Politics & Power Quote by Seamus Heaney

Heaney is naming the trap that waits for any writer who comes from a politically charged place: the audience doesn’t actually want the poem, it wants the poet. Or more precisely, it wants the poet as a credentialed mouthpiece, pre-sorted into the right camp. The delicious chill in his phrasing is how politely he says something accusatory. “It has to be said” signals reluctance, as if he’d prefer not to puncture the romance of literature’s public role, but can’t avoid the truth.

The key move is the demotion of “poetry as such.” Heaney isn’t denying politics; he’s refusing the bait-and-switch where art gets treated as a referendum. The expectation he describes is not that poems will illuminate complexity, but that they will deliver “political positions” that can be stamped approved. “Various” hints at a marketplace of stances, and “approvable” is the real tell: not courageous, not truthful, just passable to an audience looking for reassurance.

Then comes the bitter symmetry: “mutually disapproving groups.” In Northern Ireland’s atmosphere of sectarian alignment, no position satisfies everyone; the poet gets drafted anyway. Heaney’s subtext is a defense of poetic autonomy that isn’t escapist. It’s an insistence that the poem’s job is to complicate the slogans people arrive with, not to become one more slogan. The line works because it sounds like measured commentary while quietly diagnosing a cultural hunger for art that behaves like propaganda - preferably someone else’s.