Some extracts from Seamus Heaney's essay
"I chose the word 'makings' for the title because it gestures towards the testings and hesitations of the workshop, the approaches towards utterance, the discovery of lines and then the intuitive extension of the vital element in those lines over a whole passage. If you like, I am interested in the way Valery's two kinds of poetic lines, 'les vers donnes' and 'les vers calcules', are combined. The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. It is my impression that this haunting or 'donne' occurs to all poets in much the same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a hankering, a readiness. It is also my impression that the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his 'donne'. If he surrenders to it, allows himself to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestivesness, to become somnambulist after its invitations, then we will have a music not unlike Wordsworth's, hypnotic, swimming with the current of its form rather than against it. If, on the other hand, instead of surrendering to the drift of the original generating rhythm, the poet seeks to discipline it, to harness its energies in order to drive other parts of his mind into motion, then we will have a music not unlike Yeats's, affirmative, seeking to master rather than mesmerize the ear, swimming strongly against the current of its form.Of course, in any poetic music, there will always be two contributory elements. There is that part of the poetry which takes its structure and beat, its play of metre and rhythms, its diction and allusiveness, from the literary tradition. The poetry that Wordsworth and Yeats had read as adolescents and as young men obviously laid down certain structures in their ear, structures that gave them certain kinds of aural expectations for their own writing.... But there is a second element in a poet's music, derived not from the literate parts of his mind but the from its illiterate parts, dependent not upon what Jacques Maritain called his 'intellectual baggage' but upon what I might call his instinctual ballast. What kinds of noise assuage him, what kinds of music pleasure or repel him, what messages the receiving stations of his senses are happy to pick up from the world around him and what ones they automatically block out -- all this unconscious activity, at the pre-verbal level, is entirely relevant to the intonations and appeasements offered by a poet's music."
"What we are presented with is a version of composition as listening, as a wise passiveness, a surrender to energies that spring within the centre of the mind, not composition as an active pursuit by the mind's circumference of something already at the centre. The more attentively Wordsworth listens in, the more cheerfully and abundantly he speaks out."
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"The high moments of Wordsworth's poetry occur when the verse has carried us forward and onward to a point where line by line we do not proceed but hang in a kind of suspended motion, sustained by the beat of the verse as a hanging bird is sustained by the beat of its wing, but, like the bird, holding actively to one point of vantage, experiencing a prolonged moment of equilibrium during which we feel ourselves to be conductors of the palpable energies of earth and sky."
On Yeats:
"In Yeats, the voice muscles its way over the obstacle course of the form and flexes like an animated vine on the trellis of its metric and rhyme scheme...For Yeats, composition was no recollection in tranquillity, not a delivery of the dark embryo, but a mastery, a handling, a struggle towards maximum articulation."
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"Again, it is that accumulating pressure in the movement, the sense of passion held down, that we are responding to. The poem's arch is built on repetitions that strain away from one another by reason of the sense they are making, but press in upon one another by reason of the repeated vocable. ...Affirmation arises out of oppositions."
Further, on 'Long-legged Fly':
" 'Long-legged Fly' is a poem that is absolute in its poetic integrity, that commands us both by the stony clarity of its sounds and the deep probes of its images, though 'images' is too weak a word, is somehow inaccurate: it is more that every element in the poem is at once literal and symbolic. It is a transcendent realization of the things I was trying to get at: what is the relationship between the creative moment in the life of an individual and the effect of that moment's conception throughout history? ... The creative mind is astraddle silence. In my reading, the long-legged fly has a masculine gender and while there is a sense of incubation permeating the whole poem, there is also a sense of intent siring. The image recalls the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, where God the Father's mind moves upon chaos, and the image functions within the poem like the nerve of a thinking brain, a brain that concedes the clangour and objectivity of historical events, the remorselessness of action, the unstoppable flow of time. It concedes all this but simultaneously affirms the absoluteness of the moment of silence, the power of the mind's motion along and against the current of history. The poem dramatizes concentration brought to the point of consummation. The act of the mind, in Michael Angelo's case, exerts an almost grandular pressure on history and what conducts that pressure is the image in the beholder's eye. In a similar way, as I have tried to show, poetry depends for its continuing efficacy upon the play of sound not only in the ear of the reader but also in the ear of the writer."
-- Seamus Heaney