How good is Heaney?

It has not mattered much that England has produced little in the way of painting and music; we could always claim one indisputably world class author in both drama and poetry.

In the post-modern England of the 1980s real poets of nature were hard to find. But one was discovered in rural Ireland; capable of such reassuringly agricultural titles as Wintering Out, Field Work and The Haw Lantern. Seamus Heaney's pastoralism could also claim to be political. He deplored the violence of the troubles and expressed muted sympathy with the catholics in Northern Ireland. He could sound serious and important without treading too hard on anybody's toes. Invoking ancient wrongs and the old fantasy of an organic community, his political gestures were well suited to "a poetry of the self."

For these reasons Heaney has been adopted as an honorary Brit. Celebrating the recent award of the Nobel prize for literature, Blake Morrison summarised his virtues: Heaney's is a poetry of "blood and soil," yielding a sense of "the primal sources of the self"; Heaney understands the "ugly blooms of tribal and religious conflict," yet writes a poetry able to affirm "something more visionary, ecstatic and transcendental." I think we are being sold short here. The consensus for Heaney has endorsed a poetry which is bland, self-important and simply not very original.

For sympathisers, Heaney's work finds its place in a poetic tradition which began with Wordsworth and comes down to us through Hardy and Edward Thomas. Typical of it is "Adlestrop," a short poem by Edward Thomas, published in 1917:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop- The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop-only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky, And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The poem depicts an observer and what he observes. When the train stops he feels a little crisis, faced with the unfamiliar name, "Adlestrop." Almost at once, anxiety is overcome as he experiences a sense of unity between himself and the landscape, a moment celebrated by the song of a blackbird.

In the year that this appeared, a very different kind of poetry was being written in England. In TS Eliot's "Morning at the Window," also published in 1917, the world out there ("They are rattling plates in basement kitchens") and the speaker's experience of it ("I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids") do not and cannot form a unity. Instead of an affirmation, the poem ends in uncertainty and whimsical irony, referring to the smile of a passer-by which "hovers in the air/And vanishes along the level of the roofs."

This is poetry of the modernist revolution. It doubts whether reality can be directly experienced and is uncertain about the stability of individual identity. Modernist poetry also reminds its reader that a poem is a poem, words on a page, just as the art of Picasso insists that it is, first of all, a painting on canvas.

Heaney's poetry sidesteps modernism and pretends it never happened. He takes some verbal trimmings while leaving the radical effect behind. Sixty years on, a typical Heaney poem follows very much the same pattern as "Adlestrop." In "The Grauballe Man" (which has been singled out for praise) a speaker is carefully represented. He describes the mummified body of a man, one of the Bog People, ritually murdered; then thinks of the statue of the Dying Gaul and then of "each hooded victim/slashed and dumped," presumably after a sectarian murder in Northern Ireland.

The poem has the same three-part movement as Edward Thomas's poem. An observed object, the Grauballe man, is initially alien and exterior, seeming to "weep/the black river of himself"; then, under the persisting gaze of the observer, this is made over into an inward experience ("now he lies/perfected in my memory"). Finally the experience justifies a moment of transcendent understanding when the Grauballe man reveals an eternal truth about human suffering.

The poem is organised through first-person pronouns ("I first saw," "in my memory") and demonstratives ("now he lies") to give the effect of an "I" actually experien-cing and speaking to us. The modernist insight that words come first has been forgotten. Committed to an outmoded lyric voice, Heaney does not confront his reader with poetry which is complex and difficult, a poetry unsure whether it is poetry or not. Far from it-the bardic, uplifted tone of every line proclaims that poetry matters and can reassure its reader with a vision beyond the ordinary.

The inflation of Heaney's reputation has obscured the exciting and varied range of English poetry which accepts the consequences of the modernist revolution. My bet is that some of these-now unknown-poets will still be read when Heaney is consigned to the basement along with (say) John Drinkwater.