As we approach the 12th anniversary of Seamus Heaney’s death - on 30 August - here’s a timely discussion topic from the former Scotland makar, Kathleen Jamie, who asks: “Where are all the Great Poets?” Her words are from a post on the North Sea Poets Substack social media platform:

“Recently, the other North Sea Poets and myself fell to talking about the lack of identifiably great poets right now. We meant poets of international acclaim and distinction, especially English language ones, or whose work is readily available in translation. Poets who function as cultural ambassadors, as moral authorities, whose publications are an event.

“When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, he joined a tiny but existent coterie of Nobel laureates who were poets: Walcott, Miłosz. Brodsky. Wisława Szymborska joined a year later, the same year both Odysseas Elytis and Joseph Brodsky died. Tomas Tranströmer joined in 2013. You could have intelligent discussion about who else should or could join that list. Les Murray? Adam Zagajewski? Adrienne Rich? Hughes? Darwish? Voznesenski?

“Then they were gone. The poets, I mean. I am deliberately excluding Bob Dylan. Louise Glück spent a lonely couple of years as the only Nobel Prize-winning poet on the planet. She died in 2023, leaving none.

“To my mind, this feels like an extinction. The removal of a charismatic megafauna. And yes we all know that megafauna need a busy ecology of small and lesser creatures, and unlike extinction, the situation might be temporary; but I feel the lack. Where now that rumpled clique, however few, however male-dominated, of older poets of global stature? You didn’t necessarily have to like them or their work, it was enough that they existed: far from slick, far from performance-y, invested with authority, with shambling gravitas and various accents, persons of conscience whose presence at a festival or a lecture-hall induced a frisson and attracted a crowd.

“Why are there none? Why does the very idea of a Great Poet seem almost old-fashioned? Surely it’s not the lack of talent or availability of poets; there have never been so many published poets. It must be to do with the times and our current sense of what poets are for, or can be, in public life.

“Pondering this, my colleague Don Paterson said ‘we sort of collectively grew Seamus Heaney.’ We understood what he meant. Seamus Heaney accepted, honoured and returned the moral and artistic investment made in him. It became a virtuous spiral. (In public he was ever-gracious. His private attitudes and utterances remained his own affair. Seamus on Twitter, I don’t think so.)

“But who is this ‘we’ who grew him, and why? Who made that call, that investment? It must have been people willing to say, in person, in print, perhaps even grudgingly, yes, he is a great poet. In a healthy critical environment, such a claim would be tested, then endorsed. A consensus could emerge. The poet, with this increasing expectation conferred upon him, or thrust upon him, could continue to work, raise his game, stretch himself.

“If poets are neither born nor made but ‘grown’ then we are in a hiatus. The present times seem to have little interest in the sustained career, the accrued respect, or in conferring moral authority upon poets, as happened in the Soviet era. All energy is in diversity and newness. Criticism is suspect, judgement frowned upon. The feel, compared to 30 years ago, is of scurrying and noise. No big beasts here! It’s to do with what we want poets for, what or whom we want them to be or ‘represent’.

“There are some who will say, good – we don’t need ‘greatness’. It goes against justice and equality. Who decides anyway? Gatekeepers! But I believe we do need acknowledged greatness, we do need exemplars - and that inevitably means admitting that some poets are better than others. It may be formally, imaginatively, with an expanse of knowledge and concern, with a generosity of spirit, with a well of experience or empathy or even suffering, poets who can write a brilliant poem, and then another and then another, over fifty or sixty years. We need poets who have survived and developed. Poets who outrank us, dammit. Else how are we to develop ourselves? As poets, as readers, as a moral or literate society? By ‘grow’ I also mean ‘deepen’. I mean ‘come into wisdom’.

“Who decides on this greatness? We all do, or should. In the West, it’s cultural institutions, universities, students and the reading public. Parliamentarians and librarians. Translators – especially those. Magazine editors. Festival programmers. Such status is dependent, surely, on a culture at large which values and enables their own poets, which pays attention to those of the wider world, which takes their works seriously, which offers intelligent criticism and context and civil debate, which sustains and exports them, as with Seamus Heaney – or, perhaps ironically, reacts so badly it forces them into exile to be nurtured on foreign soil. But it requires the state, the culture, to take a long-term interest in its own artistic production.

“Where are they now, those giant tortoises? Difficult, stern, intimidating, remote, exasperating. I miss that presence in my world.”

 

PHOTOGRAPH: BBC