The Afterlives of the Irish Literary Revival
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The Afterlives of the Irish Literary Revival Author: Dathalinn Mary O'Dea Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104356 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2014 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of English THE AFTERLIVES OF THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL a dissertation by DATHALINN M. O’DEA submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2014 © copyright by DATHALINN M. O’DEA 2014 Abstract THE AFTERLIVES OF THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL Director: Dr. Marjorie Howes, Boston College Readers: Dr. Paige Reynolds, College of the Holy Cross and Dr. Christopher Wilson, Boston College This study examines how Irish and American writing from the early twentieth century demonstrates a continued engagement with the formal, thematic and cultural imperatives of the Irish Literary Revival. It brings together writers and intellectuals from across Ireland and the United States – including James Joyce, George William Russell (Æ), Alice Milligan, Lewis Purcell, Lady Gregory, the Fugitive-Agrarian poets, W. B. Yeats, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Ezra Pound – whose work registers the movement’s impact via imitation, homage, adaptation, appropriation, repudiation or some combination of these practices. Individual chapters read Irish and American writing from the period in the little magazines and literary journals where it first appeared, using these publications to give a material form to the larger, cross-national web of ideas and readers that linked distant regions. Until recently, scholars have been disinclined to interpret the Revival in a transnational framework, preferring instead to emphasize the cultural work its literature and drama accomplished on behalf of nationalist politics in Ireland. Yet, as this study demonstrates, the movement was imbricated in a process of cultural exchange extending well beyond Ireland’s borders, resulting in a variety of revivalist afterlives that testify to the movement’s extra-national influence. I use the term “afterlife” to describe the versions of revivalism produced when the movement’s original impulses and strategies were, in W. H. Auden’s words, “modified in the guts of the living,” in some cases long after the peak of revivalist activity was supposed to have passed. The word confers a spectral quality to the movement, describing the Revival’s re-emergence in new locations and at later dates. Writers in both countries engaged with revivalism, re-animating many of the debates over questions of identity, belonging and cultural authenticity that had originally motivated the movement’s leaders. In doing so, such writers granted the Revival a vital afterlife, demonstrating the relevance of these debates in other national and historical contexts. The relationship this dynamic describes is one of both cross-cultural affiliation, in which intellectuals and writers are actively inspired by the example of the Irish Revival, and one of reverberation – a kind of textual haunting, where the defining features of revivalism echo in later works. The movement survived, in other words, and multiplied, finding new life in Irish and American modernists’ experiments with tradition. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Acknowledgements i Introduction: Reviving the Revival 1 Chapter 1: James Joyce in the Pigs’ Paper: Dubliners, the Co-operative Movement and Alternative Communities 39 Chapter 2: “Ulster has its own way of things”: Northern Regionalism in The Shan Van Vocht (1896-99) and Lewis Purcell’s The Enthusiast 88 Chapter 3: Yeats in the States: Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound and the Revivalist Logic of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912-22) 144 Chapter 4: “the same thing in different ways happening”: Nashville’s Fugitive Poets and the Idea of Ireland 202 Acknowledgements: The rewards of finishing a dissertation are many, but one of the sweetest is having the occasion to publicly thank the communities of family, friends, teachers and colleagues who have helped along the way. First, I thank my dissertation committee, Marjorie Howes, Paige Reynolds and Christopher Wilson. As both my advisor and the director of my dissertation, Marjorie Howes oversaw this project from start to finish, offering incisive feedback at many pivotal points, guiding me to useful sources, and helping me to think through the tough spots along the way. Her skill as a scholar and a teacher is matched by her kindness. I thank Paige Reynolds for her keen readings of my (many) drafts, her perceptive feedback, her reassuring phone calls and e-mails (particularly towards the end), and her enthusiasm for the project and the process. I thank her, too, for agreeing to serve on the committee, and for making more than a few trips from Providence to Boston for meetings. I am also grateful for Christopher Wilson’s many contributions to the study. Chris welcomed me into the graduate program at Boston College, guided me through the challenges of coursework and teaching and writing my first article, and made himself available for many office meetings and e-mails exchanges over the years. His feedback was always thorough and generous – I am still rewarded by his insight when I revisit my notes from our conversations, and I thank him for pushing me to become a better thinker and writer. What a gift to have had these three as teachers, mentors and advocates, and to count them as friends, too. I would also like to thank those in the Boston College community whose support and friendship sustained me and helped to make this work possible: Dr. James M. Smith, for his faith in my abilities, his always-open door, and for modeling the kind of joy and dedication I hope to bring to my own scholarship and teaching; Dr. Joseph Nugent, whose humor and sincerity made both his classes and Connolly House that much more inviting; Dr. Phil O’Leary, for patiently enduring many sessions of Irish language translation and recitation; Drs. Robert Stanton and Laura Tanner, whose leadership as directors of the Ph.D. program showed me what it means to truly invest in your students; Gene Gorman, for Athan’s dates, conversation, commiseration and friendship; Joshua Olivier-Mason and Beth Tressler, for sharing in each others’ struggles and successes along the way; Kelly Sullivan, for spending many (frozen) hours working alongside me in our apartment; and Andrew Kuhn, for reminding me to take a break once in a while, and for always being willing to join me. I am also indebted to a number of friends, who have offered a sympathetic ear, shared a mug of tea, fed me, housed me, taken walks with me, and politely feigned interest in the work that has preoccupied me for the past few years: Corrine Dedini and Kurt Schnier, Sadie Cunningham, Maryrose and Macdara Molloy, Lara Mittaud and Alisa Nichols. I hope I can continue to convey my gratitude. Lastly, I thank my family. My parents, Denis and Sheila, my sisters, Brigid and Norah, and my grandmothers, Mary and Peg, have kept me grounded and have given me the i love, confidence, and support to always aim high. To my other, Southern family in Alabama, Franklin and Chris: you have welcomed me into your hearts, and your excitement has made completing this project that much more special. Maud and Abby’s companionship at the desk and on many long, contemplative walks was also indispensable. And of course, James and Odhran, the very best parts of my day, every day. All good things begin with you two. This success is as much yours as it is mine. I dedicate this to both of you. ii Introduction: Reviving the Revival Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. - W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939)1 When W. H. Auden penned the lines above to mark the death of W. B. Yeats, he intended to convey the Irish poet’s influence, which was both far-reaching and dynamic. The stanza renders Yeats a ghostly presence in modern poetry, describing the process by which his work is consumed and transformed by future generations. In death, the poet becomes his poems, which find new life, as Yeats’s words are dispersed among “his admirers.” Auden conjures a version of Yeats as “the Irish vessel,” describing his poetry as the product of history, rather than its catalyst: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen….” The poem’s famous maxim denies the social utility of art, presenting poetry as little more than the symbol of deed or action. Yet the line is followed by a declaration of poetry’s endurance: “it survives,” Auden proclaims, by navigating the topography of human experience, just as the poem’s prose-like rhythms spill over in enjambments. Poetry remains, “it flows south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives / A way of happening, a mouth.” The lines link the effect of a poem to the experience of reading it, describing Yeats’s poetry as “A way of happening” from which new modes of expression – including Auden’s own elegy – might evolve. Indeed, Auden’s poem is a testament to Yeats’s influence, invoking many 1 W. H. Auden, The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 247. 1 of the same stylistic and thematic features of the Irish poet’s work.