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The Great War in Irish Poetry

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The Great War in Irish Poetry Durham E-Theses Creation from conict: The Great War in Irish poetry Brearton, Frances Elizabeth How to cite: Brearton, Frances Elizabeth (1998) Creation from conict: The Great War in Irish poetry, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5042/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Creation from Conflict: The Great War in Irish Poetry The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the written consent of the author and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Frances Elizabeth Brearton Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D Department of English Studies University of Durham January 1998 12 HAY 1998 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the impact of the First World War on the imaginations of six poets - W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley - all of whom have written in wartime: Graves in the Great War, Yeats in the Great War, the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War, MacNeice in the Second World War, Mahon, Longley and Heaney in the Northern Ireland Troubles. The thesis locates affinities between these poets in their response to violence, and compares the ways in which they have imaginatively appropriated the images and events of the Great War to facilitate that response. Part I of this study begins by outlining the historical background to Irish participation in the Great War, and considers some of the issues involved in the Irish cultural response to the war which were engendered by the complex domestic politics in Ireland between 1914 and 1918. Chapters two to four constitute a more detailed exploration of these issues as manifested in the work of Yeats, Graves and MacNeice. In the cases of Yeats and MacNeice, their engagement with the subject of the Great War is re-evaluated in order to illuminate repressed or complex areas of Irish history and culture, and to shed new light on their influence on recent Northern Irish poetry. Consideration of Robert Graves's response to the Great War serves to illustrate the ways in which a high-profile association with the War can obscure relations to an Irish or Anglo-Irish tradition. The thesis discusses ways in which these poets have been misrepresented, and considers how far the misrepresentation can be attributed to the contrasting interpretations of the Great War in England and Ireland, and to versions of literary history based upon these interpretations. The second part of the study concentrates on contemporary Northern Irish poetry. Chapter five considers problems pertinent to Northern Ireland in relation to the subject of the Great War by looking at the ways in which remembrance of the war, politicized in order to bolster mythologies of history, reverberates in the context of the Northern Irish Troubles. The final three chapters outline the difficulties encountered by Northern Irish poets Mahon, Heaney and Longley, under pressure to respond to the Troubles, and relate these difficulties to those encountered by the Great War soldier poets. The chapters explore the extent to which the fascination of these three poets with the Great War illuminates their aesthetic strategies, revises aspects of Irish political and cultural history, offers a way of responding to the violence in Northern Ireland, and has determined critical responses to their work. The thesis is concerned with ways in which the Great War has been imagined in Irish writing. It also shows how and why those imaginings have struggled with, and revised aspects of, reductive mythologies of history and competing versions of the literary canon. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without their prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Contents Acknowledgements v Abbreviations vi Preface vii Parti. The Art of War 1. Ireland in the Great War: Literature, History, Culture 1 2. W.B.Yeats: Creation from Conflict 37 3. Resisting the Canon: Robert Graves and the Anglo-Irish Tradition 76 4. Louis MacNeice: Between Two Wars 108 Part II. The Northern Renascence 5. Northern Ireland and the Politics of Remembrance 148 6. A Dying Art: Irony, Apocalypse and Imperial Breakdown in the Poetry of Derek Mahon 183 7. The End of Art: Seamus Heaney's Apology for Poetry 218 8. Michael Longley: Poet in No Man's Land 257 Afterword 297 Appendix A 300 Bibliography 304 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my supervisor, Professor Michael O'Neill for his comments and suggestions on this research, and for his encouragement and support. I would also like to express my thanks to those institutions which assisted me in my work: Durham University Library, Queen's University Library, the Linen Hall library and the Central Library, Belfast. Particular thanks goes to Michael Smallman and Mary Kelly for their help in the Special Collections at Queen's University Library. The University of Durham and Dean's Fund are acknowledged for their financial support. A number of people have generously shared ideas and information, and offered helpful suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Michael Allen, Kathleen Devine, Keith Jeffery, Michael Longley, Peter McDonald, and Bernard McKeown. This thesis could not have been written without the support and friendship of - amongst others - Andrew Adams, Imogen Anderson, Craig Barnett, Lynne Beaton, Iwan Jones, Esther Jubb, Tony Leopold, Kate Marks and Scott Masson. Sean Burke and Patricia Waugh helped to make the English department at Durham both a friendly and an intellectually stimulating place to be. Tony Needham's support and encouragement over the last few months have been invaluable. Mark Sandy helped me through some of the most difficult times. I am also grateful to Mark Sandy and Hazel Storr for proof-reading the thesis for me. Gillian Mcintosh and Patricia Horton share my enthusiasm for the subjects of the First World War and Irish poetry respectively, and their friendship has made the process of writing this thesis considerably less lonely than it might otherwise have been. I am particularly grateful to Patricia for taking time out of her own hectic schedule to give me feedback and suggestions on parts of the thesis. I am also indebted to both of them for their generous hospitality over the last few years: the journey from Durham to Belfast has been made often, and always with a sense of homecoming for which they have been largely responsible. My greatest and most incalculable debt is to Eamonn Hughes. He read and commented on this thesis in its entirety, patiently answered my many questions, and has been generous with his time and critical insights beyond any call of duty. Lastly, I wish to thank my family for their support and encouragement. This thesis is dedicated to them with love and gratitude. v ABBREVIATIONS A Derek Mahon, Antarctica DN Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist FW Seamus Heaney, Field Work E & I W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions GF Michael Longley, Gorse Fires HN Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night L Derek Mahon, Lives N Seamus Heaney, North P Michael Longley, Poems 1963-1983 PWBY Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats SP Derek Mahon, The Snow Party TGO Michael Longley, The Ghost Orchid WO Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out vi Preface "Whenever war is spoken of I find The war that was called Great invades the mind" -Vernon Scannell1 "/ have not painted the war...but I have no doubt that the war is in...these paintings I have done." -Pablo Picasso2 Martin Stephen writes that: The Second World War killed roughly five times as many people as did the First, brought untold destruction to civilian populations, and in its final throes unleashed a horror that could - and still can - wipe out life on earth. The facts, and logic, dictate that if any images dominate poetry they should be those of Hiroshima, Dachau, and Stalingrad. Certainly these images appear frequently in modern writing, but it is far easier to find the images of the Great War...The Great War seems to exert a terrible and perhaps terrified fascination over the modern imagination, and not only in terms of poetry.3 This thesis considers the work of six poets, only two of whom - W.B.Yeats and Robert Graves - wrote during the Great War itself, and yet all of whom reveal in their work an underlying, and sometimes overt, fascination with the images and events of the Great War. With the exception of Robert Graves, none of the poets here discussed has firsthand experience of combat, but all of them have written, and forged their aesthetic theory and practice, in wartime: Yeats in the Great War, the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War; MacNeice in the Second World War; Mahon, Longley and Heaney in what Terence Brown calls the "nasty little Northern Irish war which began in 1968, that had its roots in the soil of 1912 and 1916 as well as that of the Great War".4 Graves, spectacularly, wrote and published through all these events, though he is popularly 1 "The Great War," Poems of the First World War: Never Such Innocence, ed.
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