In Back of Beyond, Redux: Tradition and History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon

Abstract

In Back of Beyond, Redux: Tradition and History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon Daniel Tobin (bio) The preoccupation with history as a force that shapes the consciousness of the artist and defines the wider culture is surely nothing new in Irish poetry. Nor is it new that the shaping power of history, though indubitable, nevertheless refuses to be encompassed by the purely benign capacity Samuel Taylor Coleridge attributed to the imagination. History destroys as well as creates, as W. B. Yeats for one reminds us through the protean masks of his myth. For many in the generations of Irish poets succeeding Yeats, the ubiquitous presence of history has had to be faced without the protective armor of a visionary system—and embodied more nakedly in their works than Yeats himself envisioned when he put aside his coat of old mythologies at the onslaught of the First World War. Among these poets few have confronted the destructive nature of history as unsparingly and yet as elegantly as Derek Mahon. His metaphysical and historical skepticism as well as his existential malaise compose the unlikely temperamental groundwork for his affirmation of tradition as an alternative to transcendental systems of value. Throughout the recurrent sympathies of his work, Mahon’s labors reveal a poet who aspires to the historical sense T. S. Eliot saw in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Such a poet would write out of a historical awareness not only “the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”1 Implicitly pursuing Eliot’s ideal without embracing his politics, Mahon’s work endorses a view of cultural history as composing “a simultaneous order,” and it does so despite his poetry’s often biting irony and, at times, manifest chiliasm. At the same time, by his own estimate, the very trauma of historical, metaphysical, and geographical displacement that spurs his “rage for order” renders the artist’s work marginal if not circumspect. From this vantage, over the course of his long career Derek Mahon’s oeuvre appears forever in crisis, caught as it is between the ideal order of tradition and a potentially debilitating awareness of displacement. [End Page 68] Born in Belfast in 1941, Mahon describes his “home-turf ” as stretching “from the Cavehill Road to the Shore Road, from Carlisle Circus to Glengormley.”2 If the dominant model for an Irish poet is to locate the source of imagination in a compelling sense of place, then the suburban landscape from which Mahon hails would seem by his own account to offer limited fodder for the imagination. The often quoted opening lines of his early poem “Glengormley” declare, “Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man / Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge / And grasped the principle of the watering can.”3 Far from revealing a poet’s identification with the home turf, this wryly urbane gloss on Mahon’s first world is shaped by his characteristic irony and wit, and speaks to his reluctance to invest any particular place, even his birthplace, with the psychic security of home. Indeed, Mahon’s work might be said to be at one remove from even the Anglo-Irish strain of what Thomas Kinsella has called, famously, the dual tradition of Irish literature.4 That sense of being at a remove is especially acute in his early work, where affiliations to Irish locales often appear marginal at best. “By / Necessity, if not choice, I live here too,” reads the last line of “Glengormley.” At the same time, in another early poem, “Aran,” Mahon’s reverie of dreaming himself into the Irish language constituency of Kinsella’s dual tradition only underscores the poet’s engulfing solitude. There is a restlessness in Mahon’s work relative to the sense of place that far exceeds whatever sense of displacement may be found in the poetry of either Michael Longley or Seamus Heaney, the contemporaries with whom Mahon has been most often associated from the time of their early affiliation in the Belfast Group under the presiding figure of Philip Hobsbaum. Mahon is, as Catríona Clutterbuck observed, “preoccupied with disconnections,” and so much so that, as Hugh Haughton affirmed, “there is no purely local...