by liberal japonicus
A little background and my overripe thoughts about Biden quoting Seamus Heaney (after Sophocles), started off by this article from the Guardian.
What was quoted by Biden was originally part of a theatre piece that Heaney wrote for the Field Day Theatre Company, at the end of the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the program, Heaney notes:
The conflict between the young man’s [Neoptolemus, son of Achilles] sense of integrity and the older man’s [Odysseus] code of loyalty and solidarity intiates the drama, which goes on to enact itself in the consciousness of Philoctetes himself: in him and around him Sophocles locates an argument about the different consequences of outrage and obligation:
The Guardian article quotes Heaney, who says
“Poetry’s special status among the literary arts,” […] “derives from the audience’s readiness to … credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit.”
The article doesn’t note that this is poetry’s trap, you can get yourself waaaay out on a limb and then saw through the limb you are perched on, which I will demonstrate below the fold