Content provided in partnership with
Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
My second point concerns the licence or room for manoeuvre that a responsible reader or critic has. In this regard, it is useful to think of the reader of a lyric poem as its performer, just as a singer or instrumentalist is the performer of a musical composition (see McSweeney). In any considered performance, certain features of the artwork will be emphasized while others will receive less emphasis - will remain potential rather than actualized features of the composition. Thus, the allusive level of the title of "The Guttural Muse" can reasonably remain recessive, even though the intention to have the title serve as an allusion-marker seems clear. Similarly, in a critical reading of "The Ministry of Fear" I would be content to treat the "act of stealth" allusion as one of a trio of selfconscious allusions that enact the poem's cultural subject. But if my brief were to elucidate the extraordinary poems in the "Sweeney Redivivus" section of Station Island, which defamiliarize the home environment of Heaney's childhood, I would certainly want to call attention to an earlier instance of a conflicted sense of identity in the troubled pleasure of the biscuit dumping.
For the device of literary allusion to be employed successfully in lyric poems, both the poet and the reader need to possess the quality that Robert Frost called delicacy - particularly "the delicacy of our feeling of where to stop short" (714). Ziva Ben-Porat is incorrect when she argues that in a literary allusion the "simultaneous activation of the two texts thus connected results in the formation of intertextual patterns whose nature cannot be predetermined" (108). Poets can exercise a large measure of control over the results of the activation. They can do so by choosing one marker rather than another, by the positioning of the marker in one place rather than another, by the degree of explicitness of the allusion, by its proximity to other devices, and by diction and metrical context.
But even the most calculating poet must rely on the delicacy of the reader. In determining how much of the antecedent text is activated by an allusion, Robert Alter opines, "As with most matters of reading, we need to depend not on some arcane 'technique' of decoding but on common sense" (129). In practice these and other determinations are not so simple and clearcut. The device of literary allusion requires precise calculations on the part of the poet and equally careful discriminations and choices by the reader. When both operations are performed delicately, the result for the reader is a more intense engagement with the poem and an enhancement of the aesthetic pleasure to be derived from its performance and interpretation.
Works Cited
Alter, Robert. "Allusion." The Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: Norton, 1996. 111-40.
Ben-Porat, Ziva. "The Poetics of Literary Allusion." PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976): 105-28.
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992.
