Toward the Present of English and Irish Poetry

Abstract

In the recent history of the concept of culture within the English and Irish poetic exchange, the year 1916 must be the watershed. As stewards of culture in England, English poets mourn the death in nightmarish, mechanized battles such as the Somme and Ypres of individual poets, of the rural model of society, and of the nonindustrialized individual Englishman. Irish poets, on the other hand, turn away progressively from the violent nationalistic model of the 1916 Rising toward a distinct poetic language – syntax, diction, rhythm – and Irish myth and narrative. In the 1930s, however, neither English nor Irish poets seemed engaged with culture in the ways defined above. The left-leaning English poets were too preoccupied with international politics to write elegiac or nostalgic poetry; the Irish poets were too disenchanted by the Irish theocracy, which employed the Irish language as a means of punitive discrimination, to embrace the old culture. By the end of the 1960s, however, England’s humiliation from loss of Empire and from a yea-saying, complementary role in Vietnam had found expression in irony, restraint, and the anti-exuberance of the Movement. In Ireland, the return of the Troubles and a more meaningful recovery of the matter of Ireland, as in Kinsella’s translation of The Tain, turned the poets away from sectarian politics and toward their ‘gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition’ in Kinsella’s famous phrasing. By the end of the century, a majority, but not all, English poets seemed bound by their commitment to culture and, therefore, to persist after all in their attachment to the central experience of loss and its locus in the First World War, while Irish poets had found an authority in the Irish matter which seemed no longer at ‘a great remove’ from, but just under the surface of, their language and poetic expression, in which translation functions as a regular dimension of poetic creativity.