회상의 즐거움

The Pleasures of Recollection: T. S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney

In 1974, Seamus Heaney delivered a Lecture entitled “Feeling into Words” at the Royal Society of Literature, while delivering the T. S. Eliot Centenary Lecture entitled “Learning from Eliot” at Harvard University in 1988. In these lectures, he makes some pivotal comments on the nature of poetry, which serve to elucidate the relationship between Eliot and himself. This paper attempts to shed light on the relationship between Eliot and Heaney, in close reference to Heaney’s “Feeling into Words” and “Learning from Eliot.” The poetic mystery that Heaney finds in Eliot is through “the pleasures of recollection.” To me, poetry leads to the origin of memory because it always points to the primordial memory. One of the crucial poetic qualities that Heaney finds in Eliot is “the auditory imagination,” which Eliot puts forward while discussing Matthew Arnold. The goal of “the auditory imagination” seems to be analogous to that of “Immediate Experience” expounded by F. H. Bradley since they share anthropological and psychological aspects characterized by “unity.” The former seeks “the beginning and the end” beyond time and space, while “sinking to the most primitive and forgotten.” And the latter can be defined as this: it “is not a stage which shows itself at the beginning and then disappears, but it remains at the bottom throughout as fundamental.” The ultimate goal that they share with each other seems to be of central importance in the poetic relationship between Eliot and Heaney. Focusing on Eliot’s “auditory imagination” and Heaney’s literary works, this paper puts forward that Heaney’s supreme interest in poetry and prose converges with Eliot’s “unity.”