Etymological Recirculation in Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne

This chapter discusses ways in which three poets approach etymology as a vehicle of cultural recirculation. The section on Seamus Heaney describes his career as deepening three lines of etymological influence—Old English, Irish, and Latin—beginning in an imitative and versioning mode, and concluding with direct translations. For Heaney, the etymological substrate confers ‘aura and authenticity’, which results in etymological figures that are self-buttressing and self-confirming, qualities he also ascribes to poetry more generally. R. F. Langley’s ‘semiosis of the forest’ is discussed with reference to a number of poems and journal entries, which make attempts at recirculating human experiences, especially of nature, literature, and scholarship, into a poetic present. The chapter concludes with a reading of J. H. Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is as performing an ‘atomic etymology’, breaking down language and literature into elemental particles which are then reassembled according to new ontologies.

Adaptations in the Age of the Arbitrary

This chapter begins by noting with Saussure that the rupture structural linguistics makes between sound image and referent would appear to make etymology theoretically vacant. How one might continue to ‘believe’ in the truth of etymologies in the face of this occupies the rest of the discussion, beginning with the problems and possibilities of phenomenological ‘unveiling’ (Martin Heidegger, Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Waldman are discussed) and deconstructive etymological word play (Jean Paulhan, Nancy Streuver, Derek Attridge, Paula Blank). Play, or work, with etymology then frames a comparative reading of poems by G. M. Hopkins and Ciaran Carson, which explores questions of poetic assertion, belief, and irony. After sketching a taxonomy of etymological tropes in modern poetry, the chapter concludes by following the etymological development and redeployment of central metapoetic metaphors, which imagine the work of poetry as that of maker, weaver, singer, and ploughman.

Proem

The Proem introduces several major themes of the book, including accuracy, error, nostalgia, and the arbitrary, via close readings of a number of poems, prominently ‘English: An Ode’ by Robert Hass, ‘Hedge School’ by Paul Muldoon, and ‘Nostalgia’ by Eavan Boland, as well as poems by Donald Davie, Tony Harrison, and Galway Kinnell. Noting that both etymology and poetry have a history of dubious association with notions of ‘truth’, the Proem proposes to investigate what kinds of truth may be carried or crafted by etymology in poetry, and by poetic etymology.

Paul Muldoon’s Etymological Thread

Paul Muldoon’s ‘negative epistemology’, which claims both total knowing and total unknowing on the part of the poet, is a main theme of this chapter, due to the double and porous valences etymologies often acquire in his work. This is explored in the context of tropes of fusion and confusion (as in Muldoon’s ‘pied’ readings or Joyce’s ‘conglomerwritings’, as well as poetic motifs of boundary, transience, and transgression), conjunction and disjunction (focused on Muldoon’s ‘or’ phrases), and Muldoon’s ambivalently serious invocations of determinative onomastics, or nomen est omen. The final sections propose an etymological approach to Muldoon’s oeuvre, which would read the development of motifs, themes, diction, and even rhymes diachronically across the corpus.

Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux

This chapter is an investigation into Geoffrey Hill’s philosophy of language, which is at its heart philological and etymological, and which engages questions of theology, metaphysics, ontology, ethics, and poetics. It is a philosophy that is perpetually led back to states of self-opposition and contradiction, latterly described as ‘agon’, and ‘gnostic poiesis’. Etymologically this is manifested in the terms which receive extensive poetic and critical attention in Hill—terms which lie on an ‘active–passive divide’—as well as in the method of interrogation, which is self-oppositionally both a ‘tearing up by the roots’ and a ‘rediscovering’ and careful ‘nurturing’ of them. Hill’s various paradigms for language and for poetry are examined, centring on Hebrew language, the fable of the Fall of Man, Original Sin and its early modern metaphysical extensions, and gnosticism, as well as his sources in Milton and Coleridge.

Afterword

…or does it? Paul Muldoon’s ironically self-reflexive end of the poem might be met with words spoken by the Anglo-Saxon scop in a poem by Seamus Heaney called ‘The Fragment’: ‘Since when […] Are the first line and last line of any poem | Where the poem begins and ends?’ (EL, 57)....

Origins

This chapter provides a long introduction to the history of etymological thought and its intersections with poetic thought, from etiological biblical etymology and its medieval Christian and Jewish interpretations, to the ‘philosophical etymology’ of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as pursued by Horne Tooke, and later Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to nineteenth century philology in Britain and Germany. In this chapter ‘the life of words’ implies that language is a sort of living thing, but also the converse, that life is somehow like language. In the pre-modern context these metaphors are imbricated in stories concerning the creation of the cosmos and humanity, and the Fall from Eden, and all that comes after. In the latter context they entail metaphors of linguistic ‘evolution’ and the genealogical relations among words.