The Columbia History of British Poetry (162 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 624
language. There is also the lowland Scots variety of English, pressed back into dialect and called, by its poetic champion Hugh MacDiarmid, "Doric" or "Lallans" or "the Vernacular." English hegemony in the archipelago cannot be divorced from the English language; hence the role of language in separatist ideologies. Independently of nationalism, the very existence or influence of another language promotes linguistic literacy. The locally diverse effects of Gaelic (or Scots) on spoken English in Ireland set up a double consciousness, a deviation from the standard that need not be construed only in political terms. Kavanagh tested English and Irish pastoral against his Monaghan ear: "I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul!''' Vice versa, Philip Larkin during his years in Belfast (19501955) was stimulated by "the salt rebuff of speech, / Insisting so on difference."
The Irish revival had two linguistic modes fruitfully linked by translation. However, the Gaelic League became politicized and attacked Yeats's movement as an alien (and Protestant) imposition. From a linguistic viewpoint, English won the "battle of two civilizations" in that Irish, although currently enjoying a small revival, will never be other than a minority language. Meanwhile Hiberno-Englishin the wake of Yeats, Synge, and Joycehas had remarkable literary success. R. S. Thomas, writing in "Words and the Poet" (1964), is ambivalent about the transaction whereby "frequent transfusions of Celtic blood" invigorate "the worn out veins of English." But English has been the "native" language of Irish people, apart from small enclaves on the west coast, for a long time.
Perhaps the greater tenacity of Welsh makes it harder for Anglo-Welsh poets not to feel monolingualism as guilt and bilingualism as compromise. Dylan Thomas felt no guilt, and some contemporary Welsh poets would do well to remember Louis MacNeice's question in "An Alphabet of Literary Prejudices" (1948): "When will well-known Irish writers who publish nothing but English stop preaching nothing but Gaelic?" (MacNeice may have had Austin Clarke in mind.) Today influence cuts both ways, and relations between English and Gaelic poetry from Ireland have eased considerably. Witness the bilingual poet Michael Hartnett or
Pharaoh's Daughter
(1990), in which well-known English-language poets translate the leading Gaelic poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Formerly banned as betrayal, collections in translation are reaching new audiences.
In fact, poetry in Wales has suffered from a cultural protectionism
 
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that embraces both Welsh and Anglo-Welsh poetry. As for Scotland, Douglas Dunn's
Faber Book of Contemporary Scottish Poetry
announces a kind of linguistic peace treaty: "Scottish poetry has moved gradually into its liberty . . . it is more and more the poetry in three languages of one nationality." But if this begs the National questionand overrides the regional fractures noticed by Cairns Craigit also suggests zones of influence rather than keen mutual stimulus. More broadly, fine Scottish poets such as Norman MacCaig (b. 1910) and Iain Crichton Smith (b. 1928) tend to establish one style and stick to it. MacCaig's charming, occasional aperçus, as in "Blue Tit on a String of Peanuts" (from
The Equal Skies
, 1980), depend on images rather than on surprising verbal liaisons: "Your hair-thin legs / (one north-east, one due west) support / a scrap of volcano."
Edwin Muir may be rationalizing the inertness of his own English idiom (the "tall and echoing passages" of "The Labyrinth") when he argues that Scotland has lost one language and not foundor not found itself inanother. Yet Scotland has done less than Ireland to reinvent the English lyric (supposing that to be an objective). If Welsh poets seem too close together, Scottish poets often seem too far apartand linguistic difference becomes an alibi.
Both Muir's and MacDiarmid's difficulties with English stem from their origins as dialect-speakers in Orkney and Dumfriesshire. Muir, indeed, associated the vernacular with "regression to childhood," saying in
Scott and Scotland
that "dialect is to a homogeneous language what the babbling of children is to the speech of grown men and women." MacDiarmid, who briefly made a homogeneous poetic language by grafting dictionary words onto the green shoots of his childhood speech, could not agree. In "English Ascendancy in British Literature" (1931), reprinted in
Selected Prose
, ed. Alan Riach (1992), he had argued that the repression of "Gaelic and Scots dialect poets" was, in European terms, "a sort of self-infliction of an extensive spiritual and psychological blindness.''
For MacDiarmid as for R. S. Thomas, language precipitates loss of meaning on all fronts. His writings advance two models whereby the darkness might lift. The first is Joyce's "multi-linguistic" example, followed in MacDiarmid's Poundian poems, and endorsed by his post-modernist admirers. The second model, interlingual rather than multilingual, seems predicated on MacDiarmid's genuine poetic breakthroughEnglish literature should be "broad-basing itself on all the
 
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diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects, in the British Isles."
This splendid variety affects poetry in equally various ways. Tom Paulin's
Faber Book of Vernacular Verse
(1990) relishes variety to the extent of herding quite heterogeneous effects into the vernacular fold: folk traditions, English regional poetry, Scots poetry, poetry with marked Hiberno-English features, phonetic poetry, discursive or conversational poetry, and much poetryby Dickinson, Yeats, Edward Thomasnot usually considered "vernacular" that simply bears some relation to the language "really used" by men or women. However, there is a political dimension to Paulin's project. Aside from Scots or regional variants of English, accent and idiom are the areas on which a politics of English poetic language most often impinges; for instance, in West Indian "rap" poetry, although its rhythms in performance are significant, too.
Tom Leonard's poems, whose orthography reproduces Glaswegian phonetics, satirically exploit the reading difficulties of outsiders (see
Intimate Voices: Selected Works 19651983
). "Good Style" begins: "helluva hard tay read theez init," and "Paroakial" adds political bite to Kavanagh's aesthetic by sending up a speaker who commands: "goahty learna new langwij / sumhm ihnturnashnl / Noah Glasgow hangup." Leonard anticipates his critics in ''Fathers and Sons": "'Don't you find / the use of phonetic urban dialect / rather constrictive?'/ Asks a member of the audience. . . ." Yet it can be constrictive in the work of Leonard and his imitatorswhether read aloud or on the page, phonetic poetry tends to foreclose other verbal possibilities. So does poetry that fetishizes diction.
Paulin's anthology, as Robert Crawford recognizes, is designed "to support his own poetic endeavours." His Northern Irish Protestant background attracts him to the Scots words that color Ulster speech (as do words of Gaelic origin), although true Ulster Scots vernacular verse, like its Scottish counterpart, died out during the nineteenth century. In
Liberty Tree
(1983) Paulin highlights a particular consonantal range of words"glubbed," "choggy," "chug," "screggy"to self-consciously barbaric effect. (This differs from the role of dialect words in the homogeneous language of Seamus Heaney.)
Liberty Tree
also attempts to conceive a linguistic basis for an idealized form of Republicanism.
Crawford approves of Paulin as a "sophisticated barbarian" (which seems to be having it both ways) and notes that Paulin's "dialect usages
 
Page 627
and his nationalist stance can be paralleled by the sprinkling of such Scots words as 'dailygone,' 'brose' and 'jorum-jirger' through
St. Kildas Parliament
, the 1981 collection by his friend Douglas Dunn." Dunn's earlier collection,
Barbarians
(1979), also invokes a politics of language. In "The Student" he adopts the persona of a disaffected worker who might have taken part in "the Scottish insurrection" of 1820: "
Difficult Latin sticks in my throat / And the scarecrow wears my coat
.'' This refrain parallels, as do Paulin's barbarisms, the strategies of Tony Harrison toward region and class in England. Yet political-linguistic will should not be taken, in all cases, for poetic deed. Dunn's most concentrated and moving collection is
Elegies
(1985), which commemorates his wife ("It is very lonely on the green settee").
There are less obvious forms of Celtic blood transfusion. Generally speaking, the survival of oral traditionsstrongest in Irelandhas kept the rhythms, the corpuscles, moving. Forms of verbal display are still valued: recitation, story telling, contests of wit. Even Presbyterianism and Welsh Baptism have their preachers. Just as Dylan Thomas's poetry remembers his evangelical grandfather, so is the style of Northern Irish poet W. R. Rodgers (b. 1909), who spent ten years as a Presbyterian minister, shaped by the "old sea-roar and surge / Of rhetoric and Holy Writ." Whatever the cultural reasons, Paul Durcan and Liz Lochheadlike Dylan Thomas before themare as celebrated as rap poets for reading their work. Durcan invests with priestly intensity poems whose structures draw on a range of contemporary media and the recitative of Bob Dylan. "The Kilfenora Teaboy" recasts the Irish patriotic ballad in a plangent sixties mode:
I'm the Kilfenora teaboy
And I'm not so very young,
But though the land is going to pieces
I will not take up the gun . . .
Oh but it's the small piece of furze between two farms
Is what makes the Kilfenora teaboy really run
.
For Lochhead as for Durcan, what goes into the reading goes into the writing. Her edged, colloquial dramatic monologues incorporate the twentieth-century consumerist flux, including the built-in obsolescence of words themselves. "The Grim Sisters" (1981) harks back to the prefeminist fifties:
 
Page 628
In those big mantrap handbags
they snapped shut at any hint of
that
were hedgehog hairbrushes
cottonwool mice and barbed combs to tease.
Their heels spiked bubblegum, dead leaves.
The title of Lochhead's
Bagpipe Muzak
(1991) pays tribute to Louis MacNeice's poem of 1937. In "Bagpipe Music" MacNeice's rhythms and vocabulary dramatizeat the level of languagethe culture clash between modernity and tradition: "Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python." MacNeice's central role in releasing everyday words into poetry has been acknowledged by Philip Larkin as well as by Derek Mahon, yet he also absorbed classical syntax and the impact of Christianity on the English language. Perhaps MacNeice's zest in mixing lexical and grammatical registers was influenced by his generational duel with Yeats, and by his Irish/English double consciousness. In the preface to
Modern Poetry
(1938) MacNeice defies Yeatsian precepts: ''This is a plea for
impure
poetry, that is, for poetry conditioned by the poet's life and the world around him."
When it comes to canon making, however, aesthetic pleas often seem of less account than the politics of language and nation. To take the Irish case, anthologies of Irish poetry have recently engaged in a complex quarrel about traditions, which has thrown into question understandings of Irish literary history since 1921. Hence Thomas Kinsella's reactionary
New Oxford Book of Irish Verse
(1986). Kinsella pronounces the muse of Irish poetry to be "a past heavy with loss," yet contradictorily insists on a Platonic unity that transcends linguistic and historical difference.
Yeats has always caused problems for proponents of a unified Irish tradition. And as we have seen in the case of Kavanagh, "anxiety of influence" can be compounded by cultural and sectarian factors. As it turns out, Kavanagh's parochial strengths liberated him from Yeats. MacNeice, who shared Yeats's middle-class Irish Protestant background, engaged more profoundly with Yeatsian practice and theory than did any other Irish or English poet of his generation. He wrote the first major critical study of Yeats (
The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
, 1941), which concluded that Yeats's message to his successors was: "
Go thou and do otherwise
."
For Austin Clarke (b. 1896), this was easier saidor desiredthan

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