IRISH POETRY 1930-1960 by Jessica Lynn Pannell BA in English
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“TEEMING DELIGHT:” IRISH POETRY 1930-1960 by Jessica Lynn Pannell B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1999 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Department of English of the School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2011 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jessica Lynn Pannell It was defended on April 20, 2011 and approved by Colin MacCabe, Distinguished University Professor, Department of English Troy Boone, Associate Professor, Department of English Barbara McCloskey, Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture Dissertation Director: James F. Knapp, Senior Associate Dean, School of Art and Sciences and Professor, Department of English ii “TEEMING DELIGHT:” IRISH POETRY 1930-1960 Jessica Lynn Pannell, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2011 The dissertation provides a survey of poetry in largely critically neglected decades of Irish literature, arguing that the poetry of Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Blanaid Salkeld represents a crucial phase in the development of Irish poetry. In the first three chapters I argue that Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and Samuel Beckett develop a uniquely Irish form of modernism that sits uneasily with both Irish and Continental traditions, examines the horrors of modern war, and in the case of Beckett, proposes a form of humanism based on the physiology of the body that radically departs from Enlightenment models. The Kavanagh chapter examines his reclamation and reformation of the Irish bardic tradition of pastoral dystopianism and Kavanagh’s attempts at a new poetic based in anti-Pauline, post-institutionalized Christianity. The fifth chapter explores Clarke’s reanimation of technical aspects of pre-eighteenth-century Irish poetry and, despite his public anti-Yeatsian statements, argues that his poetry both carries on and develops the Revivalist project. The Salkeld chapter proposes that Irish feminism operates in the poetry of this period in ways that both undermine and support the projects of Salkeld’s male counterparts. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ……………………………………………………………………………………... v I. “QUAKING SOD:” WRITING OUT OF THE REVIVAL AND INTO MODERN IRELAND …………………………………………………………………………… 1 II. MODERNISM “NOW:” DENIS DEVLIN …………………………………………. 32 III. WAR POET AND MODERNIST: THOMAS MACGREEVY ……………………… 69 IV. SAMUEL BECKETT: THE PROFANE AND RADICAL HUMANISM …………. 97 V. “GOD’S TRUTH IS LIFE:” PATRICK KAVANAGH ……………………………… 125 VI. FLOWERED STONE: THE POETRY OF AUSTIN CLARKE ……………………... 162 VII. INSIDE THE FOX’S COVERT: BLANAID SALKELD ……………………………. 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………………. 227 iv PREFACE My father was the first writer I knew. There is nothing I can say that could fully acknowledge the hand he had in what was to become my career and indeed, my first love—reading and talking to others about poetry. From both my parents, who threw away not a single novel they read in college (and thus made them all available for me to find and read) I received the best preparation for the life I now lead. From Bucknell University I wish to thank Harold Schweizer, who taught me that the most important question is not how but why; John Rickard, who introduced me to Joyce and Irish literature; and Ghislaine MacDayter, who convinced me that even as an undergraduate I had something worth saying. At the University of Pittsburgh there are too many people to properly thank, but I must insist upon thanking my committee for its gentle but persistent pressure and the attending patience this process requires. To all of my professors, to Jim Knapp, Troy Boone, Colin MacCabe, Shalini Puri, Marah Gubar, John Twining, Paul Bove, and Ronald Judy, I offer thanks for asking more of me than I thought could possibly give, and for giving me the support I needed to meet such lofty expectations. v I want to offer profound thanks to the late Eric Clarke, who found in me a fellow lover of Theodor Adorno and saw fit to phone me with an invitation to study with him and his colleagues at Pitt. His incisive and often troubling questions were among the first to challenge me to dig deeper, cast more widely, and to love more fully as a scholar. I could not have made it through the last few months of writing without my faithful posse, Jane Austen’s Fight Club, for reading and moral support. Special thanks must go to Ali Patterson, who cleared her schedule for ten days to ask me hard questions that ultimately led me to finishing, finally. Robin Clarke, Oliver Khan and Richard Parent deserve recognition and heartfelt thanks for years of anchoring whenever I threatened to become unmoored. I wish to thank Alex Davis for his excellent reading suggestions and well-timed encouragement. The greatest proportion of my gratitude, however, goes to Jude Pannell, who has waited nine years for this day, who put his own dreams on hold to support mine, and whose ability differentiate between a roman and italicized period allows me to present my work to the world without embarrassment. It is not easy to share your parents with their work. Sam, this dissertation is as much yours as mine. I cannot wait to see your own dreams unfold. vi “QUAKING SOD:” WRITING OUT OF THE REVIVAL AND INTO MODERN IRELAND Water wears The stone away And out of the river The arc-lamp rays and the Wind weave Try to weave Something or other From flight and water. -from “Liffey Bridge,” Denis Devlin The Irish self . was a project: and its characteristic text was a process, unfinished, fragmenting. Each artist [Synge, Yeats, Beckett, Joyce] had, strictly speaking, no predicate; and so the text had no time other than that of its enunciation. -Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation The swans on the leaden coloured water Look like hostile ghosts Of kings Who resent our presence. Are they not right? How should we Whose hearts are with the dead Come here And not die? -“Winter,” Thomas MacGreevy 1 In 1998, just three years after his Nobel Prize in literature, Seamus Heaney published a large selection of his poetry entitled Opened Ground. Heaney explains his choice to include his Nobel lecture, “Crediting Poetry,” by observing that “the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here proceed it” (“Author’s Note”). One of his earliest (and certainly the most famous) poems, “Digging,” conflates the act of writing with the act of breaking ground and bridges the intellectual and cultural natures of Heaney’s profession with the material nature of his father’s and grandfather’s turf-cutting. Although Heaney claims ground-opening on the part of his own poetry, it is worth asking what opened the ground for his poetry. Who, in other words, makes his poetry—and the poetry that has come out of Ireland for in last fifty years—possible? Heaney credits Yeats heavily in his lecture, as well he should, but it is as if he skipped to his grandfather without regard for his father (and in both “Digging” and the lecture, his mothers and grandmothers). Though Heaney has mentioned the influence of Patrick Kavanagh in other places, Kavanagh’s absence here is conspicuous given both the ubiquity of Heaney’s engagements with the soil in his poetry and the metaphors of earth and field figured in the book’s title and opening poem (“Digging”). In some ways Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem “The Great Hunger” describes not just the cultural and literary situation of Ireland in the mid-twentieth century but the critical one surrounding this period. Long considered a fallow time in Irish literature, I argue instead that these decades carry Irish poetry from its first to second revivals through the darkening of the Celtic Twilight into Celtic Night, the development of a robust Irish literary response to modernism(s), and the increasing international orientation of Irish poetry as a consequence of chosen and forced exile. Heaney has more to gain from his mid-century predecessors, however, than dystopian pastoralism. Heaney largely credits Yeats for mastery of the kind of poetry that unapologetically 2 acknowledges both real violence and the compassionate, life-affirming response it can engender, but it was the mid-century poets who carried this impulse through to the contemporary era. In his 1995 Nobel Lecture, Heaney describes Yeats’ “Meditations in Time of Civil War:” “It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside . .; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures” (428). Heaney’s continued description could also apply to MacGreevy’s war poetry, or Clarke’s poems in the voices of women, or Beckett’s pessimism laced with tenderness: It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth-telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust. It is a proof that poetry can be equal to and true at the same time . (428) Kavanagh is not, of course, the sole link between Yeats and those who come after, and though he is the most well-known of mid-twentieth-century Irish poets, he was only one of many scratching their ways into the hard-packed ground of stale and outmoded forms of cultural nationalism, native resistance to innovation, and the lack of a large and enthusiastic reading public in Ireland. In the grand critical narrative of Irish literature Yeats’ genius is followed by the necessary exile of Joyce (with the exception of a few novelists) and picked up again after the economic revitalizations of the 1960s; but this narrative misses entire decades of important development in Irish poetry that would lay the foundation—or to disrupt the foundation that had already been laid—for the poetry of our contemporary era.