HEANEY

saying that he was “glad to meet you even in that melee of people. It is always like that - speedy, half satisfactory. But then, since the negotiation has been through the printed word and the imaginative response, maybe it’s better to keep it like that! I’m not sure what your question means. Academic criticism helped me to get into poetry. I was your usual attentive sixth former your eager practical critic as an under-graduate. But, as ‘permission’ grew for me as a poet, I felt freer to follow my own intuitions and language as a critic. So, I suppose what I write about when I write best is the undervoice of a poet or a poem, that register of sound, that particular musical or sonic pitch which seems to have a carry-over meaning. Not that the meaning can be put into an articulated set of propositions; it’s more that in the tone of a writing or in its undervoice, one picks up an attitude to life, a disposition, a temperament. And it seems to me that here is where the ‘poetry’ often resides. Elizabeth Bishop is one kind of undervoice, Sylvia Plath very much another. Frank O’Hara (do you know him - the American,) is one kind, Robert Lowell very much another. Also, I suppose I do my criticism by analogy and metaphor. I find myself expressing what delights me or attempting to define what distinguishes a writer in terms of metaphors or similes. So, maybe I’m not a critic at all, just a free-associater. Anyway forgive the brevity and impressionism of all this...”, 1 side A4, 191 Strand Road, Dublin 4, 24th November