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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Whenever I read poetry or an article concerning the future of this art form, I think of what I was taught at university when I was first introduced to Aristotle and Socrates. An echo from Socrates' explanation to his judges always haunts me: "Gentlemen," he said, "I am ashamed to tell you the truth. I took the poems which seemed to be the most carefully composed, and I asked their authors what they meant. There was scarcely a man present who could not talk about those poems much better than the poets themselves. I soon found out that poets do not compose poetry because they are wise, but because they have a certain nature or genius which is capable of enthusiasm. Poets are like prophets and oracular persons who also say many fine things without knowing what it is they are saying." In other words, they are subject to what we would now call inspiration.
The Greeks wrote about the muses who inspired their poets, along with other artists. The Arabs mentioned shaitan al-sh'ir" (the devil of poetry) who was the source of all fine verse. Then came Aristotle with his treatise Concerning the Art of Poetry, usually called Poetics. The second part of Aristotle's Poetics has been lost. Yet, from what remains, one thing is clear: the Greek philosopher seems to have neglected the form which, in modern times, has been most closely identified with poetry itself, -- the lyric. Lascelles Abercrombie, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, explains that "for Aristotle, lyric poetry was inseparably bound up with music..."
A number of modern European thinkers have tried to define the concept of poetry: Sir Philip Sydney in his Apology, Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, Wordsworth, Bacon, Benedetto Croce, Pope and others. No art form has been the subject of so much research, has spawned so many treatises as poetry. And now Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate, has added his own thoughts to those of his illustrious predecessors, in a beautiful article published in the Sunday Times, entitled "The Peace of the Word is Always With You." In it, he evokes memories of a century "in which poets defied the slaughter in the trenches, the rise of the Nazis and Stalinist repression and made good things happen."
"What good is poetry?" asks Heaney. He quotes W H Auden's well-known opinion that "poetry makes nothing happen". The line comes from the end of Auden's own poem, "In Memory of W B Yeats", which he composed between the Irish poet's death in January 1939 and Germany's invasion of Poland later that year. Yet Heaney contests the conventional reading of its final lines. They are, he says, "a kind of prayer to the shade of the dead poet, asking him to ensure the continuation of poetry itself".
For Heaney, Auden's poem is more than just an elegy. It rings like a gauntlet thrown down in the face of history: "This is the voice of the spirit at bay and making a stand." Poetry always reemerges from hibernation during such crises. The first world war, the Spanish Civil War and the second world war gave us so much fine poetry.
Good poetry, Heaney believes, should be on the side of life, continuity of effort and the enlargement of the spirit. Yet there is a feeling, that poetry "is, somehow, falling short, failing in its function."
Heaney goes on to mention examples of poets who challenged repression and dark dictatorship in Stalinist Russia. Osip Mandelstam is an example of a poet who understood "the rights and freedoms of lyric poetry to be the equivalent of the fundamental human rights and freedoms denied by the state." His poetry became the expression of a deeply committed and deeply oppositional humanism.
For Heaney, "no poetry worth its salt is unconcerned with the world it answers for and sometimes answers to." There is a necessity of poetry, claims Heaney, and there should be a corresponding gratitude to the poet for having made things. Poetry, at its best, is endowed a sense of immemorial endurance. The poet's raison d'etre emanates from the fact that "we will admit that in a century when inhumanity was never far to seek, the poets have been true to that purpose, that they have been put on earth to create civilisation."
