Paul Magee – Problems with the Concept of Belonging

Abstract  This paper takes fire from Seamus Heaney’s comments on the “cultural depth charges latent in certain words,” and in particular from his analysis of poet Ted Hughes’s predilection for those with Anglo-Saxon roots. Heaney sees Germanic word choices as integral to Hughes’s attempts to evoke “the being-thereness. . . of sea, stone, wind and tree.” So Heaney makes critical mileage of the well-known existence (Jespersen 1938; Ulmann 1962; Durkin 2007) of two key strata in the English lexicon: the Latinate vocabulary of administrative, legal, commercial, educational, intellectual and ecclesiastical power, brought by the French overlords from 1066 on and later massified through Renaissance borrowings, and those older words—typically shorter, felt to be more earthy and everyday—which evidence the English language’s long descent from proto-Germanic. Inspired by Heaney’s analysis, the article asks how much the emotive power, and “being-thereness,” of the words “belong”, “belongs to” and “belonging”, can be attributed to etymological imaginings of this order. In other words, is their invocation really a kind of trick? The analysis covers artistic, scholarly and party-political uses of the “belong” words, problematising the universality scholars have attributed to the concept of “belonging” in the process. The paper concludes by suggesting that an era dominated by propaganda (a.k.a. populism) requires new uses for the tools of literary criticism.  Bio  Paul Magee is Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra, where he directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR). His most recent books are Later Unearthed (Puncher and Wattman, 2025), in verse, and the monograph, Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman and Littlefield / Bloomsbury, 2022).  This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to PaulMagee_Presentation.pptx