Seamus Heaney’s poem “From the Republic of Conscience” reflects on the public role of the poet. The poem, commissioned by Amnesty International Ireland to mark Human Rights Day in 1985, clearly addresses the intersection of poetry and the ethical imagination. The speaker of Heaney’s poem travels to an imagined destination; a republic that is radically democratic. There he engages in self-reflection and returns with a deep understanding of, and a strong commitment to, the ethical responsibility that accompanies the artistic vocation. In the final four stanzas of the poem, the speaker affirms his steadfast commitment to freedom of expression, and to bearing witness ethically:

     I came back from that frugal republic

     with my two arms the one length, the customs

     woman having insisted my allowance was myself.

     The old man rose and gazed into my face

     and said that was official recognition

     that I was now a dual citizen.

     He therefore desired me when I got home

     to consider myself a representative

     and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

     Their embassies, he said, were everywhere

     but operated independently

     and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

The attractiveness of the speaker’s principled stance must be counterbalanced by an awareness that conscience itself is shaped by culture and politics. As Marilynne Robinson observes: “conscience can be slow to awake even to abuses that are deeply contrary to declared values”. In addition, the act of speaking on behalf of others is not without its potential pitfalls, and risks being a form of appropriation or ventriloquism.

Although poetry is often understood as pertaining to the individual and to the private realm, Heaney’s poem seeks to explore what the poet’s relationship to the communal is. Indeed, in times of great crisis, poetry has always been a portable and often clandestine form employed by people to register their experience, to bear witness to atrocities and, sometimes, as a form of activism. An oft-cited example is the text “Requiem” by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, a sequence of poems written, and frequently redrafted, between 1935 and 1961. The poem bears witness to the experience of those who suffered enormously under Stalin’s politically repressive campaign known as the Great Purge. A more recent example discussed by Brenda Carr Velino is the poetry of Guantánamo prisoners who inscribed poems on coffee cups with pebbles, not only as an affirmation of their humanity, but also to critique of the human rights discourse from a non-Western perspective. In the wake of the Paris bombings (November 2015), Facebook users around the world changed their profile picture to the French flag as a sign of solidarity. In response, Indian poet Karuna Parikh urged readers not to pray for Paris alone but for humanity as a whole. Her poem “Prayer for Humanity” critiqued and resisted dangerous dichotomies that were quickly becoming commonplace in the media: us vs them; European vs non-European; citizen vs immigrant, Christian vs Muslim, loyal vs suspect. That the poem went viral and was shared online over 200,000 times attests to the potential power of poetry, especially in the era of social media, to inform public debates on human rights policies and to shape public and private views of global politics.

The examples mentioned above relate to the intersection of human rights discourse and poetry in a global context. Of course, in an interconnected world, the division between here and there, domestic and international, may be a matter of perception rather than reality. Indeed, an important difference between poetry and news media according to Jahan Ramazani is poetry’s “wider temporal horizons and its relative freedom from the imperatives of the immediate present”, a freedom that allows for a trans-temporal and a transnational understanding of issues and events. The majority of twentieth-century Irish poetry has been composed in the shadow of struggles for political and civil rights. When W.B. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, it was in the wake of a bitter War of Independence and a devastating Civil War. When Seamus Heaney received the prize in 1995, violent political conflict had loomed large in Northern Ireland for the previous 30 years. In the face of the increasing minoritization of the Irish language, language and cultural rights provide an additional context, particularly for poets for whom Irish is their chosen artistic medium. The economic boom during the Celtic Tiger years (1995-2007) and the sudden downturn that followed prompted a renewed focus on socio-economic rights in Ireland. A growing awareness of climate collapse brings environmental rights and the rights of future generations to the fore.

Indeed, the ecological crisis has brought renewed scrutiny to the ideological underpinnings of human rights discourse itself. Conor Gearty, for example, claims that the individualism and the anthropocentrism of human rights discourse is wholly inadequate in the face of climate crisis. In a similar vein, legal scholar Anna Grear has called for a reimaging of the human at the centre of human rights discourse, a new understanding that would give due recognition to the embodied nature of human life, to the vulnerability of certain humans and non-humans, and to interspecies dependency. This impetus to question the hierarchical thinking at the heart of human rights ideology, the privileging of man and culture over animal and nature, for example, is prefigured in a poem by Seán Ó Ríordáin, published in 1971, more than forty years before Grear’s call for a new ontological foundation for human rights discourse. This is an important reminder that the function of poetry in relation to human rights discourse is not confined to the role of witness, commemoration or activism. It can function as critical treatise, imagining and probing new modes of understanding that only later emerge in other discourses and disciplines. In the poem “Ní ceadmhach neamhshuim” (translated into English by Peter Sirr as “Against Indifference”), the speaker alludes, in the first stanza, to vulnerable beings, both human and non-human, to whom the “we” of the poem are indebted:

In the second stanza, the speaker conveys a transnational and cosmological sense of responsibility as well as an expansive understanding of what constitutes ‘being’:

The anticipatory nature of Ó Ríordáin’s poem has most recently came to the attention of literary scholars commenting on the Covid-19 pandemic. Máirín Nic Eoin discussed the poem in the context of the ecological crisis that the pandemic foregrounded. As a sufferer of tuberculosis whose status as a non-insured ‘pauper patient’ excluded him from receiving surgery and medical treatment, beyond observation, Ó Ríordáin was all too aware of the socio-economic and political aspect of disease and the structural inequalities that rendered some much more vulnerable than others. António Gueterres’ call to richer nations not to leave Africa behind in relation to equitable vaccine distribution, brought Ó Ríordáin’s words to mind. Poems such as “Claustrophobia”, in which the speaker imagines the cessation of breathing take on new resonances in light of Achille Mbembe’s recent call for an originary right that would precede all others, “a universal right to breathe” which he explains as follows:

Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation. If war there must be, it cannot so much be against a specific virus as against everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing, everything that fundamentally attacks the respiratory tract, everything that, in the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression. To come through this constriction would mean that we conceive of breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in-common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation. By which I mean, the universal right to breath.

At its best, poetry performs not just the function of solace or hope, but unsettles received notions, poses uneasy questions, critiques inequitable power structures, and works against the consolidation of apathy – in short, against indifference.

Professor Rióna Ní Fhrighil is Principal Investigator on the research project Republic of Conscience: Human Rights and Modern Irish Poetry, funded by the Irish Research Council.