Irish poet wins top job

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 14

Irish poet wins top job

OXFORDS Professorship ot Poetry must count as one of the world’s nicer jobs. Three obligatory lectures a year, three undergraduate literary competitions to judge, one public oration; in return, an annual stipend of • about SNZIO,OOO and a forum of unparalleled influence in British literary life. Robert Graves used his post to campaign against Auden, Blunden to try to make people hate poetry a little less; Peter Levi, the incumbent, boldly promoted a limp set of sonnets as the work of Shakespeare. Seamus Heaney, the distinguished and evocative Irish poet who was elected to the professorship on June 3, hopes to use it, in part, to promote the poetry of his country, and in part to pursue a broader campaign of his own: an investigation into "fear of the grand gesture and of visionary rhetoric” in the contemporary poetry of Britain, Ireland and America. Mr Heaney should be a bracing appointment, just as Ted Hughes was when he became Poet Laureate. A man at ease with academe (he also holds the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard), he remains in touch with hard work and hard landscapes. He is also politically controversial, a Catholic Ulsterman who wonders how the Oxford establishment could possibly have voted for him after his attacks on the attitudes of Britain to the Irish. Yet vote for him they did. He was, in fact, the establishment candidate, backed by Iris Murdoch and six heads of college. Charles Sisson, who came second, is an elderly high Tory, an English pastoral poet and translator of Dante and Lucretius; he was said to be the only poet still wearing T.S. Eliot’s shoes, but Anglican romanticism was not wanted in Oxford this year.

The third-runner, Benjamin Zephaniah, failed once again to give reggae performance poetry a voice in the marble halls. Mr Zephaniah, a young Rastafarian whose poems “live in the streets,” not in books, tried in 1987 to win election as artist-in-residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, but was turned down. He means to keep on trying. “De rhyme might be quite simple,” as he said in his New Year rap for the “Guardian,” but de riddim you must feel.” In the end, however, those who voted for Mr Heaney understood that immediacy in poetry means more than colloquial words and phrases delivered over a band in pubs, however well. As the new professor of poetry put it in his most recent anthology, “The Haw Lantern”: If we miss the sight of a fish we heard jumping and then see its ripples that means one more of us is dying somewhere. Copyright — The Economist