MARK PATRICK
Sir, - Desmond Fennell has been living outside of Ireland perhaps too long to know that his original pamphlet on Seamus Heaney is long out of print and unavailable even through our public library system, which tends to cull such ephemerabilia with a ruthlessness that most of it deserves. Hence my reference to perhaps the one place where it might still be available without having to buy the complete Fennell Heresy.
However, any misdirection of the unsuspecting public has been fulsomely redressed in his last letter (April 4th), where he gives full advertisement of his wares.
My reference to his work was not to prompt readers to drink from the source but rather to provide an example of how not to read poetry. Fennell begins with his own view of what poetry should be and then proceeds to assess whatever poetry he reads according to these criteria. He then awards marks or remarks such as "good" or "great" as if correcting an examination paper. "What good is poetry to people?" is Fennell's abiding concern.
As T.S.Eliot says: "Those who demand of poetry a day-dream, or a metamorphosis of their own feeble desires and lusts, or what they believe to be "intensity" of passion will not find much [in this poet\]. He is . . . a poet for those who want poetry and not something else, some stay for their own vanity."
In my book The Haunted Inkwell, I claim that poetry is original in the sense that it cannot be approached with preconceived ideas about what it is or what it should be. Fennell's attack on Heaney was a useful and amusing example of another, what I might call, if I were being polite, "socio-political" approach.
If any apology is due, I make it to the public who might never have heard of this unwarranted and wrong-headed diatribe if I had not entered this self-promoting and desultory correspondence. - Yours, etc.,
MARK PATRICK HEDERMAN,
Glenstal Abbey,
Murroe,
Co Limerick.