Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 by Matthew Campbell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 by Matthew Campbell Leith Davis (bio) Matthew Campbell. Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Pp. 252. US $95.00. The 1801 Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain has been a frequent starting point for critics of Irish literature who focus on the genre of the national tale as expressive of the complicated alignments and disjunctions operating in the Irish political and cultural landscape at the time. In Irish Poetry Under the Union, however, Matthew Campbell considers the “national longing for form” articulated in lyric poetry during the period in which Ireland and Great Britain were politically joined in union (14). For Campbell, the “technical struggle” in a lyric poem can be just as revealing of the complex nature of cultural contact as the marriage plot of the national tale (15). As Campbell indicates, nineteenth-century Irish poetry written in English has received comparatively little critical attention as a genre (with the important exceptions of critics like David Lloyd and Julia Wright), and the criticism it has prompted has tended to read the poetry retrospectively as preparation for the rebellion and political upheavals of the twentieth century. Campbell seeks, however, to tell the story of Irish poetry before William Butler Yeats without assuming the end of the story: “It is one purpose of this book to suggest that there was at least a century of prosodic innovation in Irish-English poetry before the revival” (24). Another purpose of the book is to present the poetry of nineteenth-century Ireland within a larger British imperial context. In addition to considering Irish poets, [End Page 277] Campbell examines the work of English writers such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins through an Irish lens. This offers a welcome corrective to much nineteenth-century literary criticism that has tended to divide texts down national lines, with critics of Irish literature focusing overwhelmingly on the Great Famine and emigration and critics of English Victorian literature sidelining Ireland. Campbell is also to be commended for a perspective that considers the entire archipelago of the British Isles. As he suggests, a “four nations approach” has tended to fall away in criticism of nineteenth-century Irish poetry, despite the continuing influence on Irish poets of works by James Macpherson and Robert Burns and the cross-fertilization between English and Irish Romantic and Victorian poetry. For Campbell, Irish poets writing in English explore and exploit the different meanings of “originality,” both as point of origin and as unique creative effort. The first five chapters of the book offer a roughly chronological overview of how the “synthetic form” of the Irish lyric poem in English combined Irish and English elements during a period when the Gaelic language and culture were suffering huge losses and when English print culture in Ireland was undergoing a rapid expansion (5). While chapter one serves as a general introduction to the argument of the book, chapter two, “The Ruptured Ear: Irish Accent, English Poetry,” establishes the argument’s own point of origin by tracing “the development of a sophisticated poetic form founded in writing for music” back to the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (30). Chapter three considers the work of Francis Sylvester Mahoney, who adopted the persona of a parish priest in County Cork, Father Andrew Prout, in order to satirize Moore in Fraser’s Magazine in 1834. Despite Mahoney’s dismissal of Moore as a cultural fabricator, Campbell perceives “links of style and content” between works by Mahoney, Moore, and contemporaries like John Philpot Curran who also experimented with forms of synthesis (60). In chapter four, Campbell examines the translations of the Protestant Unionist writer Samuel Ferguson within the context of a post-Catholic Emancipation but economically depressed Ireland. Chapter five focuses on the “repetitive originalities” of James Clarence Mangan, a mid-century poet who specialized in imitations, translations, admixtures, and reinventions and drew on a range of traditions from the Irish to the Persian (99). As Campbell suggests, Mangan achieves “a remaking of the past in an unrepeatable style” (99). Chapter six shifts perspective in order to consider...