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Perhaps Seamus Heaney's commonest critical mannerism is the teasing out of innuendoes and ambiguities in some ordinary locution, as for example in his comments in The Government of the Tongues¹ on Robert Lowell, whose poetic "resources proved themselves capable of taking new strains, in both the musical and stressful sense of that word". Heaney's device doesn't always take the strain, sometimes seeming more a tic of rhetorical routine than a necessary complication: "that strain again, it had a dying fall". As with his recurrent arguing from etymology, too much of the argument's strain can be taken up in a verbal play which substitutes for logic and demonstration. Most notorious perhaps is the schoolboy double entendre of that lecture given at the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, "Feeling into Words", which effectively exposed Leavisite pieties by touching up their lower parts as a discourse of sexual displacement. But it is apparent even in such apparently innocuous items as his 1977 lecture at the Ulster Museum, "The Sense of Place", a phrase which he glosses as "our sense, or — better still — our sensing of place".

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10682-0_15

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