SOURCE: An interview with Seamus Heaney, in Salmagundi, No. 80, Fall, 1988, pp. 4-21.

[In the following interview, Heaney discusses his poetry, especially the poems in The Haw Lantern, as well as American poets that have influenced his work.]

[BRANDES]:

With your recent birthday (your 49th), you are entering what MacNeice called "the middle stretch." Do you feel you are at a pivotal point in your work?

[HEANEY]:

Ever since I published a book, I have felt at a pivotal point. 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 which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you. So the condition of being on a moving stair that gets you only as far as you are is constant. But like everyone else, I have the sense of two special moments, in your 30s, and then some where later down the line—in your 40s or 50s; in fact, you have to start three times. First, you start to write and that's one initiation, the sine qua non of the other two, obviously.

Are you drawing here on the Wordsworthian format you mention in your TLS piece on Plath?

No. I hadn't even thought of that. I'm just thinking first of all of the excitement of beginning. Secondly, the redefinition of that—going on from the fundamentally narcissistic experience of the first self-expression. Instead of repeating your first success, your first note, you try to get a second note that does more work. But then there is obviously a third moment, that has to do with the biological attenuations and dessications, a whole set of conditions that entail a rethink. And once a rethink is forced upon the creature, the art in some way has to be rethought, or reformed. The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer. Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

That's the way you end the Plath essay. You argue that the life when you aren't writing is as important as when you are.

That's a trope to resolve what is clearly a puzzle. The very best moments of artistic action, the most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things—poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in Shakespeare's term "slip" from you. So there is almost this sexual release, which is not glandular but which is analogous to the glandular. What is the relationship between pleasure and truth?

Again, thinking about Auden, do you have to choose between those two?

No, of course not, I am setting them up far too strongly in opposition. But you have to worry that bone.

At one point you talk about Auden sacrificing the beauty and strangeness of his poetry for truth and meaning. I'm sure that all poets that make it to the "middle years" must worry about this. How do you perceive this in relationship to your own writing—being too controlled?

All of these things you're talking about are awarenesses shared by anybody who's interested in literature. And a writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well. It turns out that motifs in the poems have been a sort-of preparation for the re-think of those MacNeican "middle years." I found—at the end of Station Island and through The Haw Lantern—that one of the genuinely generative images I had was of the dry place. And throughout The Haw Lantern these images were happily assembled but weren't desperately hunted for—images of a definite space which is both empty and full of potential. My favorite instance of it is in the tree at the end of "Clearances". There's also the clearing in "The Wishing Tree," the space at "From the Frontier of Writing" and it's in "The Disappearing Island." It's a sense of a node that is completely clear where emptiness and potential stream in opposite directions. And I'm delighted to find in one of my favorite earlier poems—"Mossbawn Sunlight"—a line (I don't know where it came from): "Here is a space again."

I suppose Mircea Eliade's monograph on sacred and profane space is relevant here. I believe that the condition into which I was born and into which my generation in Ireland was born involved the moment of transition from sacred to profane. Other people, other cultures, had to go through it earlier—the transition from a condition where your space, the space of the world, had a determined meaning and a sacred possibility, to a condition where space was a neuter geometrical disposition without any emotional or inherited meaning. I watched it happen in Irish homes when I first saw a house built where there was no chimney, and then you'd go into rooms without a grate—so no hearth, which in Latin means no focus. So the hearth going away means the house is unfocused. It sounds slightly sentimental to speak like this, it's the kind of tourist-industry sentiment that you want to beware of, and yet at the same time, it represents a reality: the unfocusing of space and thedesacralizing of it.

Then in The Haw Lantern, that space that has potential—your landscapes—aren't soggy anymore, they're hard. Your stone images are very fertile.

Actually when you mentioned that I thought of "The Stone Verdict."

When we were in Dublin, you told me you'd considered titling The Haw Lantern, The Stone Verdict, but that another author was using a similar title.

Richard Murphy had a book called The Price Of Stone and I thought to bring out a book entitled The Stone Verdict would be susceptible to the wrong interpretation.

How did you decide to use The Haw Lantern?

I don't know. I went through a lot of uncertainty about what to call the book. "Haw" has always had a strange fascination for me. I like it as a little thing, as one of the little fruits or stones of the earth. Also I liked the phrase in the poem, "a small light for a small people." That's a true middle-years vision of the function of poetry. And yet I shouldn't really say that. The function of poetry is to be more than a "small light for a small people." The function of poetry is to have a bigger blaze than that, but people should not expect more from themselves than adequacy. They should not confuse the action of poetry, which is at its highest, visionary action, with the actuality of our lives, which at their best are adequate to our smaller size. In "The Haw Lantern" poem, there's a sense of being tested and earning the right to proceed.

There seems to be a duality at work in the The Haw Lantern. On the one hand there is the jouissance, the bliss beyond speech, on the other hand there is the awareness of being scrutinized and judged.

Well maybe that is just a natural consequence of my particular experience in Northern Ireland. As a member of the minority, solidarity was expected; and yet you were not just behaving in accordance with expectations, you were behaving naturally along ingrained emotional grain lines. There is actually a phrase in one of those "Sweeney Redivivus" poems, about being "split open down the lines of the grain" and that image of the private consciousness growing like a growth ring in the tree of community is true to what people experience in Northern Ireland. But there is a second command besides the command to solidarity—and that is to individuate yourself, to become self-conscious, to liberate the consciousness from the collective pieties.

In "A Placeless Heaven" you describe the chestnut tree. Do you see an analogy between yourself and what happened to Kavanagh in your re-evaluation of Kavanagh?

I guess that essay on Kavanagh is really about the way one would like to be able to do it oneself. Kavanagh seemed to me to retain the abundant carelessness of lyric action into his bleaker later life. Whereas a writer like T. S. Eliot, awesome as his later work in the Four Quartets is, Eliot seems to have lost it. Writers who kept it, and they are rare enough, are more interesting. Yeats, for example. He kept the well spurting up in the dry place.

As in "Grotus and Coventina"?

Right. The mixture of votive action and pure gift.

Your earlier "touchstones" were Yeats, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Hughes, to name a few. Are you discovering anyone new now or rediscovering anyone as in the case of Kavanagh?

Well, I suppose I went through a phase of enormous delight and fortification reading Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert and writers like that.

When did you first read these poets?

First, in Penguin anthologies in the 1960's. And then I began again about 8 or 10 years ago.

By the early 80s?

Certainly, by then. What I really like about Milosz is hearing a personal voice in which the poignance and emotional coloring and coloratura spring from the inner lining of the self. And yet at the same time, one recognizes that that feeling center is situated within a large, stern intellectual circumference. What Milosz can do is to rhyme, if you like, his personal biography with the history of western civilization. He passed a childhood among the woods of Lithuania in a scene that was fundamentally still medieval—hay wains and orchards, hunts and lakes and church bells. This was all authentic. He has gone through that, the 30s in Poland; he's gone through Warsaw, the Nazi and Soviet devastations; he has gone through himself, intellectually, coming within the sphere of Marxist orthodoxy, detaching himself from that at the cost of great personal solitude and hurt, leaving that milieu in the 1950s, ending up now in his own 60s, 70s, and 80s in California in a kind of free gravity-less modernity. So in a life-time he has moved from Medieval Catholicism, with a deep root back into early Christian time, right up into late twentieth century post-modernism. And he has this gift, as I said, for rhyming autobiography and history. He can be a serf on the road to Mass or he can be a weightless astronaut walking out there. And I find that authority irresistible, because there is the weight of personal hurt and loss, and the weightlessness of impersonal despair for the humanist venture.

Apparently then you see some parallels between your own experiences and Milosz's? Not direct, but similar.

Well, the parallel that I have not mentioned is a background of Catholicism. I have been speculating recently that the unconscious of the English language is, by now, secular. Therefore, for someone from a marginal society, like Ireland, where the society is more-or-less secularized, but where the common unconscious is still a religious unconscious,—for somebody like that, the reading of poetry in English doesn't satisfy those needinesses which must be satisfied in the biggest poetic experiences. But when I read, even in translation, the poetry of the Poles, I find sub-cultural recognitions in myself which are never called up or extended by English poetry. I just find an experience of fullness and completion which is new and refreshing to me.

What about the politics?

Well, it's the unfinished quality of things in Poland. But of course I'm also responding to the chicness of Polish writing just now. I wouldn't be reading this stuff unless it was available and published. We are all subject to the fashions of the market.

Who else are you reading? In your prose we see Mandelstam and you just mentioned Herbert.

Well, Herbert I think is a finished writer, in the good sense. I don't think anybody can learn much from Herbert. Except to be absolutely honest and thorough. His is a kind of writing shared by many language groups, at least from what I see in translation—Rumanian, Czech, Polish and Hungarian—writing in which the poetry is in the plotting, where the poetry doesn't seem to reside in the dwelling upon a privileged moment of insight or joy. The poetry dwells more in the laying bare of patterns in a reality beyond the poet. Like the animated cartoons that come from Middle European countries; they too are both lyrical and politically tough-minded. Vasco Popa, for example, from Yugoslavia has a little series called "Children's Games." And one of the games is "You be the hammer, I'll be the nail." That obviously speaks volumes. It's very merry, and it's very fierce.

Then what you're saying is that in those parables, and fables, it's not the lyrical moment that you're after.

It's the truth-seeking dimension of poetry. It's what Horace called utile. And yet, I do think that in poetry just being useful is a bigger sin than just being pleasurable.

Speaking about Eastern European poets, you said—"even in translation." What do you look for in translation? Authenticity? Clarity?

As a reader, I want to lift a book in translation and feel it's like any other book. I want the book to do it for me. We know that there are great poets out there in other languages who haven't done it yet in English. For a long time, I think, Rilke was in that situation. I unfortunately cannot read German. And I share the prejudice of my New Critically trained generation against fuzzy language, abstractly swooning language. So translations of Rilke generally didn't come through to me; I opened the book and it didn't do. Until recently, when Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rilke came out. Now I find some of those translations becoming a possession—I love his translation, for example, of the first sonnet to Orpheus. So as I said, at the personal level of opening a book, I want translation to be neither too literary, too cliché, nor too of its age. I mean, there are translations you open and you can see the poet being a poet, flourishing an inventiveness, complacently taking over the clichés, and I tend to resist that. You just want the standards that usually operate; you want a certain decorum, chastity and integrity of language to be maintained.

I believe that there are two good motives for translation and they both sponsor slightly different procedures. One motive, which is the absolutely pure one, is to so love the work in the first language that you're hurt that it isn't shared in the next language. You will do everything that is possible to bring across the unique and beloved features of the original, and this will involve an attempt at all kinds of precisions, equivalents, and honesties. And you keep saying: "Oh no, it's not like that." You hurt until it gets nearly right and then you end up unsatisfied because it never can be the same in the other language. That kind of absolute command which is there if you love the thing in the original and know it deeply, that produces the highest motive and the highest kind of translation and the highest failure. So there are two motives, one of which is that pure one, and another of which is impure. But the impure motive has its own verité. You are listening through the wall of the original language as to a conversation in another room in a motel. Dully, you can hear something that is really interesting. And you say: "God, I wish that was in this room." So you forage; you blunder through the wall. You go needily after something. This is what happened in English with the sonnet form when in the sixteenth century the courtly makers heard through the wall of English the Italian melody and the Petrarchan thing. One of the greatest sonnets in English is an abusive translation of Petrarch: Wyatt's "Whoso list to hunt I know where is hind." Wyatt indulges in a kind of Lowellesque bullying of the Petrarchan original and yet his poem is a great gift to the second language. I think that is the Lowell pattern, and it's the Chaucerian, the notion of translation as taking it over: taking it over in two senses—in the slightly imperial sense and in the original etymological sense of carrying a thing across. I had that motive, I suppose, in relation to the Ugolino section that I did from the Dante. It was a very famous purple passage, but it also happened to have an oblique applicability (in its ferocity of emotion and in its narrative about a divided city) to the Northern Irish situation. So one foraged unfairly into the Italian and ripped it untimely from its place. To some extent that was also true of Sweeney Astray. Even though I can read Irish, the Buile Suibhne wasn't singing in me as a great structure that I previously knew and loved in Irish. In fact, it was in order to get to know it that I wanted to pull it out of Irish. And of course I felt I had the right to it. It wasn't that original linguistic love-right, but it was a cultural, political, historical in-placeness, a "we are all in there together" feeling.

Did you feel the same way about "A Ship of Death"?

I did, yes. That was born out of an opportunity, which I sadly didn't have the stamina to carry through, to translate Beowulf. The funeral scenes in it are wonderful, both heartbreaking and stony. They are descriptions of true rituals.

The poem becomes the ship as in Lawrence's "Ship of Death."

One of my favorite poems. "Build me the ship of death."

Let's talk about poets who are obviously important to you; ones who are still in your imagination, but you haven't tackled in individual essays, such as Frost, Hardy, or Eliot. Are they precipitating in your mind?

I found myself having to talk about Eliot a couple of months ago and what emerged was basically an account of my different bewilderments as I read Eliot. I ended up realizing that Eliot is a terrifically pure influence on readers, because the one thing you read in Eliot is what he wrote. There is no ancillary baggage. With Hardy, you can read folk England, you can read landscape, you can read sentiment, you can read nostalgia, you can read thatch and pewter mugs and yokels, a scene that pre-dates Hardy and has a stereotypical stock response built in. The matter of Hardy, the matter which he works upon, could be mistaken for the Hardyness which he turns it into. But, with Eliot, all you have is the Eliotness. The language has become a pure precipitate of sensibility. And the older you get, the more you realize that—that is what it's all about. So your respect for this strange bat-squeak in Eliot, this pure, odd, querulous, but utterly trustworthy note, rises. I can illustrate this simply by two occasions. First, I went in 1968 to East Coker where Eliot is buried. I was surprised to see a deep lane, where you would have to stand in from a lorry. Which is exactly what is described in "East Coker," but somehow I had never credited Eliot's writing with any documentary truth whatsoever. But even more, I felt that when I went to Burnt Norton, the house outside Stratford. The opening sections of the "Burnt Norton" poem, those lines about following a thrush into a garden, first parents moving without pressure on the grass, voices of children—all that's a kind of phantasmagoria. It's eerie, both a landscape and an echo-chamber. Language has become like the pastoral symphony, full of little cries across itself to itself. It is a musical acoustic more than it is a landscape. So then you go to Burnt Norton and you see a dry pool. You see a rose garden. You hear that there were children in the garden and somewhere deep down you are disappointed. Of course, you are delighted too, but not in the way you are when you go to Yeats's tower and your heart sings because of the reliability and the equivalence there between thing and word. When you go to Burnt Norton your heart sinks a little; you don't quite want the place because you now truly know that Eliot's poetry is still late 19th century symbolist writing. He's not painting the forest but, as Mallarmé says, he's painting the deep thunder of the leaves. I think that Eliot is pure poet in that sense, the life of his art is completely conjured Ariel-life.

Is it an accurate assumption that the poets who appear in your prose are also simultaneously reflected in your poetry? Do you feel that kind of correspondence? How would you describe your critical approach?

Eliot has this lovely, haughty yet frigid term—a practitioner. He speaks of writing the criticism of the practitioner. I would say that's what I do. Nevertheless, a practitioner is a reader when he or she sits down. On the whole the poets who appear in my prose, aside from ones occasionally reviewed, are people who are part of my memory. The only way I can write with any conviction is out of love. Not necessarily from my long immersion in the poet, but the poet's long immersion in me. I suppose my criticism is some form of autobiography. It's a communing with a previously excited self and when I write those essays it's a resuscitation of what has been already settled. Now it can be tossed about and talked about.

How would you describe your feelings toward what you accomplished in Preoccupations and compare that to what you did in your new collection, The Government of the Tongue?

In Preoccupations I think I was spinning off that entrancement I mentioned earlier as the first stage of writing. Those essays are fundamentally the orchestration of my own surprise that I had begun to write. Like a long exclamation mark. But Government of the Tongue is not about the writing process. In Preoccupations I looked at Wordsworth or Hopkins … The way poems come about, the inner geologies, the underlying artesian energy that gets tapped in the poem. The Government of the Tongue is much more about the achieved work. In general, the pieces are about the responsibilities that come with delighted utterance. I think that all of the writers discussed there have conducted themselves well.

What do you mean by "conducted themselves well"?

They were writers who were forced into self-consciousness about what they were doing. And they proceeded, artistically, to deal with that self-consciousness. In some cases—in the case of Auden for example—they allowed the ethical questioner in themselves to slightly dumbfound the lyrical and self-conscious poet. In other cases, as in the case of Robert Lowell, the ethical questioner is overborne by the efforntery of the lyric poet. Mandelstam, again, writes some politically hot couplets and then stops and suffers the consequences forever. But he proceeds to overbear the conditions by lyric utterance. In Mandelstam, lyric utterance becomes radical witness. He speaks of breathing freely. So lyric poetry is his means of resistance. It isn't the language of protest; it is an authentic existential act, a pitting of breath and being against many coercions.

You've written on Plath and Lowell and you mention Frost; are there any other American poets that interest you? These could be either contemporary or modern poets.

As I said, I tend to write about people that have become part of my memory. And my memory was formed before I arrived in the U.S. But if I were going through a complete memory list I would have to add John Crowe Ransom. He is deeply laid down. His is a less ambitious but nonetheless a well-perfected achievement.

What about Wallace Stevens?

Wallace Stevens I am helplessly in awe of but my response is as helpless as it is awed. When I open the door into that great cloudscape of language, I am transported joyfully. And I have got to a stage of reading Stevens where—to mix the metaphor—I can feel the bone under the cloud. I love his oil-on-water, brilliant phantasmagoria. And there is deep mind-current under the water, and a kind of water-muscle mind at work, but I find it difficult to hold that in my own reader's mind. I find it difficult to see a Stevensian gestalt in the way that I can see Frost as a whole. I can see Frost defined against a sky or landscape. Somehow with Stevens, I cannot see the poetry defined. It is conterminous with the horizon. That says a lot for him but it also means he is difficult to think about.

Are there other Americans who fit in that category?

I would have said Ashbery except Ashbery is oddly enough more historical than Stevens. It is obvious that the Stevensian example is stylistically important, that the same beautiful musical waftage is part of Ashbery's gift. Ashbery has a rhythmic amplitude that is almost Swinburnian. I think it was inspired of him to call a book April Galleons because there is a sumptuousness, a full-rigged, under-full-sail, galleon-like progress in the word flow of his language; but there is also a paper boat mockery. Yet there is also in Ashbery something much more timey and placey than there is in Stevens. That timiness and placiness is evident in the paraphernalia of the poetry, in the way that the roughage of the contemporary comes into it—the pop culture, the jingles, the language slurry and material detritus that we live with—and that makes him of his time and place. I think that Ashbery's sensibility is symptomatic of the moment. Stevens' was overbearing at the moment, immensely odd and immensely powerful. Ashbery's gift is to be tremendously sympathetic to the usual and to be a barometer. I don't mean that he just writes clichés. He writes with clichés against clichés. I understand more, now that I have been in America for 5 or 6 years, his popularity. It's because he registers a bemused, disappointed but untragic response to the evacuation of meaning from most people's lives.

Stylistically, he's almost antithetical to what you're about?

That's always been part of my fascination with American writing, precisely this approach to the antithetical. When I came from Belfast in the early 70s to Berkeley, I came as a writer of thin cross-legged quatrains and narrow little knitting-needle forms into Beatsville, into the big open howl of the Ginsbergian. I was curious about how to listen to poetry such as Snyder's in which I liked the elements but couldn't hear the beat. Even though I knew Carlos Williams, I wanted to know what he was about. So my venture in America was to encounter the other, to put the screws on my own aesthetic. You kept hearing that British poetry and European sensibilities were too constricted, so I did my best in the first Californian quest to come to grips with what was different, like the poems of Charles Olson. I actually liked Olson's book Call Me Ishmael best of everything he's done, but I also read the body of his poetry and I have to say I found it a toil much of the time. So after justly opening myself and saying, "Be pervious to this—c'mon, open up," I could see what I ought to feel but I couldn't really feel it. And then there comes a point when honesty to your prejudice is as proper as attempts to overcome it. Fundamentally, what I want from poetry is the preciousness and foundedness of wise feeling become eternally posthumous in perfect cadence. Good poetry reminds you that writing is writing, it's not just expectoration or self-regard or a semaphore for selfs sake. You want it to touch you at the melting point below the breastbone and the beginning of the solar plexus. You want something sweetening and at the same time something unexpected, something that has come through constraint into felicity.

You don't find that in American poetry?

Sometimes I think that the thing I want to hear is not even sought after. This is very generalized, but let's say that the American cadence and the American ear tends to run to the edge of the page. It tends to be fluid and spread. Whereas my predisposition and my prejudice is toward poetry that contains and practices force within a confined area. Therefore I suppose I can understand immediately the aims of the poetry of someone like Elizabeth Bishop or James Merrill. I'm not saying Merrill writes like a European; but he operates within a defined enclosure, a writer who has been true to his gift. His gift was always for a kind of figure-skating joy and he never abandoned that figure cutting discipline. The danger of that kind of writing is that it can remain weightless—and the other danger is that a writer with that gift may deliberately seek to import heaviness. Merrill did not groan into heaviness, which would have been an offense against his nevertheless good aesthetic manners. But by remaining true to himself, he accrued weight.

A lot of what you are describing is the Whitmanian inheritance.

But the Whitmanian inheritance must beware of becoming the American equivalent of the English Augustan inheritance. English poetry's danger is in becoming "Anglican," moving from the temperate chastity of an earlier, thoroughly earned poetry like George Herbert's, who is in the good pristine sense Anglican, to the automatic intonation of the balances and comforts which Herbert actually fought for. American poetry is not out of a similar danger, using the robust Whitmanian uplift as a roller-coaster. A collusion is possible between a comfort-dispensing narcotic, drifting Reaganism and a Whitmanian optimism-and-overflow poetry. I am suspicious, I suppose, of the large gestures which are expected of American poets.

You argue in the Yale Review that American poets use myth and surrealism as a ring of literary defense against life. Is this in the same vein?

Residence in America has forced me back on what I am myself. There are times when I do not understand what is going on in the poetry. At the beginning I thought I did. Of course, there is a vast, inflationary, reputation-making business and I myself am part of it too. I have received as many amplified, overstated praises as the next. But American poets have to negotiate that language of inflation, in their society and unfortunately also in blurb-speak: there is a disgraceful abdication from truth in the words that are wrapped around books. Within the collective of poets, there are a few people I meet who know that this is generally blather and generally very bad. I have an impulse to flee from it, even while benefitting from it.

Getting back to your most recent volume The Haw Lantern, would you agree that what you've done in this volume is certainly more abstract and opaque than Station Island?

It is abstract in the sense that some of the poems are abstracted versions of what has been fleshed out already in other things, poems of an allegorical sort in which it isn't quite my voice speaking. It's a made-up other voice—a tone rather than a voice. They are like pseudo-translations from some unspecified middle European language.

But you still find these abstractions viable?

They are, I'd like to think, "a game of knowledge"—that's what Auden called poetry. And so are little swift poems like "The Riddle" and "The Milk Factory." The process is one where childhood sensation gets abstracted into a sense of wonder.

And "Hailstones"?

"Hailstones"—again, it's the palpable, documentary, remembered thing becoming a sensation of its own memory—and that to me is what abstraction is in art.

However, you still draw upon images from your rural childhood in that volume. Is this an endless well? Are those images still useful?

They remain utterly useful to me. I have little else.

Your childhood. I guess that's true.

The difficulty comes when what has happened between the original place and the moment of writing doesn't intervene in the writing itself. I see it as a process of continual going back in to what you have, changing it and coming out changed.

So that's how you would answer someone who argues that your rural childhood images do not speak to the modern urban audience.

I think that's a completely irrelevant objection to any work.

It's one that comes up often in the criticism.

But that's a sociological notion of what a work of art is—that a work of art is something designed to help people by reflecting their contemporary conditions. That's a terrifically deterministic sense of the function of art—to show people back the usualness of their life. That is one function of it indeed. But the fact that it's a rural image—the danger there is that people like the poetry because for them it's nostalgic. And the danger for me as a writer is that I may like the stuff because it's nostalgic. But that is something that it's possible to be too vigilant about. The audience's response to it as picturesque material is their problem. My problem is to make sure that the return to that enabling source is not simply nostalgic. You have to make it take the strain of adult experience. That's why I feel OK about things like "Hailstones," or "Alphabets" or "The Milk Factory"—there is a bemused, abstracted distance intervening between the sweetening energy of the original place and the consciousness that's getting back to it, looking for sweetness.

Which poems in The Haw Lantern provided you with the greatest satisfaction in working out technical difficulties?

The first one, "Alphabets," satisfied me because "Alphabets" was commissioned. I had a real problem: Write a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard that had to be spoken aloud, and be concerned with learning. And that poem is precisely about the distance that intervenes between the person standing up in Sanders' Theatre, being the donnish orator, and the child, pre-reflective and in its prewriting odd state. I also like "Mud Vision" because it's an abstract poem which follows its own inventiveness—and it has a slightly zany logic to it.

So you felt you were taking a risk there?

It began by looking at a work done in Dublin by an English painter called Richard Long. This was in the Guinness Hops Store that is now an art gallery. Long had made a huge "flower face" or rose window type of structure entirely by dipping his hand in mud and placing his handprints so as to begin with four handmarks in the shape of a cross or compass. When you put four more in the northeast, southwest and so on, so you have eight radiating from the center—then you begin to move out from that. So there it was, this immense design made of mud. So that was the original inspiration for the poem. But obviously a whole Irish Catholic subculture of apparitions and moving statues and such like went into it also.

One would imagine that the "Clearances" sequence was difficult to write, but why did you choose the sonnet form for the elegy? Sonnets are usually made to hold little things in a little room. How do you see that in terms of sonnet sequences?

I didn't choose it really. It accidentally occurred and accrued. The sonnet just turned into a habit. Good or bad? I couldn't say.

Do you still at this time believe that "the end of art is peace"? How do you understand Patmore's statement?

That's a quoted statement. I enjoy the triple take of it because Coventry Patmore said it, Yeats used it and I used Yeats using it. Obviously no matter how turbulent, apocalyptic, vehement or destructive art's subject is or that which is contained with art, no matter how unpeaceful the thing previous to art is—once it has been addressed and brought into a condition called art, it is, if not pacified, brought into equilibrium. For a moment the parallelogram of forces is just held. The minute after art, everything breaks out again. Art is an image. It is not a solution to reality, and to confuse the pacifications and appeasements and peace of art with something that is actually attainable in life is a great error. But to deny your life the suasion of art-peace is also an unnecessary Puritanism. It is an unnecessary extreme.

All the same, I am very attracted to that extreme of denial. In post-Holocaust, and post-nuclear conditions, the seeming smarminess of offering art as peace, the slightly sanctimonious, unearned "Let's go out and enjoy the alibi of art"—the indulgence is a possible affront. But to carry that denial too far, to demean the possibility of art and say that that is all art is capable of is also a great error. The greatest art confronts every destructiveness that experience offers it and in Thomas Kinsella's terms, "digests it." So, when we salute art with joy, we acknowledge that it has managed to overcome all the dice that were loaded against it. Can you write a poem in the post-nuclear age? Can you write a poem that gazes at death, or the western front or Auschwitz—a poem that gives peace and tells horror? It gives true peace only if the horror is satisfactorily rendered. If the eyes are not averted from it. If its overmastering power is acknowledged and unconceded, so the human spirit holds its own against its affront and immensity. To me that's what the "end of art is peace" means and understood in those terms, I still believe in it.