Recent Irish Poetry Research Articles

Institutions and Shadows: Jonathan Swift, Enlightenment and Recent Irish Poetry

This article traces Jonathan Swift’s legacy in the work of three modern Irish poets: Jessica Traynor, Rita Ann Higgins and Derek Mahon. I use two motifs to explore this inheritance: institutions and shadows. Using the work of Genevieve Lloyd, I argue that meaningful engagement with Enlightenment’s legacy must recognise its moral ambiguity and emotional complexity through the metaphor of shadow. Institutions, whether in the case of St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin (Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital, founded by Swift), the residential institutions of the twentieth century or the modern apparatus of Direct Provision, embody a continuing legacy of suffering, control and containment. Imagination and empathy are the difficult but necessary means through which these legacies must be acknowledged and confronted.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath by James McNaughton, Beckett’s Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

<i>Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath</i> by James McNaughton, <i>Beckett’s Political Imagination</i> by Emilie Morin

The Case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting

The Case for Irish Modernism:Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting Karl O'Hanlon (bio) In September 1935, the League of Nations Assembly was convened to discuss the Abyssinia crisis, with Italy's belligerence making war seem increasingly likely. On September 3, the Irish delegation to the League departed from Dun Laoghaire en route to Geneva, the city where, as Susan Pedersen writes, "internationalism was enacted, institutionalised, and performed," with "a genuinely transnational officialdom" functioning as "its beating heart."1 The delegation was headed by Éamon de Valera, President of the Executive Council and Minister for the Department for External Affairs. The delegation had Cabinet backing for de Valera's support for a League-mediated solution.2 The secretary to the delegation was the poet and diplomatic cadet, Denis Devlin (fig. 1). Devlin was among the "youngest generation" of Irish poets, modernists such as Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, in whom a year earlier Samuel Beckett located "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland" in his August 1934 essay in The Bookman "Recent Irish Poetry," a blistering attack on the "antiquarians" in the line of the Irish Revival.3 On October 4, two days after Italy invaded Ethiopia, de Valera addressed the nation a day later than scheduled on Radio Athlone (known as 2RN prior to 1933), in which he conceded that all hopes for a League-sponsored resolution to the crisis were now gone. Several hours earlier on the same station, Devlin, de Valera's most junior diplomat in the delegation, delivered a talk on Irish poetry, "A Reply to F. R. Higgins," in which he waded into debates surrounding modernism and revivalism in response to an earlier series of radio talks by Higgins, an associate of [End Page 157] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Denis Devlin (center) and other Irish diplomats seated with Èamon de Valera, Geneva, mid-1930s. Dorothy Macardle, de Valera papers, UCDA P150/2818, c. 1935. W. B. Yeats and one of the leading proponents of an anti-modernist, postrevivalist "racial consciousness" in anglophone Irish poetry. De Valera's Abyssinia crisis address and Devlin's defense of modernist poetry airing in the same evening program on Radio Athlone emphasizes the cross-fade complexity of Irish modernism's radiophonic mediation, as well as modernism's inextricable situation within national and transnational political contexts. As this article explores, Devlin's involvement in international broadcasting against the backdrop of the September 1935 session of the League has a curious, significant place in the history of Irish modernism.4 While the centrality to modernism of what Timothy Campbell calls "the radio imaginary" has been firmly established thanks to pioneering scholarship, Irish modernism's broadcasting context, with notable exceptions, has not been extensively investigated, studies tending in the main to focus on major figures such as Yeats, and the BBC rather than Irish radio.5 This article recovers Radio Athlone's role in the 1930s international mediascape as a fertile site for debates about Irish revivalism versus modernism, debates which also had echoes in the intrigue surrounding the legitimacy of the station's state-mandated role as a transmitter of a specifically "Irish-Ireland" collective consciousness.6 By the mid-1930s, Radio Athlone played a crucial role in relaying Irish national identity to international listeners, an identity which was the discursive subject of many of its broadcasts. This article reconstructs the "radio imaginary" of these debates in the absence of surviving recordings, weaving the conflicted dynamics of Irish modernism as they emerge in all their density. By reconstructing Irish modernism's archival traces, this article resituates competing statements on Irish poetry by modernists and their opponents within the full context of their delivery. [End Page 158] The case for Irish modernism as made by one of its most intriguing voices, the poet Denis Devlin, clarifies the case for the categorical and critical value of Irish modernism (and modernism tout court) in contemporary scholarship, which has recently been questioned. The most striking intervention in this regard is made by Edna Longley in Yeats and Modern Poetry (2013), in which the rap sheet against modernism includes the assertion that its post-hoc...

Samuel Beckett's Disruptive Translations of ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’

Self-translators are often granted freedoms in their translations unimaginable for standard translators. Whereas a standard translation usually prizes sameness (or invisibility as Lawrence Venuti argues), the self-translator may instead highlight difference or disruption. A burgeoning subfield of criticism has outlined the ways in which one of the most famous of these self-translators, Samuel Beckett, makes use of his role as translator to further the reach of his work beyond the constraints of a monolingual text. Whereas most of this criticism has taken aim at Beckett's prose and theater, this essay asks what can be gleaned about Beckett's translation style from his early poetry. Here I focus on Beckett's four-line, untitled poem which begins ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’ (‘I would like my love to die’). Originally published in 1948 in the bilingual journal Transition Forty-eight, this poem would go on to be edited, translated, reedited, and retranslated over the course of nearly thirty years. The various iterations and translations of the poem are not always harmonious and instead force the reader to consider more deeply the themes of the poem and to question the role of translation. I read the poem in light of Beckett's 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ as well as consider it in response to W.B. Yeats' 1899 poem ‘He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead’. By situating the poem in this context, I argue that this poem is a manifestation of Beckett's argument in the essay that poetry must take into account the division between poet and object. His short poem demonstrates this division as well as that between original and translation and thus allows us a window onto his translation project at large. Considering Beckett's poetic translation permits us to consider how a complementarity of intention towards language does not necessarily entail complementary translations.

Antiquarianism, archaeology, and aporetic immanence in Beckett’s prose

Beckett derides those antiquarians unaware of “the rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object in his 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry”. However, Beckett will come to incorporate into the late prose specific terminology used by archaeologist, including those involved in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, who were contemporaries of the same antiquarians he scorns so contemptuously in his early career. This paper traces and examines the Irish antiquarian elements in relation to megalithic archaeology in Beckett’s prose. The elements of antiquarian archaeology in Beckett function to present the existence of those populating the work as mediated by the aporia between ancient and modern epochs. Allusions to antiquarian and archeological terminology contribute to the issues of representation in Beckett’s work. Instances where historical material resides in Beckett’s prose will be analysed through the logic of reverberation. Based on the physics of sound, it will be argues that the fragments of historical material act like artefacts which do not represent historical discourse but reverberate within an aporia of chronological time.

Sinéad Mooney A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and TranslationA Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation. Sinéad Mooney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. viii+278.

<i>Sinéad Mooney</i> A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation<i>A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation</i>. Sinéad Mooney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. viii+278.

An Agon with the Twilighters: Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of the Aesthetic

Beckett was unusually forthcoming in his professions of enthusiasm for the work of Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer and Beckett were cognate minds on issues such as the ubiquitous miseries of existence, their shared convictions regarding aesthetic questions is no less demonstrable. This essay examines Beckett's critical reflections on the work of Irish artists in relation to core precepts of Schopenhauer's philosophy. It seeks to show how the hermeneutical strategies employed by Beckett in texts such as ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934), ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’ (1938), and ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’ (1945) are of a piece with Schopenhauer's assertions regarding the phenomenological processes of artistic composition and appreciation. In revealing the conceptual underpinnings of Beckett's evaluative criteria and their correlations with central principles of Schopenhauer's thought, this reading aims to enhance our understanding of Beckett's commitment to views of the irreducibility of the aesthetic.

Wallace Stevens, in America, Thinks of Himself as Tom MacGreevy

Wallace Stevens, in America, Thinks of Himself as Tom MacGreevy William Fogarty These are the ashes of fiery weather,Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,Like beautiful and abandoned refugees. The whole habit of the mind is changed by them —Wallace Stevens, "Our Stars Come from Ireland" I For many years, the Irish poet Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967) has been a shadowy presence in the appendices and footnotes of modernist masters from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Wallace Stevens. But MacGreevy's continuing omission from major anthologies, such as Wes Davis' 2010 An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, is increasingly troubling in light of several recent publications that suggest MacGreevy's significance for both the relationships he fostered and his intrinsic merits as a poet.1 The most compelling evidence for this reevaluation derives from the 2009 landmark publication of the first of four planned volumes of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, which has revealed that MacGreevy was the key figure in Beckett's early correspondence: most of Beckett's letters in that volume are addressed to him. In her review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Marjorie Perloff shows how the correspondence helps to offer a fresh portrait of the elusive Beckett: For here is the most reticent of twentieth-century writers—one who refused to explain his plays and fictions, wrote almost no formal literary criticism, and refused to attend his own Nobel Prize ceremony—revealing himself in letter after letter as warm, playful, unfailingly polite even at his most vituperative and scatological, irreverent but never cynical, and, above all, a [End Page 56] brilliant stylist whose learning is without the slightest pretension or preciosity. Perloff surmises, "we might not know this new Beckett had he not written so many letters to his close Irish friend Tom McGreevy" (McGreevy changed his name to MacGreevy in the 1930s; Perloff and other critics often revert to the earlier spelling). Reviewing the same collection for the London Review of Books, the novelist Colm Tóibín emphasizes the closeness between the two men: "In the years between Beckett's arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and McGreevy taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, the years in which the letters in this volume were written, McGreevy was Beckett's confidant and his closest friend" (16). Tóibín further notes that the relationship exceeded mere affection and was rooted in an intellectual and aesthetic sharing: "In his interest in art, and his efforts to write a poetry filled with radiant or fragmented statement, the language unadorned, personal, sometimes obscure and strangely beautiful, [Beckett] found a soulmate in Thomas McGreevy" (16). Tóibín offers a few lines of verse from each poet as an example of how MacGreevy arguably reverberated in Beckett. Here is how MacGreevy's poem "Exile" began: I knew if you had died that I should grieveYet I found my heart wishing you were dead. (qtd. in Tóibín 16) These lines have their echo in an untitled poem by Beckett, written first in French: I would like my love to dieand the rain to be falling on the graveyardand on me walking the streetsmourning the first and last to love me. (qtd. in Tóibín 16) In a 1934 essay on "Recent Irish Poetry," Beckett claimed, in what has come to be regarded by scholars as the apotheosis of MacGreevy's critical assessment, that by not excluding "self-perception . . . nor postulat[ing] the object as inaccessible," MacGreevy made "probably the most important contribution to post-War Irish poetry" (Disjecta 74). We should, however, be sufficiently skeptical of this assessment. At least one critic has argued that Beckett's seemingly unequivocal praise for his friend's poetry was really an obfuscation of a less than benevolent opinion. From Seán Kennedy's point of view, we had better understand that "Beckett and MacGreevy differ quite sharply in their views on poetry, that these views reflect tensions arising from their different attitudes to religious faith, and that Beckett's published responses to...

The Reception of W. B. Yeats in Europe by Klaus Peter Jochum

1128 Reviews incarnation sets out the concepts which will be deftly applied in the following chapters. The mid-section study of epiphanies and interiormonologue as mani festations ofmeaning and of being in both writers is themost convincing and enlightening. O'Sullivan cogently states that 'Joyceprivileges the interhuman event, not by naturalistically detailing tics of conversation, but, by plumbing the depths of interiority for a shared "corporeity within"' (p. 67). As in Pierce, Modernist writing is interpreted in terms of a new covenant, of a desire tomake writing a "form of life'" (p. 56).What Beckett saw in Joyceand in Proust is developed into a coherent reinterpretation of incarnation which sheds light on writing's capacity to reveal the 'thing itself, the 'immediate mediation that is the essential matter of human beings' (Agamben, quoted inO'Sullivan, p. 56). The implications of the ideas propounded in this book will no doubt trigger further investigations, but in themselves theyprovide a verywelcome philosophical reading of Proust, Joyce,and Modernism. Magdalene College, Cambridge Hugues Azerad The Reception ofW. B. Yeats inEurope. Ed. by Klaus Peter Jochum. London: Continuum. 2006. xxxvi+359 pp. ?160. ISBN 978-0-8264-5963-3. In his 1934 survey 'Recent Irish Poetry' Beckett places W. B. Yeats at thehead of the Celtic antiquarians' resisting European Modernism. While this judgment neglects to consider Yeats's latervolumes ofwriting, itreflects awidely held belief thatYeats preferred to engage with traditional Irish culture rather than European modernity. As The Reception ofW. B. Yeats (part of theAthlone Critical Traditions' series of 'The Reception of British and IrishAuthors inEurope') reveals, this is an issue that fundamentally influenced, at times even determined, the reception ofYeats's work by reviewers, translators, and academics in Europe. IfYeats was only marginally (although at times crucially) influenced by European culture, then in turnhis work was not afforded the same kind of reception given towriters such as Joyceor Beckett. The fourteen essays of this volume, scrupulously edited by Klaus Peter Jochum, chart thehistorical reception ofYeats's work by analysing theway it was transmitted and received in reviews, translations, performances, and scholarly studies across Europe. As with previous volumes in the series, the essays collected here draw attention to a general tension between documentary and interpretative approaches within reception studies. Most of the contributions in The Reception ofW. B. Yeats fall into the former category. However, the attempt to cover all aspects of Yeats's reception comprehensively within specific territories effectivelydrowns out any cri tical engagement with the specific and general problems underlying the dynamics of cultural exchange?or perhaps inYeats's case, the lack thereof. While Jochum's introduction does well to outline the cultural, political, and tex tual difficulties posed byYeats's work, few contributors offera sustained analysis of the relative absence of amore generous reception ofhis oeuvre (especially as regards performances of his plays). It isperhaps unsurprising that essays concentrating on specific aspects of the reception history yield more interesting discussions, for the MLR, 104.4, 2009 1129 simple reason that theyhave room to address thequestion ofwhy rather than simply stating thewho, where, and when. Thus Jacqueline Hurtley has interesting things to say about theway inwhich Catalan, Galician, and Basque communities appropri ated Cathleen niHoulihan in translations and performances between 1920 and 1936, thus connecting Yeats's own national ideals to an aspired cultural independence within these Iberian regions. Similarly, Jochum's analysis of theGerman reception is illuminating, in that he argues that the lack of overall engagement with Yeats's work was partly due to theuneven quality of translations byHerbert E. Herlitschka, who acquired the exclusive German translation rights as early as 1928 and retained them until the late 1960s. Carle Bonafous-Murat perceptively examines themerits and demerits ofvarious French translators (especially Yves Bonnefoy), and shrewdly remarks thatYeats's reception was subject to the changing attitudes toMallarme. Roger Keys astutely outlines theway early Russian symbolists engaged with Yeats. But on thewhole this reader lamented the absence of any reception theories (even ifonly Jauss's concept of Erwartungshorizonte, the 'horizons of expectation' thatgovern theway inwhich texts are culturally appropriated) within these essays, as the paucity of reception (forwhatever reason) is just as telling as a more suc cessful reception when analysing theway...

"Infernal streams" – beckett's rivers

This paper examines the function and meaning of rivers, and other bodies of water, in Beckett's texts of the 1930s, concentrating in particular on . The specific use of rivers and by extension bridges as textual and structural devices in underlines the narrative's oscillations between movement and stasis, and prefigures Beckett's development of an aesthetic focusing on what the essay "Recent Irish Poetry" calls the "space that intervenes."

KICKING AGAINST THE THERMOLATERS: Beckett's "Recent Irish Poetry"

"Recent Irish Poetry" (1934), while well-known to Beckett critics, has most frequently been read only in terms of a straightforward binarism between "antiquarian" Celtic twilighter and modernist "other." This essay attempts to move beyond the familiar reading by examining the essay's dialogue with other contributors to the "Irish Number" of in which it originally appeared, to survey readings of the text as Irish modernist manifesto, and to treat it as a "precipitate in prose."

UNNAMING THE SUBJECT: Samuel Beckett and Colonial Alterity

Since David Lloyd's pioneering studies some fifteen years ago, the postcolonial dimension of Beckett's work has received little sustained attention in critical scholarship. This essay contributes to a further evaluation of Beckett's engagement with postcoloniality by examining the ways in which Beckett's critique of the object emerges from a broader critique of postcolonial nationalism. Its discussion focuses particularly on "Recent Irish Poetry" and the "German Letter" as a means of illustrating the ways in which Beckett's impatience with the Irish Literary Revival and its insistence on nationalist representation coincides with the more far-reaching assault on language sketched for Kaun. Proceeding then to , the essay considers how the novel's relentless critique of subject and anti-subject draws much of its energy from Beckett's searching analysis of postcolonial representation.

'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. …