Modern Irish Poetry Research Articles

In Sunlight and in Shadow

In Sunlight and in Shadow Ben Howard (bio) Richard Tillinghast , Finding Ireland: A Poet's Exploration of Irish Literature and Culture. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 276 pages. $25; David Pierce , Light, Freedom, and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing. Yale University Press, 2005. 350 pages. $40. Irish history casts a long shadow on contemporary Irish culture. Amidst the bright prosperity of recent years that shadow has sometimes receded from view. And in youthful stylish Dublin, with its ubiquitous mobile phones and thriving Internet cafes, it often seems to have vanished. But, in two recent books on Irish history, literature, and culture, the shadow of the past is not only present but very much in the foreground. Richard Tillinghast's Finding Ireland is a gathering of memoirs, travelogues, reviews, "letters from Ireland," and familiar essays, in which the American poet explores Irish culture mainly through the works of modern Irish writers. A longtime sojourner in Ireland, Tillinghast now lives in retirement in County Tipperary. In the manner of an informed "blow-in" speaking to the less informed, he endeavors to cross what he calls the "oceans of sentimentality and prejudice [that] keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity." In tones ranging from the professorial to the celebrative to the elegiac, he writes with authority on subjects as diverse as the poetry of Derek Mahon, the fiction of William Trevor, the plays of Brian Friel, the felicities of Irish traditional music, and the surviving pleasures of rural Irish life, where "there is still a place by the fire and a cup of tea for the visitor in a farmhouse kitchen." Though his book has the look of a miscellany, its center of gravity may be found in the poet's intellectual passions, namely Anglo-Irish culture and modern Irish poetry. Jonathan Swift, the first major Anglo-Irish writer, described his people as "strangers in a strange land." And Yeats, two centuries later, spoke of "Anglo-Irish solitude." In "Who Were the Anglo-Irish?" Tillinghast embraces these descriptions, portraying a culture that enjoyed its heyday in the late eighteenth century and declined thereafter, becoming ever more isolated and insecure. Distrusted by the Irish and English alike, the Anglo-Irish lived apart in their [End Page 665] big country houses, watching the Protestant Ascendancy become what Julian Moynahan has called a "Descendancy," its power eroded by Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the Land Law Act of 1881. Yet, as Tillinghast notes, the "existential insecurity" and "heightened awareness" of the Anglo-Irish fostered a "golden age" of Anglo-Irish writing, which includes the novels of Maria Edgeworth; the diaries, letters, and fictions of Somerville and Ross; and the major works of the Irish Literary Revival. Concurrently the "hybrid" nature of Anglo-Irish culture nourished a distinctive literary tradition, beginning with Maria Edgeworth and continuing through the fiction of George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. "Year by year from 1800 on," writes Tilling-hast, "as their position became less and less tenable, the heart and pluck and humor of those whom Yeats called 'the indomitable Irishry' built from words a hybrid body of work that will stand with the world's best." Turning to specific authors, Tillinghast discusses their distinct contributions to the Anglo-Irish tradition. In "The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross" he rejects the common view that the coauthors romanticized the Ascendancy and portrayed sentimentalized stage-Irish characters. In Tillinghast's view they offered a "vigorous realism" that extended to their portrayal of servants' lives, and they were "deeply implicated" in the "ironies and tragedies of Irish history." In "The Asymmetrical George Moore" he defines Moore as a "nationalist" who differed "from others in the movement by his complete lack of idealism and patriotic sentiment." In "Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child" he opposes the view of Bowen as a class-ridden snob, seeing her instead as a writer who "took the world as she found it." And in his essay on William Trevor he identifies Trevor as a "Protestant-Irish and English" author whose interest lies not in politics, history, and class in...

Irish Neutrality: Louis MacNeice’s Poetic Politics at the Outset of “The Emergency”

This article builds upon previous scholarship attuned to Ireland’s complex position as a neutral state during the Second World War (“The Emergency”), and which points out Louis MacNeice’s hostility towards the Irish government’s official stance. It does so by looking at “The Closing Album” as a political lyric critiquing Irish neutrality’s isolation0 ist and damaging effects and shows how the poem – in the act of critiquing neutrality – asserts the modern poet’s position as an emotionally invested political spokesman. I argue that the nation’s political goals were irreconcilable with postcolonial artistic aims: Irish writers were intent on constructing an image of Irishness that was not dictated by British coloring and was exportable through the medium of their art, while the government aimed at becoming a self-sufficient, sovereign nation. This split between politician and artist during The Emergency ushers in a modern Irish poetry that is at once political and aesthetic.

Michael Longley’s Early Epitaphs

Michael Longley’s Early Epitaphs Renée Fox In a 1996 essay called “A Tongue at Play,” Michael Longley recalls the short poems of rhyming couplets included in his first volume of poetry, No Continuing City (1969), as “closed circuits”: “They had about them the air of ‘end of the road’ rather than ‘en route,’ and enjoyed already the brevity of epitaphs.”1 For a poet now renowned for his elegies, the poem as epitaph might not seem an odd place to begin, and indeed, some among Longley’s critics have used the two terms interchangeably.2 Yet, explicitly epitaphic verse—poems that thematically consider the epitaph or pay homage to writers of epitaphs, as well as these “epitaphic” couplets—has a dominant presence in Longley’s publications before 1970, a presence that gives specific poetic form to an increasingly prevalent concern among established Irish poets about the fractured and isolated state of contemporary Irish poetry. Longley’s epitaphic poems are experiments in the silencing and disconnecting capacities of language, expressing most fully Longley’s sense of his first collection as a self-reflexive preoccupation “with form . . . exploring its capacities to control and its tendencies to disintegrate” (TAP 112). What Longley describes as a purely formal concern with disintegration, however, resonates more expansively as a meditation on the imperfections and ambitions of Irish poetry as Ireland hovered on the brink of political crisis. Longley’s early interest in the epitaph emerged as a response to the aesthetic pressures of Irish national discord, and in particular to the ways in which poetry should—or should not—seek to write across and erase the violence of such fundamental cultural rifts. A theory of the epitaph emerges from Longley’s own analyses and [End Page 125] revisions of his epitaphic poetry, one that both parallels changing ideas about the politics of Irish poetry and elaborates in complex formal terms a political agenda that engages with, but ultimately rejects, lingual discontinuity as the precondition for writing modern Irish poetry. The formal ambiguities of several of Longley’s epitaphic couplet poems express Longley’s authentic, if soon abandoned, desire to find poetic form for the static and disconnected sensibility that constitutes one vision of Irish poetic identity. Longley’s early couplets, those poems with the “brevity of epitaphs,” were first printed by Phoenix Pamphlet Poet Press in 1968 as a separate collection called Secret Marriages: Nine Short Poems, and later included in No Continuing City (1969).3 His comments about the couplets in “A Tongue at Play” are lifted almost verbatim from his introduction to Secret Marriages, which—as the only analytical introduction Longley has written to one of his own collections—suggests that Longley registered the difference of these poems as a lack: the act of writing an introduction indicates he perceived a demand for supplementation and a failure in the poems’ independent efforts at communication. The retrospective “A Tongue at Play” remembers all of No Continuing City as a preoccupation with formal disintegration.4 The introduction to Secret Marriages sees this smaller collection as the more immediate culmination of the same preoccupation: the short, rhymed couplets of most of its poems are “tiny units, reduced stanzas, circuits which are almost closed, relying more on their own interrelationships than would the usual cursive and open-ended kind.” Although shifts in the order of phrasing between earlier introduction and later essay turn our attention from the couplet poems in particular to their impact on Longley’s later career, both link the “brevity of epitaphs” to the inevitability of a subsequent “blank page and silence”; in the introduction, the silence is a melancholic “dead silence.” Longley’s introduction to Secret Marriages attempts to speak over that silence, but it inscribes an intrinsic relationship between morbidity and form in the language it uses to fill the gaps left by [End Page 126] these poems. The couplets, he tells us, are the result of “murderous deletion,” gestures of “dead silence,” marked by “brevity,” about “extremes of experience or remote notions,” and conveying to Longley “definite warnings about [his] future.”5 In describing the relationship between silence, brevity, and the “preoccupation with form” as epitaphic, Longley hints at a...

Postnational Ireland

Postnational Ireland Robert Archambeau (bio) Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. 306 pp. $95.00. Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 260 pp. $81.00; $24.99 paper. The nation of Ireland has been, in large measure, the creation of its writers, of a thousand real-life Stephen Dedaluses, each toiling away in the smithy of his or her soul, hard at work on the uncreated conscience of the race. But if the nation of Ireland was created by writers, it's also true that our idea of the Irish writer—especially the poet—has been the product of Irish nationalism. That is, the received idea of the Irish poet is that of a public figure, speaking to a national audience on questions of nationhood—someone altogether different from the self-obsessed garret dweller we imagine when we think of poets in Paris or New York. The idea of the Irish poet as nationalist and public figure dates back into the nineteenth century and has been a powerful force, helping poets find audiences and self-definition, and making great themes available to the aspiring talent. It has also provided the interpretive framework for much of the finest scholarship on Irish writing: one need look no further than the title of Declan Kiberd's monumental 1997 study Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation to get a sense of the way Irish writing has been perceived by its leading scholars. But the idea of the Irish writer as national figure seems to be an idea whose time is running out. [End Page 610] Irish writers have been revising and interrogating their role as privileged seers of the national essence for some time. In his 1980 play Translations, for example, Brian Friel cast doubt on the idea of an essential Celtic identity, envisioning Ireland as a palimpsest of different cultural identities, layered over one another in an archaeology of changing place names. Seamus Deane undertook a similar project when he edited the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, a four-thousand-page representation of the Irish literary canon as a multicultural, polyglot tradition, including works in monkish Latin and Norman French as well as in Irish and English. Critical studies have appeared in the wake of this reappraisal, notably David Lloyd's Ireland after History (1999), which attempts to reframe the question of Irish literature from the perspective of Frankfurt school critical theory. Both Elmer Kennedy-Andrews's Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008 and Justin Quinn's Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000 continue this reappraisal. The two works are different in scale and focus: Kennedy-Andrews offers close to three hundred pages on four decades of writing from the north of Ireland, while Quinn, whose study is a svelte two hundred pages, must cover two centuries of writing from the whole island—a task made all the more difficult by a further broadening of scope to include a chapter on the translation of poetry in Ireland. But both set out with similar goals: to demonstrate that the old, national paradigm has run its course, and to begin exploring where Irish poetry has gone after the passage of the old idea of the poet's role. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, as a professor of English at the University of Ulster's Academy for Irish Cultural Heritage, is well-positioned to take on the matter of the poetry of the north of Ireland. A prolific scholar, he has written books on the fiction of Northern Ireland, the drama of Brian Friel, and the poetry of Seamus Heaney and edited more than a half-dozen studies of Irish and American literature. His present study tells a local version of an important, if familiar, story: the passage from modernism, with its nostalgia for a lost cultural wholeness, to postmodernism, with its celebration of hybridity and fragmentation. Here, an older generation of Northern Irish poets embodies the modernist assumptions and, often via such modernist methods as mythopoesis, seeks to recover a lost sense of...

Beyond A Global Village: Modern Irish Poetry*

Beyond A Global Village: Modern Irish Poetry*

'A brief glow in the dark': Samuel Beckett's Presence in Modern Irish Poetry

One definition of 'Irish' that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett's. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: 'Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?'. To which Beckett replied: 'Au contraire'. (Seamus Heaney) (1) In 1982, the same year he harnessed Samuel Beckett's quip to define a notion of Irishness, Seamus Heaney protested at his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by pointing out that his passport was green. It is somewhat surprising that Heaney would invoke Beckett in a discussion of Irish national identity, as the latter's attachment to the national colour--and much else--was rather problematic. A week after the 1931 publication of Beckett's first book, Proust, in Chatto & Windus's 'Dolphin' series, the editor Charles Prentice wrote to Beckett apologizing for the fact that the front cover was brown rather than green: 'Clearly I have been trying to steal you from Ireland.' (2) Beckett's answer, that he had 'not noticed whether the Dolphin was green or brown', represents an early instance of what would become a lifelong ambivalence towards his native country. (3) This studied indifference is evident again in 1938, when Beckett describes Routledge's 'effort to make an Irishman of me' in the blurb to his novel Murphy as 'touching'. (4) Such efforts largely disappeared, however, following his permanent departure from the 'land of my unsuccessful abortion' for France, where 'the little operation is cheap, safe, legal + popular', not to mention his adoption of French as his creative medium. (5) Resurfacing only briefly during the 1956 Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett remained largely outside further developments in Irish cultural events until the early 1970s. (6) The timing of this (re)integration into collective cultural consciousness naturally owes much to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, but is surely also related to the eruption of the Troubles in that same year. In a climate where questions of identity, place, and displacement, and the role of the artist within society were highly charged, many Irish poets looked to Beckett's experiences when wondering, as Paul Muldoon does in '7, Middagh Street', 'Which side was I on? | Not one, or both, or none.' (7) This development is somewhat like that observable in post-war Germany, where Adorno's essay 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen' made Beckett central to socio-cultural and philosophical debates over the role, and possibility, of art in a society irredeemably altered by the Holocaust. (8) Yet in contrast to the efforts of German sociologists and philosophers to set Beckett into a more abstract and universal context, in Ireland, creative writers have entered into a more textual dialogue with Beckett's work, in an effort to investigate their own roles in the Irish community. In this undertaking, they have concentrated on Beckett's writings as creative texts, not merely as philosophical texts, whereby their religious and political aspects as well as largely ignored parts of his oeuvre have been explored. Thus the neglected field of Beckett's poetry has been discussed by Irish poets, amongst others Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and David Wheatley, often in scholarly Beckett journals. This essay will trace and explore the presence of Beckett in modern Irish poetry, particularly in that of Derek Mahon. Ruptures The Irish revival of critical interest in Beckett's work in the 1970s started a process of reappropriation, leading, for example, to John Montague's solicitation of Beckett (a few months before his death in 1989) for a contribution to The Great Book of Ireland compiled by 'Poetry Ireland'. (9) The first, most important event in the process of reintroducing Beckett into Irish cultural discussions after the Second World War was the republication of his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' in the fourth number of The Lace Curtain in 1971 by the poets Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. …

Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION: IRELAND'S ALHAMBRA 1. Sean O Riordain: Between Corkery and Joycery 2. Cathal O Searcaigh: Zig-zagging All Over Creation 3. Mairtin O Direain: Departures You Cannot Go Back On 4. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill: Journeying to the Shrine CONCLUSION: A POLISH PERSPECTIVE APPENDIX: TRANSLATIONS INDEX

Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology

This is a collection of over 250 poems which represent the best Irish poetry since Yeats. Short biographical/critical essays on each poet and an introduction makes this a useful companion for anyone wanting to experience contemporary Irish poetry.

Irish Literature and Culture ed. by Michael Kenneally

on by feminist theorists in other contexts. But she is alert to the ways in which the text at times almost celebrates (albeit grudgingly) women’s witty and resourceful evasions of a patriarchal system that could have been suffocating. This book is a welcome addition to Grosart’s 1884 edition and F.P. Wil­ son’s 1929 edition, both out of date and neither very user-friendly to non­ specialists. Its modern spelling and its “nonspecialist” glosses and notes will make it accessible to students; any chance to enrich the classroom with Renaissance texts outside the usual Shakespeare/Spenser/Marlowe/Jonson range is always cause for rejoicing. lin d a w o o d b r id g e / University of Alberta Michael Kenneally, ed., Irish Literature and Culture. Irish Literary Studies 35 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992). x, 196. Illustrated. Irish Literature and Culture is a collection of eleven essays, nine of which were presented at the 1988 conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, held at Marianopolis College, Montreal. The remaining two papers, one by Andrew Carpenter tracing the transformation of attitudes toward Irish musical and literary culture in eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish litera­ ture from rejection to acceptance, and the other by Mary Helen Thuente demonstrating the literary, cultural and political importance of The United Irishman, were solicited for this volume. These two essays, along with Terry Eagleton’s study of the aesthetics and politics of Edmund Burke, and Patrick Rafroidi’s assessment of the complex social and aesthetic impact of the work of Thomas Moore, provide a rich literary/historical background for the other seven essays whose focus is on more contemporary aspects of Irish literature and culture. Three of these examine the relationship between modern Irish literature and the sister arts. In the first, “No More Poems About Paintings?,” Edna Longley explores the influence of Pre-Raphaelite art on modern Irish poetry from Yeats to Paul Muldoon. In the second, “Music and Ritual in Ulysses,” Zack Bowen argues that Joyce’s treatment of music and song is complex and ironic. For most of the characters in Ulysses, according to Bowen, music is the means by which they create and heighten profane rituals. Bowen, however, views Bloom differently. Using music and song, Bowen sees Bloom ironically debunking the phony rituals to which the other characters are devoted. In the third, “Stage Design As A Form of Dramatic Criticism,” Richard Cave carefully compares the stage designs of different productions of plays by Wilde, Yeats, and O’Casey and convincingly demonstrates that 102 stage design at its best not only involves a high degree of dramatic criticism and appraisal, but is also, despite its collaborative nature, an art form in itself that can significantly enhance the dramatic effectiveness of a play. The final four essays in the collection discuss more generally the cultural contexts of Irish drama, cinema, and politics. Wolfgang Zach’s “Criticism, Theatre and Politics: Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City and its Early Re­ ception,” describes the highly polemical nature of the Irish, English, Amer­ ican, and German responses to the first productions of Friel’s The Freedom of the City in Dublin, London, New York, and Wiesbaden. He concludes that both the immediacy and the engagement typical of such reviews in­ variably tell us at least as much about the aesthetic views, the theatrical expectations, and the political opinions of the reviewers and the audiences as the play does. One of the more discouraging implications of this essay, particularly when it is read in conjunction with Richard Cave’s analysis of stage design, is that theatrical verisimilitude remains a fiercely held expec­ tation and “value” by a wide cross section of post-Brechtian reviewers and audiences both in Europe and North America, and that dramatic experi­ mentation is still not well understood or welcome. Such a state of dramatic affairs may well have a negative impact on the production and reception of the non-realistic dramatic works of Yeats and O’Casey as well as some of Friel. Declan Kiberd’s “Fathers and Sons: Irish-Style” introduces the cultural cliché that Irish domestic relationships are characterized by an over-intense relationship...

"We Were Never on the Scene of the Crime": Eavan Boland's Repossession of History

From Yeats and the Celtic Revival onward, Irish poets have recorded, shaped, and criticized their nation's emerging independent identity. In the process, of course, they also attempted to reforge links to the past by creating for Ireland a literary incorporating the myths, folklore, and symbols of a long-suppressed Gaelic heritage. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the literary wished into existence by Yeats has been expanded, modified, complicated, and virtually completed: it has become, so the argument goes, a given in Irish literature, a dead issue. Thus in Modern Irish Poetry, Robert Garratt assumes a change among a younger generation of writers in their attitude toward tradition (5). For today's poets, Garratt argues, the need to create and establish a in literature no longer appears foremost in their thoughts (5); contemporary poets no longer feel compelled to write the definitions and apologetics that so obsessed their poetic forefathers. Although Garratt does not use the word, forefathers is by implication a key concept in his formulation; the Garratt traces (from Yeats to Heaney) is exclusively male. For women, who until recently have appeared only as subjects and objects of poems, not as their authors, the matter of carries considerably more urgency than it does for their male counterparts. Indeed, just as the early Revivalists

Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney

Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney

Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney. Robert F. Garratt

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsModern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney. Robert F. Garratt Calvin BedientCalvin Bedient Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 86, Number 2Nov., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391698 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney. By ROBERT F. GARRATT. Pp. xii+322. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986. £19.95 net. BERNARD O'DONOGHUE BERNARD O'DONOGHUE Magdalen CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIX, Issue 154, May 1988, Pages 320–321, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIX.154.320 Published: 01 May 1988

Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney

Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney

The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry

The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry