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When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. .Louis MacNeice and his influence on contemporary Northern Irish poetry Dave Coates PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2018 1 Abstract: This thesis examines in close detail the influence of Louis MacNeice’s work – primarily his poetry but also his critical prose and radio plays – in the poetry of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson. Rather than following a fixed, unified theory of influence, the thesis explores how individual poems contain echoes – either formally, rhythmically, tonally or imagistically – of the elder poet’s work. The thesis shows how the example of a single, shared creative ancestor may manifest in many different ways. For Derek Mahon, MacNeice is present in the question of how an artist may be of use to their community, even (perhaps especially) in a community or society in which the artist is not valued. Mahon’s poetry also explores similar existential questions, through a shared interest in the work of Samuel Beckett. For Michael Longley, MacNeice presents a vital example for his war poetry through the poem ‘The Casualty’, and for his love poetry through ‘Mayfly’. As single poems of Longley’s reverberate and evolve throughout his oeuvre, so specific poems by MacNeice become touchstones throughout Longley’s poetry. Muldoon’s writing seems interested in MacNeice as a symbol as well as an artistic forebear: MacNeice appears as a dramatic persona in one poem, and remnants of his own poems, particularly ‘Snow’, ghost many of Muldoon’s collections. Carson has had a turbulent relationship with MacNeice through his career, and in his early collections this relationship is defined in negative as much as positive: Carson’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ seems a response to and a rebuke of MacNeice’s poem of the same name. Later, the creative potential of MacNeice’s determination to remain creatively unanchored seems to have been an empowering example. The thesis considers the matter of influence as far more subtle and contextually sensitive than the psychologically fraught, highly combative depiction in many existing theoretical models. Instead, it is interested in how influence works in practice, in individual case studies. 2 Signed Declaration: This is a signed declaration, that I, Dave Coates, the undersigned, am the author of the thesis; that, unless otherwise stated, all references cited have been consulted by me; that the work of which the thesis is a record has been done by the me, and that it has not been previously accepted for a higher degree. Signature: 3 Dedication and Acknowledgements i.m. Donna Jane Coates 1955-2006 This thesis has happened with the work and support of a humbling number of people. Omissions are many but necessary, and I hope everyone not specifically named here knows how grateful I am. To my friends Peter Mackay and Miriam Gamble, thank you for your endlessly patient, kind and supportive, guiding me through the vagaries of my first long-term academic project. Thanks are due to the staff of the Scottish Poetry Library, who have been friends and allies since my arrival in Edinburgh in 2009; my first sponsors and mentors, without you, none of this. Thanks to Sandeep Parmar and the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool for appointing me to my first professional academic post, the pay from which was instrumental in the completion of this thesis. Thanks to Barry Robertson, Denise Garland, Gordon Hamilton, Gregor Denholm and every single colleague at Cloisters Bar since January 2013. Without your patience, support, good humour and flexible rota, this would not have been possible. Love, admiration and gratitude to the Art Gang: Alice Tarbuck, Christina Neuwirth, Maria Stoian and Sasha de Buyl-Pisco. You showed me how it’s done. Finally, all my thanks and love to Muireann Crowley, my best friend, my first, most careful and most inspiring reader. 4 Contents One: Introduction……………………………………………………………………6 Two: ‘Searchlight and Icon’: Michael Longley………………………..60 Three: ‘A Familiar Voice’: Derek Mahon………………………………121 Four: ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’: Paul Muldoon………180 Five: ‘Nods and Whispers’: Ciaran Carson……………………………248 Six: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….296 Seven: Bibliography……………………………………………………………..302 5 One: Introduction This thesis will explore the influence of Louis MacNeice in the work of four contemporary Northern Irish poets: Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson. I believe it would make a fair amount of sense to walk the boundaries of these terms before embarking on the thesis proper; the matter of literary influence is no settled thing, and far from uncontroversial. My own conception of influence in these pages does not intend to place MacNeice in an uncomplicated role as forerunner or ancestor, partly because of a belief that art does not benefit from hierarchical systems of authority, and, more mundanely, because I do not believe that this is the lived reality of poems and makers of poems. The four studies that comprise this thesis aim to think of literary influence as a process that takes many forms, and is only rarely easily identified, and that in practice that often the least enlightening examples of literary influence are those which signal themselves openly. In the chapter on Mahon, for instance, the obvious place to start is with Mahon’s elegy for MacNeice, ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’1. What I found in close study, both of the poem and of Mahon’s work at large, is that it is something of an aesthetic outlier. Certainly the poem itself is a conscious, perhaps self-conscious, engagement with, homage to, and imitation of MacNeice’s style and content, but how much does that tell us about either poet’s aesthetics when it embodies something like an artistic cul-de-sac? A substantial, sustaining relationship between one poet’s work and another’s may begin with such clear signals and gestures, but an influence that might open to the reader new perspectives and approaches to both the elder poet and the younger, as this study demonstrates, takes forms far more idiosyncratic and difficult to systematise. 1 Mahon, Selected Poems, 11. 6 It may also be beneficial to briefly explore a few key attempts to do just that. A great deal has been written, often quite colourfully, in response to Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, which for all its flaws remains a major touchstone in discussions of literary influence, as such worth exploring, however cautiously: as this study will examine in detail, particularly in regards to Ciaran Carson’s relationship to MacNeice, not all influence is uncomplicatedly positive. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom, under the influence of Freud and Nietzsche, outlines an understanding of poetry inextricable from the processes of history: Poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.2 Later, he expands upon this conception of strength and individualism: [E]very poet begins (however “unconsciously”) by rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death’s necessity than all other men and women do. […] The death of poetry will not be hastened by any reader’s broodings, yet it seems just to assume that poetry in our tradition, when it dies, will be self-slain, murdered by its own past strength.3 In his analysis, poetry that transcends its own anxiety must first mortally overcome its own lineage, before it can truly be itself, however much he acknowledges that ‘poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better’4. Bloom goes on to formalise the six stages of poetic influence 2 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 5. 3 Ibid, 10. 4 Ibid, 7. 7 using Greek terminology: clinamen (a swerve away from the strong precursor), tessera (a completion or advancement of the precursor’s work), kenosis (an ostensible emptying-out of the precursor’s influence), daemonizathion (a creation of an imaginative world ostensibly independent from the precursor’s), askesis (self-purgation or curtailment to better distance oneself from the precursor), and apophrades or return of the dead (consciously opening oneself up to the precursor, ‘as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work’5). In a study of MacNeice’s influence on Michael Longley, Terence Brown described this schema as ‘an agonistic thing, compact of oedipal stress and straining ambition’, a ‘heavy-breathing, forced psychodrama’6; perhaps successive generations of influence scholars are merely swerving well clear of an overly strong precursor. What is most obviously lacking in Bloom’s analysis is the possibility that one’s forerunners are not merely patriarchs to be toppled, but mentors, colleagues and friends, and that chronology might not be hierarchy. In a study of Yeats, T.S. Eliot explored Yeats’ intuition regarding the fluidity of intergenerational affinity and empowerment, noting that ‘after becoming unquestionably a master’, Yeats remained ‘always a contemporary’7.