[New-Poetry] What has poetry taught you?

[Robin Hamilton]

Shouldn't it be "integritas" (and "consonantia")?

Odd to find an Irish poet misquoting Joyce, and equally odd that Heaney 
misses the irony of Joyce's giving the formulation to the then-still-naive 
Stephen Deadalus, and apparently takes it with complete seriousness.

Robin

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "TheOldMole" <Opus40-01 at opus40.org>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2008 1:24 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] What has poetry taught you?


> "Mr. Heaney, pray tell, what is
> Poetry?" "It's integratis."
>
> "Please sir, Mr. Heaney, whaddya
> Telling me?" "It's consonatia."
>
> "Consonatia?" "Claritas."
> "Mr. Heaney -- kiss my ass."
>
>
> David Graham wrote:
>> Dennis O'Driscoll:    What has poetry taught you?
>>
>> Seamus Heaney:    That there's such a thing as truth and it can be 
>> told -- slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorised away and is worth 
>> defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of 
>> possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of 
>> possessing inherent strength of reason by its sheer made-upness, its 
>> integratis, consonatia and claritas.
>>
>> from *Stepping Stones:  Interviews With Seamus Heaney*, by Dennis 
>> O'Driscoll.  Farrar, Straus, 2008.