The Columbia History of British Poetry (159 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
12.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 615
ments: his long, fantastic, anguished meditation in the persona of
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
(1926) and the concentrated Scots lyrics that he produced between 1922 and 1933. Here the rural or island settings conjured by the vernacular serve a cosmology at once vibrant and visionaryas in the Shetland poem "With the Herring Fishers":
"I see herrin'." I hear the glad cry
And 'gainst the noon see ilka blue jowl
In turn as the fishermen haul on the nets
And sing: "Come, shove in your heids and growl"
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For this is the way that God sees life
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It's his happy cries I'm hearin'.
But MacDiarmid was to sacrifice his lyrical rhythms to ideological rant, even glorying in the destruction:
Fools regret my poetic changefrom my "enchanting early lyrics"
But I have found in Marxism all that I need
(from "The Kind of Poetry I Want," in
Lucky Poet
)
Robert Crawford and others have sought to validate the structural chaos of MacDiarmid's later poetry as a postmodernist "multiplicity of linguistic possibilities." Comparing MacDiarmid with Ezra Pound, Crawford urges "the forcefully provincial nature of Modernism." But it is equally possible to see both poets as dominies or "village explainers," disabled more than enabled by unselfcritical logorrhea and the avoidance of genuine formal challenges. Andrew Noble has pointed out the contradictions between MacDiarmid's own view of Scottish provincialism as "morbidly Anglicized" and Crawford's definition of it as "the source of original, seminal, eclectic and heteroglot writing.''
Edwin Muir's poetry comes to life when it attacks Scottish matters with the cutting edge of his critical prose, or when his fables are imbued with historical urgency. He is best known for postwar parables such as "The Combat" and "The Horses"and "The Labyrinth," which begins:
Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I'd meet myself returning at some smooth corner
 
Page 616
In "The Impact of Translation" (
The Government of the Tongue
, 1988) Seamus Heaney argues that Muir, "the poet who translated Kafka in the 1920s and who witnessed the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia after the war [was] the one poet from the British island with an eschatological. if somewhat somnambulistic address to the historical moment in postwar Europe." Heaney had, himself, imitated Eastern European parabolists (like Zbigniew Herbert) in
The Haw Lantern
(1987). However, the attempt to package Muir as an Eastern European poet in translation seems little more plausible than the attempt to package MacDiarmid as a postmodernist. Both arguments dress disabilities as deliberate art. The hiatus in Muir's sense of Scotland, ''One foot in Eden" and the other nowhere, empties his poetry of local habitation. Nor do most of Muir's allegorical beasts contain enough actual blood for existential terror. MacNeice, whose poetry was more concretely in touch with the postwar, as with the pre-war, moment, says in
Varieties of Parable
(a set of lectures given shortly before his death in 1963): "[Muir's] metaphysico-mystical writing is so unadulterated either by topical or documentary elements or by primarily aesthetic ones, such as images used for their own sake, that I find reading many of his poems on end is like walking through a gallery of abstract paintings."
Nonetheless, "the possible conditions for a literary revival" in Scotland made waves around the archipelago. For instance, R. S. Thomas declared his enthusiasm, especially for MacDiarmid, in "Some Contemporary Scottish Writing" (1946). Yet although he shared MacDiarmid's anglophobia and contempt for fellow Celts "whose sole criterion of success is appointment to some post under the English Government," Thomas noted: "The poet's chief problem is, how in virtue of his mind and vision can he best save his countrydirectly through political action, or indirectly through his creative work?" Later, in fact, growing "rather tired of the themes about nationalism and the decay of the rural structure in Wales," Thomas was to separate his political activism from his poetry.
John Hewitt, in Northern Ireland, faced still more testing questions. A friend of Muir's, he was a poet, socialist, and atheist from a Protestant (Methodist) family. On cultural as well as political grounds Hewitt opposed a Unionist establishment that had its own reasons for promoting the kind of Anglicization so resented by Scottish and Welsh Nationalist literati. However, he also disliked what he saw as the atavis-
 
Page 617
tic, antiprogressive, and theocratic character of Irish Nationalism. Accordingly, literary "regionalism" seemed a way of negotiating the "problems and cleavages" produced by Unionism and Nationalism. His essay "The Bitter Gourd" takes heart from Scotland and Wales. But a movement in the West of England has been less successful, Hewitt writes:
Perhaps a warning for us. Wales and Scotland are, after all, well-defined geographical and national entities. . . . Where then does Ulster stand? After all, we have a frontier. What then of Donegal?
For fifteen years, from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, Hewitt preached and promoted a cross-sectarian regionalist consciousness in literature and the arts. His activities (which took their cue from Yeats as well as MacDiarmid) included the recuperation of Ulster's literary and cultural resourcesfor example, the "Rhyming Weavers," who wrote in the Ulster Scots vernacular while working at their preindustrial looms. Denied an influential job at the Ulster Museum by Unionist intrigue, Hewitt left Northern Ireland in 1957. He returned in 1972, after retiring as director of the Coventry Art Gallery, and found himself the grand old man of a new literary scene, with regionalist residues. Hewitt criticized his earlier regionalism as being predicated too much on the counties of Down and Antrimon Protestant east Ulster. His preferred regional model, New England, carried less cultural justification in the Catholic areas of western Ulster. Hewitt's regionalism was primarily an attempt to articulate Ulster Protestant identity in terms more complex and indigenous than Unionism allowed, and simultaneously to create a distinctive aesthetic for himself. His well-known poem "Once Alien Here" (1945) sums up these aspirations. On the one hand, the poem reproduces a binary (not to say stereotypical) view of national poetic traditions: "graver English, lyric Irish tongue." On the other, it represents relations between landscape, language, history, and poetry in such a way as to open up fundamental questions about "a native mode" in a divided society and within the archipelago's "complex of interacting cultures.''
A particular place usually lies at the heart of national or regional allegiance, and may even be its real object: for Yeats, Sligo; for Hewitt, the Glens of Antrim; for Muir, a lost Orcadian Edendistinct from Scotland as well as from Glasgow. In her essay "Region and Nation: R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas" (
The Literature of Region and Nation
, ed.

Other books

Momzillas by Jill Kargman
Outbreak by Tarah Benner
My Dream Man by Marie Solka
Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones