'a scheme of echoes': Trevor Joyce, Poetry and Publishing in Ireland in the 1960s

Abstract

For some time a consensus has existed in critical circles concerning developments in poetry and publishing in Ireland in the 1960s. This decade has been seen as a period of expansion in the volume of new writing, in the range of subject matter and in the formal properties of poetic writing, activities which represented an unprecedented change in poetic expression. This has been frequently claimed but seldom analysed. While history testifies to the beginning of a modernising process in Ireland in the 1960s in terms of industry, economics and social policy changes, contrary to the glib pronouncements that to date neatly package the poetic activities of this period, it was, in fact, a complex period of cultural adjustment involving many players whose thinking and whose written pronouncements often harboured antithetical perspectives. This is most obvious in the editorial policies and pronouncements within Irish poetry journals, which, contrary to the above impression, harboured traditionalist and often nationalist and or essentialist affinities. While there is evidence that the 1960s heralded an outward looking political ethos it remains to be recognised that this did not involve the total abandonment of the ideologies of the preceding six decades, for, as Raymond Williams has demonstrated, societies undergoing change will retain a 'residual' strain of previous social and cultural tendencies.1 Williams's 'active manifestation' of Ireland's 'residual' appeared as a cultural nationalism overlaid by the veneer of modernisation. Cairns and Richards have identified an ideological lineage passed down from De Valera and alive in Lemass whose 'new ideas' merely formed a veneer over this.2 The cultural parallel of this is best understood in terms where Lemass 's economic policies have their correlative in the marked change of attitude towards the Irish writer that we witness at this time. In the drive for expansion the Irish writer was now viewed less as a potentially subversive influence but more as an aid to, and to some degree, a