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Toward a Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading the Rural in Seamus

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Toward a Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading the Rural in Seamus Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2014 Toward a Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading the Rural in Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Krassenstein, Stephanie Jean Osburn, "Toward a Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading the Rural in Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon" (2014). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3988. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3988 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. TOWARD A NORTHERN IRISH PASTORAL: READING THE RURAL IN SEAMUS HEANEY AND PAUL MULDOON A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein B.S., Indiana State University, 2006 M.A., Indiana State University, 2008 May 2014 When I came to Louisiana State University in the fall of 2010 to begin this program, my daughter, Lola Ann, was five weeks old. In many ways, the experience of obtaining a graduate degree has been much like that of parenting. Whether at work or at home, the last four years of my life have been all-consuming adventures, journeys populated by joy, terror, frustration, laughter, doubt, happiness, and profound good fortune. This dissertation, this degree, and everything I do—it is for you, Lola, always. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout this process, I have been supported, loved, and encouraged by so many people to whom I will always be indebted. I owe an immeasurably large debt of gratitude to my wonderful husband, Jordan, and my daughter, Lola—without the two of them, I could not have done this. And to my parents, Jim and Patty Osburn, who have provided invaluable support, kindness, and love during this long process—thank you. My dissertation committee members, as well, have been irreplaceable. I wish to thank Solimar Otero and Benjamin Kahan for being both excellent readers of my work and shining examples of graduate faculty members and scholars. It has been an honor. And I am especially grateful to Pallavi Rastogi, who chaired this project. She has been a source of guidance, support, and infinite wisdom over the past four years, always willing to read innumerable drafts, to offer up exceptional critiques over a cup of chai or a glass of wine, and to be a fantastic role model of a successful academic who also happened to be a successful mother. I could not have been more fortunate than to have the opportunity to work with Pallavi and my entire committee. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................................v Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1. They ‘smelt of rot’: Heaney’s Abject Pastoralism .......................................................20 Chapter 2. Femme Fatale: Heaney’s Violent Female Pastoral ......................................................55 Chapter 3. Paul Muldoon: Performing the Pastoral .......................................................................73 Chapter 4. A Wind Bred on the Atlantic: Bodies of Water and Displacement in Paul Muldoon ..........................................................................112 Coda .............................................................................................................................................143 References ....................................................................................................................................147 Vita ...............................................................................................................................................153 iv ABSTRACT The goal of this dissertation is three-fold: to mount a comparison of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, arguing that the two poets actually share much in common, particularly in their use of the pastoral mode; to argue that the pastoral mode offers a provocative, even radical platform for postcolonial writing and thinking; and to argue that reading Heaney and Muldoon, and Ireland in general, as postcolonial offers much for critics and scholars. This project looks particularly at Heaney’s use of gender in landscape to argue that Heaney relies on an abject pastoral mode, one which is dominated by excess fertility and dangerous maternity, to portray an Irish landscape that is both colonially scarred and potentially radically anti-colonial. These readings stretch from Heaney’s early pastoral poems to his famous sequence of bog poems and through to his much more recent eclogues, and in each instance this project seeks to bring a discussion of gender to the fore—thus making an intervention into the existing scholarship, which often overlooks or elides these concerns. The latter chapters focus on Paul Muldoon’s poems, arguing that Muldoon’s pastoral poems use the pastoral as a platform for writing about Irish cultural tropes and stereotypes. This project divides Muldoon’s pastoral poems into two groups: the first, his pastoral performances, are marked by his use of the pastoral as a setting from which to play with stock characters and commodified Irish culture in a way that both mocks and celebrates such tropes; the second, his “water poems,” use bodies of water as a form of landscape writing that enables Muldoon both to ground his identity to Northern Ireland and to take flight, embarking on transatlantic crossings from Northern Ireland to America to the Amazon and back again. In these readings of Muldoon, this project seeks to establish a reading of Muldoon that explores and celebrates his roots in the v rural and the natural—a perspective that is often lost in Muldoon scholarship, which traditionally has been much more concerned with global, urban, and cosmopolitan concerns. vi INTRODUCTION In 2010, both Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon published new poetry collections— collections released within a week of one another and by the same publisher, Farrer, Straus, and Giroux. Dwight Garner’s New York Times double review, “Shared Homeland, Different Worldview,” marks just one of many instances that the two men are considered together: Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon published their first books in 1966 and 1971, and ever since, their verse has been compared and contrasted, often in facile ways,as if they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee . Reading Mr. Heaney’s restrained, earthy poems, you can almost smell the bits of straw and dried sheep dung woven into their woolen fabrics. His work has as much compression, cogency, and unhurried rural gravitas as that of any poet alive. Mr. Muldoon, after toddling briefly in Mr. Heaney’s footsteps, has emerged as a much wilder cat, an allusive and riddling poet, one whose Irish roots are tucked into the shadows casts by his cerebral lighting. (C26) Garner’s review of Human Chain and Maggot (Heaney’s and Muldoon’s newest collections, respectively), begins with the above comparison of the two poets, finding them at odds with one another, ultimately asking why they have been written about in conjunction so often, since they are so dissimilar. It is a fair question—is it simply because they are the most well-known of the Belfast Group?1 Is it that Muldoon was briefly Heaney’s student and that dynamic between the two men intrigues us?2 Garner goes on to suggest that it’s “time to give up the Heaney/Muldoon analogizing. These are two men whose poems—in terms of texture and structure, tactic and tone—could not be more dissimilar” (C26). Of course, as Garner then acknowledges, he has been drawn to make the comparison himself, in this very review, despite his own words of advice. 1 Originally formed in 1963 at Queen’s University Belfast, the Group boasts a star-studded list of participants, including Heaney and Muldoon, of course, as well as Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, and James Simmons. 2 Muldoon studied briefly under Heaney during his time at Queen’s. 1 Most critics, as Garner acknowledges, compare Heaney and Muldoon in order to highlight their differences—much as Garner himself does in his review. And, to be sure, there is plenty of contrasting material to find. However, I suspect that the reason so much writing has been done comparing Heaney and Muldoon is not simply because they are very different poets with very similar backgrounds. In fact, I would suggest that on some level, the opposite is true— that is, that Muldoon and Heaney have more similarities than we might suppose, and that those similarities link them more deeply than the surface contrasts between Heaney’s earthy reflections on Irish soil and Muldoon’s cosmopolitan hi-jinx. Heaney and Muldoon are so often thrown together, first and foremost, because they are, arguably, the most
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