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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
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Over the past two decades, theoretical interest in intertextuality, presupposition, and influence has generated a good deal of interesting discussion of the device of literary allusion. This has led to a better understanding of what the device is and how it functions. A literary allusion is an explicit or implicit reference to another literary text that is "sufficiently overt" to be recognized and understood by competent readers (Petri 290). It is "a poet's deliberate incorporation of identifiable elements from other sources" and should be distinguished from "intertextuality" in the "involuntary" sense of the term (Miner 38-39; and see Alter). In Ziva Ben-Porat's formulation, a literary allusion contains a "built-in directional signal" or "marker" that is "identifiable as an element or pattern belonging to another independent text" (108).
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By definition, an allusion must be allusive (passing or indirect) and thus is distinguished from what can be called reinscription. In an otherwise helpful discussion of literary allusion, Robert Alter is misleading when he describes Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier" as alluding to the story in the Apocrypha of Susannah and the Elders (133-34), and Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet "Thou art indeed just, Lord" as alluding to the lines in Jeremiah that are its Latin epigraph and are translated in its first three lines (135-39). These are reinscriptions or, in Alter's own phrase, "midrashic" amplifications of antecedent texts, not allusions to them (132). Nor is an allusion the same as quotation, the exact and explicitly signalled transfer of one text into another. "Quoting poems," Leonard Diepeveen explains in his study of American Modernist poetry, "incorporate phrases in the new poetic text that precisely duplicate the verbal patterns of the original source, stealing for the new poem the conceptual content and the texture of a previously existing text" (2). While "alluding texts attempt to assimilate their borrowings [and do] not present the allusion as a self-contained texture" (10), the exact texture of quotations introduces a "disruption" into the host text (4).
For John Hollander, the crucial difference between an allusion and an echo is that the echo "does not depend on conscious intention" (64). In many cases, however, no clear indication of conscious intent is provided by the author. For example, George Herbert's "Affliction (4)" contains the line, "My thoughts are all a case of knives" (82). Elizabeth Bishop may be said unequivocally to refer to Herbert's poem in her lyric "Wading at Wellfleet" because she puts the phrase "all a case of knives" in quotation marks (7). On the other hand, Philip Larkin's poem "Deceptions" contains the line "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives" (32). That Larkin consciously intended to allude to Herbert's poem cannot be unequivocally claimed. But it does pass Perri's test of being sufficiently overt to be so taken by competent readers. In Ben-Porat's terms, it is a "veiled referent" but nonetheless the marker of a literary allusion (109).
My particular interest lies in questions about the function of literary allusions in lyric poems. For example, how are the intertextual possibilities triggered by an allusion controlled or delimited? Is it a relationship of part to part, part to whole, whole to part, or whole to whole? And how is this to be determined by the reader? Other questions involve allusions that introduce a reflexive or meta-element into a poem, thus inviting consideration of the poem as being about itself vis-a-vis another literary text, as well as about its expressive or representational subject. Another interrogative node concerns the use of allusion "to enrich a poem by incorporating further meaning" (Miner 39). Do allusions always enrich a lyric poem? Are they not sometimes counterproductive or superfluous? What is a reader or critic to do if an allusion is perceived to weaken rather than strengthen a poem? Does one have the right to delimit a poem's resonances by ignoring a veiled allusion when it is perceived to be detrimental to the artwork? Is the responsible reader's primary obligation to the author's intention or to the poem in its most aesthetically satisfying rendering?
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Seamus Heaney's frequent employment of literary allusions, sometimes tacitly and sometimes with panache, makes his poetry an excellent place to explore these questions. Let us begin with the first poem in the "Singing School" sequence from North, whose title alludes to Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium." "The Ministry of Fear" (its title alludes to a Graham Greene novel) is addressed to Seamus Deane, who was Heaney's schoolmate at St. Columb's College:
Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
In important places. The lonely scarp
Of St Columb's College, where I billeted
For six years, overlooked your Bogside.
I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat
O Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,
The throttle of the hare. In the first week
