The Poetics of Print: The Private Press Tradition and Irish Poetry

Abstract

The Poetics of Print:The Private Press Tradition and Irish Poetry Conor Linnie (bio) In the archive of the Dun Emer and Cuala Press at the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin, there is a folder containing three large scrapbooks dated from 1903 to 1905.1 Written in purple and blue pastel across the worn hardback cover of the first book is the Gaelic script Leab.ar Dún Éimire. Inside, the opening page reframes the title with a profusion of pink sorrel in watercolor, the sinuous forms of the pale green stalks weaving a floral pattern of petals and buds. Translated into English as The Book of Emer's Fort, the three scrapbooks give a vivid insight into the daily life and workings of an arts and crafts cooperative: the Dun Emer Industries. The industries were established in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson, who was joined by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and Susan Mary "Lily" Yeats to manage the guild's three departments in weaving, embroidery, and printing. Gleeson named the industries after the famed figure in Irish mythology, Emer, who was renowned for her beauty but also for her wit and skill in needlework. The pages of each scrapbook bustle with creativity: handwritten poems and short stories are illustrated with sketches and paintings; photograph collages are pasted alongside design templates; advertisement mock-ups market a variety of crafted products from tapestries and tufted rugs to footstools. The scrapbooks were assembled by Elizabeth Yeats, who took charge of the guild's printing department: the Dun Emer Press. She outlined the ambition of the press in its first prospectus of 1903: "Though many books are printed in Ireland," Yeats begins, "book printing as an art has been little practiced here since the eighteenth century. The Dun Emer Press has been founded in the hope of reviving this beautiful craft."2 Specializing in the production of hand-printed [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Book of Dun Emer (1903). The Library of Trinity College Dublin Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The Book of Dun Emer (1903). The Library of Trinity College Dublin [End Page 40] limited-edition books made from native materials and circulated to an exclusive readership, Dun Emer Press inaugurated the Irish private press tradition in the twentieth century. This tradition is brought into focus by the digital exhibition The Poetics of Print: The Private Press Tradition and Irish Poetry, launched by the School of English and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.3 The Poetics of Print explores the interlinked histories of four private presses—Dun Emer, Cuala, Gayfield, and Dolmen—and their role in the development of modern Irish poetry from 1902 to 1969. The exhibition presents more than sixty unique images of archival and published material in a compelling digital narrative, drawing from the collections of the Library of Trinity College Dublin along with material from a diverse range of external institutional, commercial, and private sources. The Poetics of Print allies digital humanities (DH) research with the burgeoning field of Irish book history to showcase the influence and achievements of the Irish private press tradition. In its conception and design, the exhibition draws particularly from recent international digital projects associated with the critical expansion of modernist studies, which have elevated the role of DH to provide new archival and interpretive resources for our understanding of the material world of the modern book. The decisive turn of "the new modernist studies" toward a radically expanded materialist and historicist reading of the movement has reinvigorated scholarly interest in the print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Digital platforms and tools have in turn become central to the visualization, collation, and analysis of the myriad publishing contexts of modernism. Launched in 2017, The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) originated as an archive of materials generated by Leonard and Virginia Woolf 's Hogarth Press and is currently developing into a broader critical archive of early twentieth-century publishers.5 MAPP's growing digital repository now includes a critical biography of the Dun Emer Press accompanied by a selection of digitized artifacts from the Gilsenan Yeats...