The Parish and the World in Irish Poetry

Abstract

Starting with Patrick Kavanagh's distinction between the parish and the province as source and audience for poetry, the essay goes on to Seamus Heaney's essay 'The Sense of Place', to revisit his question of how particular to Irish writing these concerns are. It looks at Irish placenames for their familiarity or obscurity, and the extent to which they can be accounted for by origins in the Irish language or the historical experience of Ireland. It argues that the same questions of fidelity to origin or unfamiliarity arise in the famously successful twentieth-century Irish short story as in poetry, as well as in drama, concluding that this well-worked seam remains strikingly productive. Even if this is true for ‘the great society of mankind’ as Smith says, it remains tempting to say that there does seem to be a particular readiness in Irish poetry to introduce local, parochial reference, especially place names (and therefore places – though this is not exactly the same) into literary contexts. I am aware that in raising this matter again I am returning to a ground treated decisively by Seamus Heaney in his celebrated 1977 essay ‘The Sense of Place’, an essay that both gave a new prominence to an aspect of Irish poetry and made it a central point for discussion in the century since. In that essay, Heaney warned that ‘this nourishment which springs from knowing and belonging to a certain place and a certain mode of life is not just an Irish obsession, nor is the relationship between a literature and a locale with its common language a particularly Irish phenomenon. It is true, indeed, that we have talked much more about it in this country because of the peculiar fractures of our history, north and south, and because of the way that possession of the land and possession of different languages have rendered the question particularly urgent.’ And Heaney goes on to say that the same sense of place and its centrality in the text is true of Dante. Further afield there is the observation by the great Japanese poet Basho, that ‘Of all the many places mentioned in poetry, the exact location of most is not known for certain’ (said in his Narrow Road to a Far Province in 1689, probably the greatest work in celebration of the local in poetry). I should warn too that at a couple of points I will stray from poetry into other areas of Irish writing, the short story and the drama, but at places where I will claim that they manifest the same concern with judging between the parish and the wider world that Kavanagh does.