The Columbia History of British Poetry (163 page)

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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done. Clarke's most achieved poems are to be found in
Pilgrimage and Other Poems
(1929), which mythologizes the medieval "Celtic Romanesque" period and blends the vowel assonances of Gaelic meter with English sound patterns. "The Lost Heifer" begins: "When the black herds of the rain were grazing / In the gap of the pure cold wind / And the watery hazes of the hazel / Brought her into my mind . . . " Clarke's subsequent metrical experimentation was less successful, and his anticlerical satires (although of historical interest) lack the punch of Paul Durcan's.
The uncertainties of Clarke's oeuvre exemplify wider confusions, ever since the 1920s, as to howor whetherIrish poetry in English should declare its independence, too. (The really independent moves by Kavanagh and MacNeice were not on any ideological agenda.) One obvious option seemed to be Gaelicism; another, modernism. But Irish prose modernism, thanks to Joyce, has been infinitely more significant than Irish poetic modernism.
Denis Devlin (b. 1908) and Brian Coffey (b. 1905)and in one view Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928)opt for feeble imitations of T. S. Eliot rather than feeble imitations of Yeats. The real free-verse achievement of that period is
The Great Hunger
, a poem that had digested
The Waste Land
but "did otherwise" in indigenous termsas did MacDiarmid's
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
. And the strategic position of MacNeice vis à vis the English thirties generation enabled him to synthesize the disparate influences of Yeats and Eliot in a context after ideologies were tested by the politics of the period. This was to prove important for Northern Irish poetry later on.
MacNeice's place in the canon and the term
Northern Irish poetry
tend to besomewhat shakilyinterdependent. There are still taboos on partitioning Irish poetry, even for analytical purposes. Yet canonical bids have been made from the North: Frank Ormsby's diplomatically entitled
Poets from the North of Ireland
appeared in 1979 and was updated in 1990. Paul Muldoon's
Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
(1986) placed Kavanagh and MacNeice at the head of a select group of living poets, chiefly from the North. This bid has been countered by
The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
(1990), whose editors, Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon, firmly pull the poetic center back from Belfast to Dublin andlike Kinsellaassert a unitary Irish poetry: "as ever, poets from the North contribute to a national body of work which, in its turn, belongs to a global commu-
 
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nity." Blotting out the island of Britain, Fallon and Mahon emphasize European links and a "transatlantic neighbourhood" with the United States.
This battle of the anthologies began with
The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
(1982), which includes six Northern Irish poets (Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin). In a verse
Open Letter
Seamus Heaney objected to his inclusion under "British"since "My passport's green." Here political and literary or cultural vocabularies clash. How does this affect the influence of Wordsworth or Ted Hughes on Heaney's poetry? In practice, Heaney's poems remain in the
Penguin British
; the presence of the Northern poets in the
Penguin Irish
, as well, accurately suggests a degree of condominium and provides for reader reception in different contexts. At the same time, the glaring literary-historical deficiencies in the conception and execution of both these anthologies confirm that, during the last seventy years, little thought has gone into Irish-British poetic relations.
Heaney's
Open Letter
was written for the Field Day Theatre Company, a group of writers and academics who have done much to politicize Irish literary criticism since 1980. Its apotheosis is the three-volume
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
(1991)a massive canonical and hegemonic bid on many fronts. The anthology has been criticized on two main grounds: for underrepresenting women and for overrepresenting Nationalist politics. (Its general stress on "Political speeches and writings" makes the neglect of women's utterance all the more surprising.)
Indeed, a strongly negative aspect of Celtic traditionalism is its patriarchal character, reinforced through all the churches. As elsewhere, Irish women have made their mark in fiction rather than in poetry, and only Medbh McGuckian and, in Irish, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill have reinvented language and form. However, Eavan Boland (b. 1944) instituted a greater self-consciousness on the part of Irish women poets when she published her pamphlet
A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition
(1989). Boland criticizes the literary-political invention of that blighting, silencing figure "Dark Rosaleen. Cathleen ni Houlihan. The nation as woman: the woman as national muse." But although her poems bring a new slant to suburban motherhood, some of Boland's work rather too deliberately inverts Irish male poetic premises. The impact of feminist theory on poetry by Irish women has
 
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been double-edgedas yet insufficiently acclimatized, it tends to preempt or usurp creative practice. But the numbers of women now writing poetry belong to the great surge of sociopolitical confidence that made Mary Robinson President of the Irish Republic, and more good poems will surely follow.
The "Contemporary Irish Poetry" section of the
Field Day Anthology
is another example of literary-historical and critical inadequacy. The anthology as a whole uses literature and theory to challenge so-called revisionist history, i.e., the way in which most Irish historians, for several decades now, have complicated the Nationalist narrative represented at its simplest by Kinsella's "past heavy with loss." Thus Field Day also rules out poetic partitionism, obscures distinctive developments in the North and South, and shows a significant hostility towards Paul Durcan, printing none of his political poems and calling his work "loose to the point of garrulity."
If Durcan is sometimes vulnerable to the charge of journalism, his real sin seems to be that his critique of Church and state, of hierarchy and patriarchy, of political violence from all quarters, manifests a revisionist tendency. But Durcan's poetry embodies and prophetically imagines cultural change at a deeper level than either historians or journalists can reach. Its popularity in the Irish Republic, together with that of Brendan Kennelly and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, indicates that a communal psychodramaa communal psychotherapyis taking place, which has to do with growing up. Childhood countries have recurred in this discussionDurcan's
Daddy, Daddy
(1990) enacts a psychological and political rite of passage in relation to his dead father, a pillar of the state who once put his poet-son into a mental home. This suggests that arguments about poetry are not purely academic in Ireland.
Northern Irish Poetry, 19621992: A Formal History
The issues raised so farplace, history, nation, religion, language, canonare deeply implicated in the dialectics that Northern Irish poets conduct with one another and with themselves. Here the theoretical term
intertextuality
applies in a living, social sense. Relations between poems can help to interpret a societyin MacNeice's words"small enough / To be still thought of with a family feeling," yet simultaneously engaged in a bloody family feud. Since the cultural mix that
 
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produces the conflict also conditions the poetry, it is well placed both to empathize and to criticize.
Poetic intertextuality improves on the black-and-white "readings" encapsulated in
Autumn Journal
, and passes the Northern Irish problem through finer meshes than those available to political science. Indeed, John Whyte's useful survey of twenty years' scholarly research,
Interpreting Northern Ireland
(1991), comes to a conclusion that the poetry might have anticipated: "Areas only a few miles from each other can differ enormouslyin religious mix, in economic circumstances, in the level of violence, in political attitudes. . . ."
In Northern Irish poetry parochial variables are of the essence. They cover the spectrum between "A Christmas Childhood" and "Carrickfergus," between our need to construct parishes and history's need to dissolve them. This is a matrix for poetry itself. If at one level poetic intertextuality interprets a civil war, at another it represents literary traditions at work. Because Northern Irish poetry reads the historical English lyric from a peculiar angle on the British Isles, it has reinvented lyrical categoriesnot only war poetryand reopened the debate about form that took place earlier in this century.
It was in the late 1960s that Northern Irish poetry became a recognized phenomenon. Seamus Heaney, still Northern Ireland's most internationally known poet, published his first collection,
Death of a Naturalist
, in 1966. Derek Mahon followed with
Night Crossing
(1968), and Michael Longley with
No Continuing City
(1969). The first reciprocity between these poets occurred at Trinity College Dublin, where Longley (b. 1939) and Mahon (b. 1941) met, although they had earlier attended the same Protestant grammar school in Belfast. A second phase began when young writers from Queen's University Belfast, including Heaney (b. 1939), originally from rural County Derry, joined the literary "Group" run by Philip Hobsbaum, a poet and critic from England. Longley also joined the Group, and met Heaney there, when he returned to Belfast in 1964. Mahon only attended the Group once and said he "didn't like it. Too Leavisite and too contentious, intolerant" (interview in
Poetry Review
, summer 1991). Since the Group is sometimes credited with being the only begetter of Northern Irish poetry, the Trinity College Dublin connection should not be forgotten. From the early 1950s Trinity possessed a flourishing magazine,
Icarus
, which was the literary nursery of Brendan Kennelly as well as of Mahon and Longley.
 
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All three Northern poets were stimulated by exemplars outside Ireland and the British Isles. To take the United States alone: Mahon looked to Crane and Lowell, Heaney to Frost, and Longley to Stevens and Wilbur. They also looked back: Heaney to Wordsworth and Hopkins, Longley to the Classics and Metaphysical poetry, and Mahon to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. But three literary contexts were more immediate in uniting cultural and aesthetic significance for the poets: first, the Anglo-Irish poetic tradition (Yeats and Robert Graves mediated by MacNeice), in which Trinity College Dublin still had a particular stake; second, the impact of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, whose own cross-currents involved differing relations to such "Celtic" poets as Yeats and Dylan Thomas; and third, Kavanagh's Ulster parochialism and Hewitt's Ulster regionalism. The poets' varying relation to these varied influences produced strikingly diverse results.
What
Night Crossing, Death of a Naturalist
, and
No Continuing City
do have in common is a formal concentration only matched at that period by Philip Larkin. Virtually all the poems in
Night Crossing
and
No Continuing City
are stanzaic and rhymedin almost every stanza length between two and ten lines. Heaney's
Death of a Naturalist
generally prefers the quatrain (as does his later poetry), but also includes richly textured blank verse in the tradition of Edward Thomas and Ted Hughes. Differences in approach to the stanza can be seen if we compare Heaney's "Personal Helicon," Mahon's "An Unborn Child" and Longley's "Freeze-Up." "Personal Helicon," a poem at the center of Heaney's early poetic parish, is both springy (like Hopkins) and weighted (like Hughes):
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
This quatrain alternates between strongly consonantal monosyllables and the contrasting stresses that fall on the disyllabic and trisyllabic words, which seem counterpoised at the end of the second and beginning of the fourth lines. Yet, overall, the single line counts for more than the stanza. The rhythmical force is centripetal, turning on "dark drop."
In Mahon's "An Unborn Child" individual lines may have their own rhythmic verve, but they also participate in a freer version of Yeats's "exact coincidence between period and stanza":

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