The Columbia History of British Poetry (157 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 608
Northern Irish poetry is widely seen as the most important poetic movement in the British Isles during the last quarter-century. Its vitality seems inseparable from the area's diverse cultural elements and from the political subtexts that have accrued to word and image.
But if Northern Irish poetry represents the molten core of a melting pot within a melting pot, literary traditions are pitched in there, too. Coming from a deeply traditional as well as a deeply fractured society, the poetry casts wider light on the workings of English-language poetic traditions in the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot, an authoritarian arch-metropolitan who fled American heterogeneity and had a bee in his bonnet about a "powerful literature with a powerful capital," published an essay called "Was There a Scottish Literature?" (1919). Eliot also managed to ignore Yeats and the Irish literary revival in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," when he pronounced: "In English writing we seldom speak of tradition" (Yeats spoke of little else). So much for traditions and the individual country. It was through regional specificity rather than through Dante that Yeats made contact with the mind of Europe. The supposed margins can surprise the metropolis not only by their "barbarian'' energies but by their conservative instincts: their adherence to traditional structures, their maintenance of what the center cannot hold. But the centerBelfast, Dublin, London, Boston?is itself as much in question for Northern Irish poetry as for Northern Irish politics. This poetry destabilizes British Isles canonsand the Anglo-American axisin more than one direction.
Place, Nation, Region, Parish, Religion
In Irish history, we are often told, the stable element is the land. The same might be said of twentieth-century poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The Romantic attraction to Nature and place included a generally spurious "Celtic" dimension, but at least this led Yeats in the 1890s to appreciate how "Irish legends move among known woods and seas." Nationalist critics are unconvincing when they claim (as does Ned Thomas in his introduction to R. S. Thomas's
Selected Prose
, 1986) a total divorce between English Romantic traditionsWordsworth or the "late Romanticism of the far horizon that was so often projected onto the Celtic west"and "a new and fresh Romanticism, grounded in
this
place."
 
Page 609
Yeats's peculiar and influential nexus of legend and locality was not wholly alien to longer-earthed literary traditions:
dinnseanchas
(the Gaelic lore of place names in Ireland and Scotland); the vernacular verse of Scots and Ulster Scots townland bardsthe Robert Burns tradition; and what excited the young Edward Thomas in Welsh poetry"it is entirely Welsh; it refers constantly to Welsh men, traditions, places, by name, and is proud of all, whereas English poetry has no such characterexcept Wordsworth, perhaps." (Later he would discover Clare and Hardy). In the early twentieth century Thomas also found the Irish literary revival a stimulus to his quest for an English poetics, based upon an inner-directed Englishness, that might replace "the word Imperialism." Reviewing an anthology of Irish poetry in 1910, he said: "They sing of Ireland herself with an intimate reality often missing from English patriotic poetry, where Britannia is a frigid personification." Thomas's influence (and that of his American poetic ally, Robert Frost) on the local precisions of Northern Irish poetry shows an aesthetic of ''intimate reality" moving around these islands and beyond.
At the same time, Thomas's antithesisintimate reality versus frigid personificationimplies an inescapable friction between cultural and political versions of national affiliation. Nationalists would argue that cultural topographies, although often helpful to the cause, merely conceal an absence of territorial power. For example, the kitsch "kailyard" (cabbage patch) streak in Scottish writing, a cosy idealization of small-town life, can be seen as a compensatory kilt to cover the fact that, according to Edwin Muir, "there's no Scotland," i.e., since the Union with England in 1707. R. S. Thomas's Welsh Nationalist poem "Reservoirs" (from
Not That He Brought Flowers
, 1968) questions an aesthetic of place built upon "the putrefying of a dead / Nation":
There are places in Wales I don't go:
Reservoirs that are the subconscious
Of a people, troubled far down
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The serenity of their expression
. . . is a pose
For strangers . . .
. . . instead of the poem's
Harsher conditions . . .
 
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If Irish, Scottish, and Welsh landscapes are less populated, less modernized and urbanized, more imaginatively susceptible than their English counterparts, this is not only a function of romantically rugged terrain or cultural choice, but of economic and political history. The Great Famine and continuing emigration underlie the emptiness of the West of Ireland, a landscape much inscribed with visionary and utopian prospects since Yeats first veiled its contours in twilight. And it was the enclosing landlords who made the Scottish Highlands, in Cairns Craig's words, "one of Europe's most sparsely populated areas." lain Crichton Smith's poem "The Clearances" (from
The Law and the Grace
, 1965) strikes the same antipastoral note as "Reservoirs": ''The thistles climb the thatch. Forever / this sharp scale in our poems / as also the waste music of the sea."
Yet the representation of waste and loss, however harshly or sharply phrased, can return poetry to "the backward look" of Celtic stereotype. Industrialism, following upon Acts of Union, has compounded problems of cultural and literary accommodation. Yeats's myth and idiom just about held out against the incursions of technology. Edwin Muir, twenty-two years younger, said that to be born in the Orkney islands was to be "born before the Industrial Revolution." Muir never quite resolved the historical and psychic distance between his Orkney origins and Glasgow (where his family moved in 1901). Another Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown, is currently making a last-ditchor last-islandstand. Brown's most recent collection,
The Wreck of the Archangel
(1989) still confines its social vocabulary to traditional rural labor set within a mythic and seasonal frameworkas in "Building the Croft House": "Flashing scythes, falling corn. / The doorstep set. / We drank ale from a stone jar."
In his 1940s essays (reprinted in
Selected Prose
) R. S. Thomas wanted Welsh poetry "to show some difference from the essentially urban-minded English poets who write for the most part in a highly sophisticated manner and with a consistently town outlook." Thomas's Nationalism "epitomizes" Wales as "the bright hill under the black cloud" and balks at urban, industrial Wales: "towns are not characteristic of Wales; they are evidence of foreign influence. . . ." In
The Rough Field
(1972) the Northern Irish poet John Montague couples the defeat of Gaelic Ireland with the impact of new farming methods and new roads on his native Tyrone, but accepts historical necessity: "Our finally lost dream of man at home / In a rural setting!"
 
Page 611
A younger Northern Irish poet, Derek Mahon, took a brisker attitude when he complained in 1970 that the Belfast shipyards and housing estates were anathema to the westward-pointing compass of much Irish poetry. Similarly, Douglas Dunn seems to question the antiurban reflex when he observes in his preface to
The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry
(1992):
Scottish literature has not always been the citys friend. . . . Until well into the twentieth century, Scottish cities were depicted as stone wildernesses into which rural Lowlanders, displaced Highlanders and immigrant Irish families drifted in search of a livelihood, becoming industrial fodder.
According to Dunn, the tension between rural Scotland (itself diverse) and "slums, squalor and urban hardships" is "part of the drama of modern Scottish literature." Even Hugh MacDiarmid's fusion of Nationalism and Marxism could not stomach Glasgow. More recently, a self-consciously "Glasgow" school of poets (Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead) and novelists (Alasdair Gray, James Kelman) has imaginatively inhabited the citywarts, beauty spots, accents, and all.
A similar phenomenon now centers on Dublin, which has swollen immensely since the 1960sthe so-called Finglas writers, named after a deprived working-class suburb. These writers, who include the novelist Roddy Doyle (author of
The Commitments
) and poet-novelist Dermot Bolger, insist on the differences between their own gritty Dublin and Joyce's city. Yet there can be urban as well as rural pastoral, and structures of Scottish and Irish local attachment may have been transformed rather than abandoned.
Clearly, the city has been subject to uneven poetic development in the British Isles. Urban realism (and urban fantasy) associated with left-wing politics took hold earlier in England, for obvious reasons, and earlier in fiction than in poetryalways the conservative medium. As Raymond Williams says in
The Country and the City
, "the English experience is especially significant, in that one of the decisive transformations, in the relations between country and city, occurred there very early and with a thoroughness which is still in some ways unapproached." Williams criticizes postindustrial literary sublimations, including the invention of pastoral "Old England"the English kailyard. Yet while he shows how sanitized rural heritage not only functions as opium for the urban masses but masks the exploitation of rural laborers, Williams's Welshness still draws him to "knowable communities."

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