Medievalism and Writing Modern Poetry

Abstract

Bernard O'Donoghue argues that his choice of specialising in the medieval parts of an English degree may have been unconsciously dictated by the language and culture of an Irish Catholic upbringing and school education. At Umeraboy National School in North Cork he learned the writing and reading of English and Irish simultaneously, giving no particular privilege to the language spoken at home, English. A possible consequence of this was an everyday acceptance of unfamiliar vocabulary, which was reinforced by daily encounters with the Latin-derived language of prayer: words like ‘implored’, ‘intercession’, ‘advocate’, ‘clement’. When he did graduate work in Medieval English, he found that the cultural issues for writers like Chaucer and Dante and the Old English poets were the stock in trade of his childhood, and that the script used by the Anglo-Saxon scribes were the same as the cló gaelach of the National School of his time. Also, while operating in an imperfectly understood vocabulary might be expected to be a disadvantage in grasping the precise senses of words, the compulsion of ‘the half-stated’ or half understood was not out of place in poetry. So he ended up as a medievalist who tried to write poetry.