to make the work of poetry his first concern, the world of magic his second. And by magic as we know he did mean the real thing: arduous negotiation with spirits; regular systematic, ritual dealings with the supernatural and supersensible realms” (Winter Pollen 270).
Hughes's familiarity with esoteric epistemologies—the Art of Memory, Astrology, Occult Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, Alchemy, and the Kabbalah—are intense magical points of contact with Yeats. These contact points not only made Yeats one of Hughes's essential lodestones, but also gave Hughes a unique insight into Yeats's work, especially his mythic preoccupations. These preoccupations included his belief that the form and function of the mythic poet and that of the shaman are one and the same.
5 - The anthropologist’s uses of myth
-
- By Rand Brandes, Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, USA
- Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
- Published online:
- 28 July 2011
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2011, pp 67-80
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
There is only one poem in the 1972 Faber and Faber revised edition of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, the edition used for the Collected Poems, that has never been collected in a US edition: ‘Crowcolour’. The 1972 Faber edition ‘Publisher’s Note’ states: ‘This new edition of Crow contains seven new poems which did not appear in the original edition. They are: . . .’ Since all seven of the new poems had appeared in the 1971 first American edition, the note gives the impression that the only difference between the 1970 Faber first edition and the 1972 augmented Faber are the new poems. The note does not mention that one poem, ‘Crowcolour’, was deleted from the 1970 Faber first edition before the seven new poems were added to the American edition.
Crow poems were appearing regularly in American magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and ‘Crowcolour’ was one of them, published on its own on 14 November 1970 in the New Yorker, its first and last US appearance. The poem is so understated, slipped between the monumental twins of ‘Crow Improvises’ and ‘Crow’s Battle Fury’ in Crow, that one would not notice its disappearance. ‘Crowcolour’ also has the fewest words of any poem in the Faber first edition — thirty-three (‘Glimpse’ has thirty-four).
2 - Seamus Heaney’s Working Titles
-
- By Rand Brandes
- Edited by Bernard O'Donoghue, Wadham College, Oxford
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney
- Published online:
- 28 March 2009
- Print publication:
- 18 December 2008, pp 19-36
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
‘“Polder”, how do you pronounce “polder?”’ was the topic of discussion between Seamus Heaney and his editor at Faber and Faber, Charles Monteith, who advised the poet to ‘Never call a book by a title that people aren’t sure how to pronounce.’ ‘Polder’ never made it to the bookstores; neither did ‘Easter Water’, another working title for the same volume. But the collection of poems did finally appear under the title Field Work (1979). As well as receiving sound marketing advice, Seamus Heaney has been highly attuned to the mystical potential of book and poem titles (as well as the look of the book). For Heaney, ‘working titles’ are titles that ‘work’, as in successfully embodying the spirit of the poem or book in a way that resonates with the reader. But most obviously, ‘working titles’ are titles that serve as emblems capable of calling forth the essence of the book or poem from memory. In addition, ‘working titles’ are provisional titles, like ‘Polder’, that after serious consideration by the poet have been replaced because of internal and external pressures.
Heaney has said of the process:
What usually happens is that I start to look for one [a title] once a ‘critical mass’ of poems gets written. I find that if I have a working title at that stage – say when half a volume is in existence – the title itself can help in shaping, or at least inclining and suggesting, the poems to come.
If a title can help engender the ‘poems to come’, then it must also play a role in shaping the books to come. Writing great poems is one thing; giving them great titles is another; but assembling them with authority and vision into a dynamic whole takes more than mere talent. Ultimately, to compose one ‘great’ Yeatsian book out of all the books he has written is the final stroke of the Magus. What informs Heaney’s ‘great book’ is the notion of the poet as shaman and seer, as well as promoter and protester. Heaney has said that:
publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat that turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping-stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.
![](/core/cambridge-core/public/images/lazy-loader.gif)