Then came Aristotle with his treatise Concerning the Art of Poetry, usually called Poetics. The second part of Aristotle's Poetics has been lost. No art form has been the subject of so much research, has spawned so many treatises as poetry. Yet Heaney contests the conventional reading of its final lines. For Heaney, Auden's poem is more than just an elegy.
Poetry always reemerges from hibernation during such crises.
The first world war, the Spanish Civil War and the second world war gave us so much fine poetry. Good poetry, Heaney believes, should be on the side of life, continuity of effort and the enlargement of the spirit. Heaney goes on to mention examples of poets who challenged repression and dark dictatorship in Stalinist Russia. His poetry became the expression of a deeply committed and deeply oppositional humanism. There is a necessity of poetry, claims Heaney, and there should be a corresponding gratitude to the poet for having made things.