The Example of Poetry Bridget Vincent Philosophy and Literature, Volume 37, Number 1, April 2013, pp. 53-71 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2013.0006

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/515501

Accessed 27 Jan 2017 15:38 GMT

In Focus: Poetry, Context, Meaning

Bridget Vincent

The Example of Poetry

Abstract. That literary scholarship is experiencing an “ethical turn” has become something of a commonplace, and seminal to this “turn” is the use of literary works as examples in moral-philosophical arguments. So far, however, ethical criticism has dealt almost exclusively with narrative texts—little work has been done on poetry. I argue that considering poetry in this context not only expands the corpus of exemplary works but also reveals methodological caveats applicable to ethical critics of poetry and fiction alike. Poetic examples raise new doubts about the moral authority of literature—doubts elided in the narrative-based discussions that currently prevail.

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hat works of literature might provide useful examples for moral philosophers is not a recent suggestion. It is, however, one that has received increasingly concentrated attention in the past two or three decades, particularly in the wake of work done by Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Wayne Booth, and Alasdair MacIntyre, among others.1 Twenty years after the publication of Love’s Knowledge, this attention has fluctuated, diversified, and eddied, but not considerably abated. The content of a compendious 2010 Companion to the Philosophy of Literature testifies to this persistence, tracing a path from Nussbaum’s seminal neoAristotelian essays to the numerous strands of revision and renovation

Philosophy and Literature, 2013, 37: 53–71. © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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they continue to prompt.2 What has remained amidst this evolution is an overwhelming generic uniformity. The phrase “literary examples” denotes, in the large majority of cases, prose examples. This is a cast of characters—and novelistic “characters” they usually are—that features Emma Woodhouse, Thomas Gradgrind, Dorothea Brooke, and of course, Hyacinth Robinson and Maggie Verver. Uncle Vanya and Banquo appear less often; Prufrock and the Last Duchess scarcely at all. This emphasis on prose fiction is in part a historical result of rhetorical inertia; the debate in its most recent incarnation was introduced using a framework of Aristotelian ethical questions and Jamesian examples, and many of Nussbaum’s interlocutors have reproduced her novelistic reference points in responding to her ideas. Given that one of the often-stated aims of introducing imaginative examples is the replacement of categorical abstraction with particularized instances— to narrow the “literary” down to, say, the “Dickensian”—is to show a certain methodological consistency. While often, examples other than nineteenth-century realist ones are indeed simply irrelevant rather than expressly ignored or rejected, in some cases this generic specificity is the result of a systematic exclusion of other forms. In Richard Rorty’s essay titled “Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens,” for instance, poets are quite explicitly exiled from the polis (“HKD,” pp. 66–82). Whether by a self-replicating accident of focus or by polemical design, a curiously tenacious lyric absence shadows these debates. The impulse to fill this gap does not derive simply from an urge for completeness: the equal representation of various genres in the archive of potential examples is not necessarily a good in itself. Rather, I will suggest that the exclusion of poetry rests on a restrictive and historically contingent characterization of the lyric, and that the reevaluation of this characterization opens the way for new avenues of inquiry into the potential contribution of poetry in this context. Perhaps most importantly, looking to poets not only widens the scope of available literary examples, it also introduces certain methodological caveats, which receive minimal attention in narrative-based accounts. The diction of early example-use exponents is tinged with an element of the inaugurator’s verve: a distinct emphasis on celebration over qualification. Those who have built on this early work, such as Samuel Goldberg, Jane Adamson, and Richard Freadman, while themselves exhibiting an element of incitatatory endorsement, start to introduce notes of caution.3 They bring to light, for instance, some of the complications and questions associated with literary example use, such as whether exemplary

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force originates with the text’s characters, the historical author, the author’s agency as expressed in the text, or an agency assigned to the text itself. I will suggest that when the examples concerned are poetic, the difficulties—like the ambitions—of literary exemplarity manifest themselves in new and revealing ways. After offering an historical overview of advocacy for literary examples, the first half of this paper argues that once the unhelpfully narrow conception of poetry on which this rejection is based is reevaluated and its historical contingencies traced, the impetus for exploring poetic examples and their contributions becomes clear. A consideration of poetic examples as a general class, however, remains at a level of speculation that can only hold so much explanatory force. Just as discussions of narrative examples have tended to ground abstract uses of the category of fiction in attention to specific narratives and specific writers, so too is a consideration of poetic examples better served by a turn to particular poets and poems rather than to the monolith Poet. This paper will look to Seamus Heaney as a particularly valuable case study—indeed, Heaney himself maintains a longstanding preoccupation with the exemplary potential of poetry. The second half of the paper will consider the more skeptical strand of responses to initial advocates for literary example use, and propose that poetic examples (especially those taken from Heaney’s work) can shed new light on the difficulties as well as the potential of literary examples. The unease Heaney expresses about his moral authority in general and the exemplary dimensions of it in particular presents a kind of lyric-specific dark night of the page which narrative-centered debates, with their different inflections of writerly self-doubt, do not entertain in quite the same way.

I While not discussing the difficulties caused by flimsy examples so much as the etiolation of philosophical discourse more generally, Phillipa Foot’s 1958 essay “Moral Arguments” was one of the first to propose that discursive writing should incorporate an imaginative dimension.4 Likewise, Mary Warnock, in making some general speculations for the future of ethics in her conclusion to Ethics since 1900, specifically emphasizes the need for more complex examples, calling for a focus on “human beings in general in their context” and stressing that “examples . . . will necessarily have to be long, complicated, and realistic.”5 In “The

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Power of Example,” an article published several decades later, Onora O’Neill makes similar observations about the triviality and schematism besetting philosophical examples.6 It was Martha Nussbaum, however, who gave these questions their eventual cross-disciplinary prominence. Given that thorough analyses have already been made of the arguments Nussbaum presents in Love’s Knowledge and elsewhere, I will simply outline her ideas so that my suggestions about poetic examples function more effectively as responses to specific elements of her thesis. Nussbaum proposes that “certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist” (LK, p. 5). The word on which I plan to press is “narrative.” In Love’s Knowledge, she sets up an opposition between novelistic detail and abstract generality, and she explicitly narrows her ethical inquiry down to Aristotle and her literary examples to James. I propose that retaining Nussbaum’s useful initial set of preoccupations doesn’t necessarily require an adherence to her choice of archive. When she associates the literary work’s value as exemplary material with, for instance, a capacity for particularized attention and the representation of contingency, she locates this potential in narrative forms, but many of the very qualities she claims for narrative carry with them analogous currents of thought, ancient and modern, associating them with poetry.7 In Nussbaum’s framework, poetry is excluded by default rather than by design: her concentration on the particular idiosyncrasies of James is not a disavowal of the equivalent questions surrounding Yeats. However, there are philosophical advocates of literary examples in whose work poetic examples are not simply left out but explicitly rejected. In “Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens,” Rorty couches his criticism of philosophical discourse in the context of an opposition between the philosopher (as exemplified by Heidegger), whom he associates with the figure of the Nietzschean “ascetic priest,” and that of the novelist as described by Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel. While poetry has a role to play in some of Rorty’s related writings (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” and “The Fire of Life”), in this essay he attempts to show how alternatives to asceticism can be found in novels.8 He aims to “develop an opposition between the ascetic priest’s taste for theory, simplicity, structure, abstraction and essence and the novelist’s taste for narrative, detail, diversity and accident” (“HKD,” p. 73). Poetry, in this picture, should not be considered as another kind of detailed literary example: the poet joins the philosopher in instantiating everything

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the novelist supplants. It is the ramshackle detail of a Dickensian street scene rather than the ascetic chill of Rilkean “interstellar space” that provides the best counterpoint to propositional logic and its reductive abstractions.9 By folding poetry in with philosophy under the cloak of the ascetic priest, however, Rorty’s essay neglects the possibility that the poem could, alongside the novel, make a similarly rehabilitative contribution to philosophical argumentation. In basing its definition of the poet on Heidegger’s “thinker/poet” complex, the essay draws on a specific conception of poetry derived from historically contingent post-Romantic assumptions about lyric subjectivity and solipsism. A longer view reveals that some of the characteristics that he, like Nussbaum, claims for the novelist could be annexed to poetry. Like Rorty, Hazard Adams refers to a mythic “‘priesthood’ of abstractionists,” but, drawing on a broader set of historical moments (he cites such diverse figures as Blake and Giambattista Vico), he shows that poets have in the past been counterpoised to, rather than subsumed within, this “priesthood.”10 Gerald Bruns, likewise, seeks “the rejection of constricting and oppressive universals for the particularity of experience” (MP, p. 84), but finds the antidote in poetry, arguing that “the interests of poets are in particulars” (MP, p. 88); and that inhering in poetic form is a “preference for singularities or resistance to universals” (MP, p. 9). Murray Krieger and Clare Cavanagh, likewise, have defended poetry as a site of particularized perception and representation.11 Cavanagh’s reflections, though made in the more specific context of contemporary Polish poetry, are notable here for their inversion of some of the very terms Rorty’s essay uses to characterize the essentializing and totalizing lyric voice: “Through its commitment to the individual vision in all its particularity, poetry works to undermine those versions of human history that negate the weight of individual experience by subordinating it to one Hegelian grand scheme or another.”12 Regardless of how these individual claims for poetic particularity may ultimately be judged, they attest to a groundswell of disagreement with those conceptions of poetry that would set it in opposition to narrative and thereby exclude it from the corpus of potential philosophical examples. I propose that poetry can not only manifest, in its own way, some of the properties claimed for narrative examples but it can also, by virtue of the compositional attributes specific to various lyric forms, provide examples of some qualities not presented, or presented in different ways, by narrative texts. Any argument about, for instance, the

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exemplary force of a narrator will look different when the narrator is replaced by a lyric speaker, or a picaresque hero by an apostrophized beloved. A certain amount of work on specifically poetic examples has already been carried out, but so far, much of this exploration has come from experimental traditions in which the poetry invoked is either restricted to the noncanonical or tied to quite specific ethical ends. Bruns has posed the very question I am considering—“what would happen if philosophers of this (mostly analytical) sort took an interest in poetry”— but his inquiry is only directed at certain kinds of poetry. Indeed, he explicitly restricts the category of the exemplary poem to those that are expressly concerned with redefining the boundaries of poetry itself: for him, “what is philosophically interesting is a poem that is not self-evidently a poem.” In his eyes, a “kind of oblivion hovers over ‘the canon’” (MP, p. 16). Bruns’s work, then, attests to the potential of poetry as a form of philosophical example, but he does not show how this might manifest itself in less marginal cases. Unlike Bruns, Charles Altieri orients his attention to poetic exemplarity quite broadly. In his article titled “Avant-Garde or Arrière-Garde in Recent American Poetry,” Altieri presents productive readings from poetry by Robert Hass,13 and in his Companion chapter titled “Exemplification and Expression,” from Wallace Stevens.14 What Altieri’s readings do not involve is the additional perspective provided by poets who have themselves displayed an interest in the exemplary dimension of their own and others’ writing. It is this perspective that the work of writers like Geoffrey Hill, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney provide so fully. Heaney’s own preoccupation with exemplarity renders him a particularly valuable point of reference: it allows him to introduce to the debate the corroborations and qualifications of self-description.

II Seamus Heaney (whose emergence broadly coincides with that of late-twentieth-century ethical criticism) makes frequent recourse to the category of the exemplary poem, particularly in his ongoing meditations on poetic authority. He has consistently sought to negotiate between a need for aesthetic autonomy and a desire to effect some (however indirect) kind of extraliterary influence, and for him, the concept of the “exemplary” poem offers a means of articulating this tension. By definition, that which is “exemplary” is characterized at once by a

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Platonically inflected element of ideality and self-sufficiency, and, at the same time, by an assumption of outward influence—to be an example is, ultimately, to be followed. Exemplarity is a status that Heaney has from time to time conferred upon the category of poetry in general, but also one that he associates with specific writers. His prose emphasizes, for instance, the ideality of the images MacDiarmid and Wilde provide: they are, he proposes, “appealing to an imagined standard as well as to an empirical audience.”15 Similarly, he suggests that Marlowe offers “an intimation of a far more generous and desirable way of being alive in the world.”16 Indeed, this ideality is a feature that numerous critics have attributed to Heaney’s own work. Neil Corcoran, for instance, argues that “Broagh” constitutes “an implicit emblem for some new political community . . . ; it acts as a linguistic paradigm of a reconciliation beyond sectarian division.”17 Heaney himself holds up one of his poems (“From the Republic of Conscience”) as a “paradigm of good relations between poetry and social issues.”18 The exemplar or paradigm is such a pervasive category in Heaney’s writing that in his poetry he sees paradigms not only in admirable individuals. Heaney’s identification of exemplary objects is cognate with Carlos Williams’s icebox and Pound’s petals, but amounts to something more idiosyncratic than another incarnation of modernist thingly specificity.19 He takes, that is, a reasonably conventional belief—that the features of poetic form help preserve an apolitical distinctiveness in literary diction—and gives it an idiosyncratically literalized twist: poetic form here becomes physical form, with all the “heft,” “gravity,” “force,” and “weight” this entails. In the short but revealing “St Kevin and the Blackbird,” multiple definitions of exemplarity collide, helping to expose some of the complications that emerge when an exemplary text is an exemplary poem.20 With its hagiographic echoes (which even include the quotation of a religious maxim, itself a suitably condensed utterance), it can be read as a Nussbaumian supplementary example: it illustrates in literary form the discursively parsable moral concept of self-sacrifice. At the same time, however, the poem can be read as having its own exemplary dimension; one that exists independently of the poem’s potential use as a moral-philosophical example. What the piece ultimately reveals is the difference the lyric makes: poetic form here manifests and mutates literary exemplarity in ways unavailable to other forms.

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Philosophy and Literature St Kevin and the Blackbird And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands And lays in it and settles down to nest. Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked Into the network of eternal life, Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown. And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms? Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees? Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river, ‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays, A prayer his body makes entirely For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

This piece, from its conventionally devotional title onward, announces itself as a poem concerned with a moral model or ideal figure. However, the poem’s status as an exemplar extends beyond the presentation of virtue for emulation: in the second half, the pointedly self-interrogating treatment of the scene redoubles the exemplary force of the saint, as the poetic speaker’s own values and rhetorical gestures position him or her as another form of paradigm. The ekphrastic cataloguing that opens the poem conjures the saint’s body as a three-dimensional iconic

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object—most of the poem’s first half consists of a list pinpointing limb positions and angles, diagramming the saint’s posture with present-tense immediacy: “the saint is kneeling,” “the cell is narrow,” “one turned-up palm is out the window.” Rather than simply venerating the saint’s figure, however, the speaker begins a meditation on the welfare of the body in the picture, which mounts one solicitous question upon another (“are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?”) to generate a gestalt of compassion which itself invites emulation. The first lines of the second section break the pictorial frame by reminding readers that the scene is mediated through the mind of the speaker: “And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow / Imagine being Kevin.” This imperative, halfway between shared colloquial marveling and an injunction to participate in this process of imagining and sympathizing, explicitly positions the speaker as a model to be followed as the series of caring questions is launched. Not only does the speaker instantiate admirable qualities as well as describing them in the saint; the poem draws on other expressive opportunities afforded by poetic form to deepen this exemplary dimension further. The poem crystallizes, for instance, the saint’s quality of self-forgetfulness in articulating the physical metaphor of bodily numbness—the exploration of “being Kevin” focuses on his “sleeping fingers” and whether he can “still feel his knees.” This objective correlative is not a static image, but, in keeping with the poem’s meditation on the body’s evolving suffering, the metaphor of numbing is used dynamically to communicate the progressive nature of the self-forgetting process: the questions are pitched at an increasingly abstract and less anatomically specific level, moving from “fingers” and “knees” to the more phantasmagoric “blank of underearth” to the almost metaphysical question of “is there distance in his head?” By the end of the poem, St. Kevin has “forgotten self”; so too do the metaphors describing him “forget” the specifics of his corporeal being. By virtue of such nuances, this poem is not simply a medium like any other wooden, plaster, or, indeed, verbal one for the presentation of an iconic figure; rather, the poem is itself a working “model.” The saintly figure the poem describes is not the only source of exemplary force in the poem: the poetic speaker, with his or her intricately compassionate regard for the subject described, constitutes a moral ideal in him or herself. Most importantly for the present discussion, the specific resources of this particular type of lyric—the echoes of venerative ekphrasis in the spatially comprehensive description of the saint’s body; the shaping,

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through line and stanza length, of the speaker’s questions into a visible gestalt; and the shifts in mode of address from the conventions of storytelling to conversational immediacy—mean that the poetic speaker’s exemplary force takes on a shape quite specific to this form of utterance. Heaney is, of course, not so much interested in how poetry might provide examples in philosophical discourse as he is in this exemplary dimension of poetry itself. This is an important detail in the term’s inflection, as behind much ethical criticism is an assumption that works of literature do not become examples by virtue of being used as such in a philosophical argument but that rather, they have an inherent exemplary force (one, in fact, on which their later use in moral discourse is predicated). The emphasis of the term “example,” that is, slides between the value-neutral suggestion of argumentative illustration and the positive (and sometimes dangerously confident) denotation of moral leadership. As is evident even from the slivers of close reading able to be accommodated here, contributions from poetry can do much to expose this slide. The question of inherent exemplarity manifests itself differently when the “literary language” concerned is poetic: foundational questions from paraphrasability to performativity take on unique implications. Beyond this, an important part of the case for including poetic examples lies in the poem’s capacity to reveal the limits of example use itself—limits that would be less visible if examples were restricted to narrative form. The next section introduces some of the methodological caveats raised by earlier respondents to Nussbaum and shows that new perspectives on these caveats emerge when the examples concerned are poetic.

III Being noticeably rangy both historically and methodologically (inheritors of O’Neill rub shoulders with Levinasians and combatants in the culture wars), debates about literary examples are beset by a definitional bagginess surrounding the concept of exemplarity itself. Unresolved questions remain over problems like the following: where in the work the example is thought to originate; the type of philosophical discourse thought to need enrichment; and how the difference between a literary example understood as a moral ideal is to be distinguished from one that engages with moral questions but provides no guide for imitation. In particular, the fundamental ontological and teleological distinctions that render literary works germinal but awkward for philosophers have prompted considerable jostling for what Goldberg calls “logical and

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evaluative priority” (AL, p. 285). Adamson captures especially clearly the slight paradox involved in the pseudo-respect granted to literature by those who treat it as an “orchard full of juicy examples which merely illustrate issues that philosophy preformulates perfectly well on its own” (“AT,” p. 89). While the “orchard of examples” perspective constitutes an attentiveness to literature, it is an attentiveness that misunderstands its object. Goldberg, similarly, objects to viewing literature as “simply exemplifying or instantiating” philosophers’ conclusions (AL, p. 285), and he notes that even Nussbaum herself, who is so often associated with literary exemplarity tout court, stresses that, as he summarizes, “literature is not . . . merely a storehouse of examples for use in traditional philosophical discourse” (AL, p. 289). Notwithstanding these disavowals, if a literary example is included in a moral-philosophical text as illustration, then a discursive introduction of the concept to which it relates undermines its unparaphrasability, as Goldberg has also noted (AL, p. 294). This problem manifests itself even in the terms of approbation used to justify the inclusion of literary examples. That is, the qualities of literary texts that render them attractive as examples are identified using a matrix of terms which take their substantive definitions from the philosophical end of the debate: literature appeals because it constitutes that which philosophy is not. This phenomenon emerges particularly clearly in a comparison posited between philosophical “tidiness” and literary “untidiness.” For instance, drawing on Murdoch’s distinction between “dry” and “messy” writing, and Nussbaum’s emphasis on the “messiness” of tragedy, Adamson sets up a contrast between what she calls “philosophy’s penchant for tidiness as against literature’s more disorderly, spontaneous ‘messy’ character” (“AT,” p. 87). The only reference to poetry and drama having ordering processes of their own is made in a brief suggestion that this disorder forms part of the “dramatic design” of a play like Measure for Measure (“AT,” p. 88). Taking as it does philosophical tidiness as its starting point—that which needs to be remedied—this contrast defines order as philosophical order and literature as that which lacks it, rather than acknowledging the many ways in which other forms of order and ordered forms are present in literary writing. In disregarding, through this negative definition, the very ontological otherness that rendered literature attractive in the first place, this kind of philosophical advocacy can end up damning the literary with its own schematic praise. Many of the concerns parsed above ultimately turn on the long vein of controversy surrounding the distinctiveness of literary language, and

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poetic examples manifest with particular clarity this friction between the exemplarity of literary language and the exemplary uses to which it is put. An exemplar is exemplary, rather than simply one individual instance, by virtue both of its participation in a larger category of things of the same type and of its guiding function in a larger body of followers. The very concept of an exemplar rests on a logic of condensation and concentration, a spatial dynamic assuming the interaction of small with large. In its fundamentally representative nature, then, the example shares structural parallels with the ontology of metaphor, and with other forms of representative language associated particularly closely with poetry, such as metonymy and synecdoche. Indeed, numerous accounts of the representative dimension of the poetic voice exhibit a logic of condensation analogous to the one-formany status of the exemplar, whether the lyric speaker’s position is taken to be one of hierarchical prioritizing of the speaker’s own perspective or democratic voicing on behalf of the silenced. Hugh Haughton, in his discussion of Geoffrey Hill and hierarchy, cites Hazlitt’s dictum that poetry “puts the individual for the species, the one about the infinite many, might before right.”21 R. Clifton Spargo’s wariness about speaking for others (he raises the possibility that in some forms of poetic witnessing, the poet’s ability to speak may be predicated on the sufferer’s silence) is grounded in a similar association of the lyric with one-for-many representation.22 So too are some of the even more ambitiously damning accounts of lyric solipsism, such as those of Victor Li and Prospero Saiz, for whom, as Mark Jeffreys writes, the lyric is connected with “the imperial assertion of self, the programmatic exclusion of others or difference, and the logocentric quest for presence . . . .”23 As I will show in the next section, the specific case of Heaney is especially useful in this more qualificatory context. Just as Heaney’s specific interest in the exemplary dimension of literature has meant that he sheds light on the potential poetry holds as a form of literary example; so too do his anxieties about his own exemplarity speak helpfully to the problems haunting these hopes.

IV The methodological difficulties outlined so far—questions, that is, surrounding the relationship between the inherently exemplary text and the text used as an example—have the status of procedural stumbling blocks rather than fundamental doubts about the ultimate ethical

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mandate of literary models. While Heaney’s poetry is pertinent to the former, it is in relation to more foundational reservations that his work, in all its self-abnegating rigor, offers its most relevant counterbalance. Whichever position is taken in controversies surrounding his uneasy gaze at tribal violence (Neolithic and modern), it is a critical commonplace that his ambitions concerning moral authority are undercut by a self-limiting anxiety; an awareness that any ideas of order at Lough Neagh carry risks.24 Even beyond the larger phenomenon of generalized moral unease, some of Heaney’s doubts derive specifically from the exemplary dimension of his public role. He is aware that a larger instability is coiled inside the semantic ambiguity of the word “example”; that just as the word encompasses both a positive denotation of a moral ideal and a value-neutral or even negative sense of a mere instance, so too can the example presented by a literary work be both a paradigm and a dangerous precedent—a “bad example” in all senses. Heaney provides a useful point of reference then, not simply because his self-inculpatory instincts place limits on authority in general (and this by extension affects exemplary authority), but rather, because some of his anxieties stem specifically from his perceptions of his work’s exemplary dimensions. The category of exemplarity and its attendant risks becomes the object of specific reflection in poems like “An Afterwards,” “Exposure,” and “Summer 1969.”25 “Summer 1969” raises Heaney’s characteristic concerns about his own geographical and artistic withdrawal from Irish political realities, but does so in a way that questions, quite specifically, the position of the artist as representative or exemplary figure for a national public.26 The poem begins with a self-deprecating contrast between the poet’s ersatz suffering in the “bullying sun of Madrid” with the events at home, where “the Constabulary covered the mob / Firing into the Falls.” Counterpoised against the speaker’s self-allegation of introspective preciousness (he dwells on the “casserole heat” of the flat, where he “sweated [his] way through” nothing more painful than “the life of Joyce” and where the cultural violence is experienced secondhand through “bullfight reports on the television”) is the palpably engaged figure of Goya, who “painted with his fists and elbows, flourished / The stained cape of his heart as history charged.” The piece is not, however, a straightforward piece of self-condemnation for political disengagement. Rather, it also highlights the compromises and hypocrisies that threaten the attempt to transmute this aesthetic autonomy into a form of exemplary authority.

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The poem invokes the figure of the poet as national exemplar or representative of the people, only to call into question the legitimacy of this kind of voicing: “‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’ / Another conjured Lorca from his hill.” The figure of the poet who can “touch the people” and speak for them in a manner that tries to imitate Lorca’s is called into question by being here invoked in a conversation in which romantic immersion in a deserted landscape mingles with echoes of governmental complicity: “We talked our way home over starlit plains / Where patent leather of the Guardia-Civil / Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.” Further, the reference to the flax-dam (recalling a mention of the “reek off a flax-dam” earlier in the poem), introduces echoes of “Death of a Naturalist” and the emergence of hostility in a previously unthreatening natural encounter. In this poem, then, the legitimacy of the writer as an exemplary figure representing his community (“touch[ing] the people”) while absconding from the immediacy of its conflicts has itself been obliquely but caustically undermined. It is worth noting that the poem doesn’t perform the same kind of work in this context as “St Kevin.” The poem helps show that Heaney harbors anxieties, as well as hopes, about poetic exemplary authority, but here the expression of these anxieties does not rest on specifically poetic features, unlike the expression of exemplary hope in “St Kevin.” Nonetheless, Heaney’s work here helps to show that while writers of all kinds present caveats about their own exemplary status, the specific history of lyric self-excoriation mediates these doubts in idiosyncratic ways, introducing reservations that go beyond the procedural questions surrounding the example’s integration to touch its ultimate mandate.

V At present, recommendations for the study of literary examples are largely that—recommendations. They say what we ought to do with literature—what we might do, with all the provisionality of that subjunctive. This is in part because if, as Goldberg and others have suggested, the very inclusion of literary examples is predicated on an assumption of their unique disclosive potential and unparaphrasability, then reading the examples as illustrations of ideas parsed discursively around them presents a fundamental contradiction (AL, p.263). Indeed, of the procedural problems discussed so far, one of the most obstructive involves the correspondence (or lack thereof) between literary examples and the

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literary reading modes needed to interpret them. While many advocates for literary examples rehearse or outline proposed changes to prevailing reading methods, the scholars who propose these alternative modes tend, often for justifiable reasons involving their own argumentative delimitation, not to carry out the kinds of criticism they recommend. Even readers who explicitly prioritize reading for textual detail often don’t give a full literary-critical account of the text concerned, as, it could be argued, is the case for my own quite content-driven remarks on “Summer 1969.” In Ethics, Evil and Fiction, Colin McGinn emphasizes that many “moral philosophers systematically ignore the role of fictional works in ethical understanding,” but in his own readings of novels he tends to give little attention to how the works’ literary dimensions contribute to their effects.27 Similarly, in his Things Merely Are, a study of the philosophical implications of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Simon Critchley explicitly distances his project from one that would simply involve “mining Stevens’ verse for philosophical puzzles and aperçus in pleasing poetic garb.”28 However, as his argument progresses, he ultimately pays little attention to the literary elements of Stevens’s poetry, and the relationship between argument and textual evidence in his writing is illustrative of this difference: when he makes a claim about a poem, he draws his evidence from the semantic content of the lines rather than from any distinctively poetic features of its expression. These tendencies are not inadequacies of McGinn’s and Critchley’s analyses so much as indicators of the tensions between philosophical analysis and the depth of close reading. These problems are compounded by a tendency of some commentators to focus on how readers might imitate literary models in their behavior, with reading itself often disappearing into its function as the medium of transfer. Nussbaum, for instance, claims that Henry James’s writing constitutes “ethical conduct” (by “cutting through the blur of habit and the self-deceptions habit abets”) and that while reading, we are participating in this behavior: “When we follow him as attentive readers, we engage in ethical conduct, and our readings are assessable ethical acts” (“ER,” p. 344). Here, however, the question remains as to whether the ethical act James performs through writing is the same as the ethical act carried out by the reader. She is tying James’s ethical status to his capacity to work against “the shopworn terms of ordinary discourse,” but that of the reader to being “attentive” (“ER,” p. 344). Further issues are raised by Nussbaum’s designation of moments spent reading as “examples of moral conduct, in the sense that they are

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examples of the type of emotional and imaginative activity that good ethical conduct involves” (“ER,” p. 355). This claim raises questions because it assumes a transferability of values not only from the processes involved in writing to those involved in reading, but also from the act of reading to other acts the same person might later perform. Manifold difficulties have thus stymied efforts to read moral-philosophical literary examples as literary works. Many modes of literary-critical reading associated with poetry, from the Aristotelian to the Attridgian, emphasize an especially textured and detailed engagement, cognate with but slightly different from that which Goldberg associates with literary reading tout court (AL, p. xv). I propose, then, that including poetic examples may open the way for fuller critical accounts of poetic and nonpoetic literary works used as examples—accounts based on the distinctiveness of literary texts that provided the grounding impetus for including them. If the abovementioned Jamesian narratives were poems, Nussbaum’s ameliorative claims about the reading process would be subject to a variety of additional Ricardian twists. Indeed, ethically freighted accounts of the reading process (including but stretching well beyond that presented by early exponents of Practical Criticism) map troublingly and revealingly onto Nussbaum’s treatment of reading as a mode of access to, rather than constitutive site of, the ethically significant processes described in the text. Ultimately, the phrase “The Example of Poetry” calls forth at once the potential “example” set by the poet to the wider social world and the use of poetry as a form of literary “example.” More than this, however, it signals a hope that my initial steps toward the study of poetic examples in moral philosophy might themselves become a type of example, a small “sample” prompting more work in a similar vein. Aims of this kind, must, however, be qualified by a suitably Heaneyesque acknowledgment of the fallibilities that attend any such hopeful self-positioning. While I have been emphasizing the ameliorative potential of poetic examples, they are subject to methodological blind spots of their own. Most importantly for the framing of this discussion, while particularized attention is part of what lends literary texts value as examples, this concept also raises the issue of how particularized details ultimately speak to their framing precepts. This is a problem that touches not only the literary examples used by moral philosophers, but the rhetoric and structure of the literary-examples debate—and this essay’s contribution to it. This complication is evident in Nussbaum’s own specification of the reach and applicability of her investigations. Her work is at once couched

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as an exploration of a specifically Aristotelian ethical trajectory in a specifically Jamesian context, and also as a meditation on literary examples generally. If the decision to use James provides an exemplary instance for Nussbaum’s larger questioning, is this the same kind of exemplary instance that a passage from What Maisie Knew provides in an epistemological inquiry? Critchley’s analysis prompts similar questions. He states that one of his aims is to focus on a specific poet and develop from this focus a theory that applies to poetry as a category, but this rests on the assumption of a squarely metonymic relation between the philosophical elements of Stevens’s poetry and those of poetry in general. Just as the correlation between the Jamesian novel as a specific form of example and the larger category of literary exemplarity is not straightforward, so too does the present essay rest on the vexed relationship between the poetic example and the category of the example broadly conceived. This argumentative instability is worth considering in part because it helps to temper the campaigning energies of my own suggestions, which add to the overriding tenor of advocacy characterizing claims about literary examples. Part of the problem with Nussbaum’s advocatory tone comes from the jaunty impermeability of its positive claims. Similarly, without the reservation raised above, the present essay, in presenting a genre-specific slice of the same recommendations, might risk succumbing too wholeheartedly to its own methodological publicity. University of Cambridge

1.  Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), hereafter abbreviated LK; Martha C. Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 348–49, hereafter abbreviated “ER”; Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: the Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens,” Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 66–82, hereafter abbreviated “HKD”; Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981). 2.  Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010). 3.  S. L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), hereafter abbreviated AL; Jane Adamson, “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral

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Philosophy,” in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 84–110, hereafter abbreviated “AT”; Richard Freadman, “Disciplinary Relations: Literary Studies and Philosophy,” in Border Crossing: Studies in English and Other Disciplines, ed. John Barnes (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1991), pp. 24–35. 4.  Phillipa Foot, “Moral Arguments,” Mind 67, no. 268 (1958): 513. 5.  Mary Warnock, Ethics since 1900, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 147. 6. Onora O’Neill, “The Power of Example,” Philosophy 61, no. 235 (1986): 5–29. 7.  Some recent work that engages with the poem’s capacity to represent particulars includes: Gerald Bruns, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (Athens: Georgia University Press, 2005), hereafter abbreviated MP; Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry (Seattle: Washington University Press, 2007); Murray Krieger, “My Travels with the Aesthetic,” Revenge of the Aesthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 208–36. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 105–19; “The Fire of Life,” Poetry (November 1997): 129–31. 9. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Night,” Selected Poems, trans. Albert Ernest Flemming (St. Petersburg: Golden Smith Associates, 1983), p. 164. 10. Adams, The Offense of Poetry, p. 168. 11.  Krieger, “My Travels,” p. 211. Clare Cavanagh, “Lyrical Ethics: The Poetry of Adam Zagajewski,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 12. 12.  Cavanagh, “Lyrical Ethics,” p. 12. 13.  Charles Altieri, “Avant-Garde or Arrière-Garde in Recent American Poetry,” Poetics Today 20, no. 4 (1999): 629–53. 14.  Charles Altieri, “Exemplification and Expression,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, pp. 491–506. 15.  Seamus Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber, 1995), p. 192. 16.  Heaney, “Extending the Alphabet: Christopher Marlowe,” Redress, p. 36. 17.  Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 1998), p. 90. Corcoran’s comment is also cited in Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney, Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), p. 53. 18.  Heaney, “Keeping Time: Irish Poetry and Contemporary Society,” International Aspects of Irish Literature, ed. Toshi Furomoto (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), p. 261. 19.  In considering the difference between the larger phenomenon of modernist engagement with things and the specifically exemplary cast of some of Heaney’s objects, Edward Larrissey’s reflections on Heaney’s post-Romantic inheritance offers valuable

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contextualizing nuances. Edward Larrissy, “Things, Description, and Metaphor in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry,” The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 218–33. 20.  Heaney, “St Kevin and the Blackbird,” The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), pp. 20–21. 21.  Hugh Haughton, “‘How Fit a Title . . . ’: Title and Authority in the Work of Geoffrey Hill,” Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), p. 139. 22. R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 23.  Mark Jeffreys, “Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics,” PMLA 110, no. 2 (1995): 197. 24.  This is discussed in particular detail by the following critics: Rand Brandes, “Seamus Heaney’s Working Titles,” Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 19–36; Neil Corcoran, “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary,” The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 117–27; James Fenton, The Strength of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Hart, Seamus Heaney; Stephen James, Shades of Authority: the Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (New York: Harvester, 1994). 25.  Corcoran has also discussed these three poems in this context in “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary.” 26.  Heaney, “Summer 1969,” North (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 63–64. 27.  Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 175. 28.  Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 4.