TRADITION and INFLUENCE in ANGLO-IRISH POETRY Tradition and Influence in Anglo- Irish Poetry

TRADITION AND INFLUENCE IN ANGLO-IRISH POETRY Tradition and Influence in Anglo- Irish Poetry

Edited by Terence Brown Associate Professor of English Trinity College, Dublin

and Nicholas Grene Associate Professor of English Trinity College, Dublin

M MACMILLAN © Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene 1989 Chapter 2 © Seamus Deane 1989 Chapter 10 © Seamus Heaney 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied of transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1989

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Tradition and influence in Anglo-Irish poetry. 1. English poetry-Irish authors- History and criticism I. Brown, Terence II. Grene, Nicholas 821'.009 PR8767 ISBN 978-1-349-09472-1 ISBN 978-1-349-09470-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09470-7 To Poetry Ireland Contents

Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Contributors X

Introduction 1

1 Constitution, Language and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Irish Poetry 7 Robert Welch

2 Yeats: the Creation of an Audience 31 Seamus Deane

3 Yeats and the Re-making of Synge 47 Nicholas Grene

4 Austin Clarke: Tradition, Memory and Our Lot 63 Peter Denman

5 Louis MacNeice's Ireland 79 Terence Brown

6 Patrick Kavanagh's Parish Myth 97 Antoinette Quinn

7 An Absence of Influence: Three Modernist Poets 119 Gerald Dawe

8 Derek Mahon's Humane Perspective 143 Brendan Kennelly

9 Poetic Forms and Social Malformations 153 Edna Longley

10 The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh 181 Seamus Heaney

Index 194

vii Acknowledgements

The editors and publishers wish gratefully to acknowledge permission to quote from copyright material as follows: R. Dardis Clarke, for the extracts from Collected Poems of Austin Clarke (the Dolmen Press); the author, for the extracts from Selected Poems (the Dolmen Press), Three Poems and Third Person by Brian Coffey; the Dolmen Press, for the extracts from the Complete Poems of Denis Devlin; the Blackstaff Press, for the extracts from The Selected Paul Durcan and The Berlin Wall Cafe by Paul Durcan (Blackstaff Press); Faber and Faber Ltd and the author, for the extracts from Seamus Heaney's 'Bog Oak' (Wintering Out), 'Singing School' (North), 'Personal Helicon' (Death of a Naturalist), 'The Last Mummer' (Wintering Out) and 'Terminus' (The Haw Lantern); Katharine Kavanagh, do Peter Fallon, 19 Oakdown Road, Dublin 14, Ireland, for the extracts from the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh; the author, for the extracts from Thomas Kinsella, Poems 1956-73 (Dolmen Press); Faber and Faber Ltd, for the extract from 'The Suicide' in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice and for the extracts from the following other poems taken from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice: 'Autobiography', Belfast', 'Train to Dublin', 'Valediction', 'Carrickfergus', 'Autumn Journal', 'Eclogue from Iceland', 'The Closing Album', 'Carrick Revisited', 'Woods', 'Donegal Triptych'; Oxford University Press, for the extracts from Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford University Press, 1979); Faber and Faber Ltd and the author, for the extract from 'The Boundary Commission' in Why Brownlee Left by Paul Muldoon and for the extracts from 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants' (Quoof), 'lmmran', 'Anseo' (Why Brownlee Left); and A. P. Watt on behalf of Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan London, for the extracts from The Collected Poems ofW. B. Yeats. A version of Chapter Ten, 'The placeless heaven: another look at Kavanagh' by Seamus Heaney, was delivered as the Keynote Address at Kavanagh's Yearly in Carrickmacross in 1985. It was subsequently published in 1987 in the Massachusetts Review, to the editor of which we make acknowledgements. The editors have made every effort to seek permission from copyright holders; we apologise if we have failed to obtain any necessary permissions.

viii Acknowledgements ix

We also have some personal acknowledgements to make: to Rory Brennan, the energetic secretary of Poetry Ireland who jointly initiated the lecture series from which this collection developed and gave the project so much of his help and support; to Sara Ellison for careful and keen-eyed editorial assistance; and to Geraldine Mangan who typed and re-typed many of the essays with her usual devotion and skill. Notes on the Contributors

Terence Brown is Associate Professor of English, Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, and Ireland: a Social and Cultural History.

Gerald Dawe is Tutor in English, University College, Galway. He has published two collections of poetry, including The Lundys Letter (1985). He also edited The Younger Irish Poets and edited with Edna Longley, Across a Roaring Hill: the Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland.

Seamus Deane is Professor of Modern English and American Literature, University College, Dublin. He has published three collections of poetry and is the author of Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature and A Short History of Irish Literature.

Peter Denman is Lecturer in English, St Patrick's College, Maynooth. He has published one collection of poetry and essays on Anglo-Irish Literature.

Nicholas Grene is Associate Professor of English, Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of Synge: a Critical Study of the Plays, Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere: the Comic Contract and Bernard Shaw: a Critical View.

Seamus Heaney is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Harvard University. He has published many collections of poems, most recently Station Island (1984) and The Haw Lantern (1987), and a volume of critical essays Preoccupations.

Brendan Kennelly is Professor of Modern Literature, Trinity College, Dublin. He has published many collections of poems, the most recent being Cromwell (1983) and Selected Poems (1985). He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Verse.

Edna Longley is Senior Lecturer in English, Queen's University, Belfast. She is the editor of Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems and

X Notes on the Contributors xi editor with Gerald Dawe of Across a Roaring Hill: the Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland. A collection of her critical essays Poetry in the Wars was published in 1987.

Antoinette Quinn is Lecturer in English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published essays on Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, and is now completing a book on Patrick Kavanagh.

Robert Welch is Professor of English, Media and Theatre Studies, University of Ulster. He is the author of Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats and editor of The Way Back: Essays on George Moore's 'The Untilled Field'.