Poetry, Hamlet, Humanities and Heaney

Several months ago, I began writing about Literature and History.

As our sophomore Humanities students are about to meet Hamlet and his play, I find myself thinking of Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel acceptance speech, "Crediting Poetry," especially its last paragraph.  Throughout my years as a Humanities teacher, I have had to keep asking myself and articulating to others what literature distinctively brings to the table.  How does the literary enterprise differ from the historical one, and what primary values come from experiencing a text like Hamlet?  Answer: the human experience generated by the text.  While Shakespeare's play, as an artifact (art made), has historical value, it is not primarily an historical text.  It is art designed to be felt and lived.

Enter Seamus Heaney.  I have italicized a portion of the excerpt that particularly resonates for me.  After the passage, a brief explanation.

"Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor.  It is at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.  The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."  [emphasis added]

As we question the spirit who appears during the night watch in Act One, Hamlet's experiences of fear and curiosity are ours, too.  So is his anger at Gertrude's o'erhastey marriage.  When we act, or imagine acting, in these scenes, "the base of our sympathetic nature" is touched.  The form of the language, says Heaney, touches that vulnerable part of ourselves; it connects us to the experience of another person, and in so doing recognizes us.  Part of our job as teachers of literature is to help young people understand that a play written four hundred years ago and set a thousand years ago CAN have relevance for us today.  Such plays CAN teach us valuable lessons about ourselves as individuals and communities.  Our own vulnerabilities and sympathies DO matter, and literature recognizes this claim.