M G Kratz, Dante in Contemporary Irish Poetry, 10 10 2012
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“O poet guiding me”: Dante and Contemporary Irish Poetry Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Neuphilologischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg von Maren Gisa Kratz Diese Arbeit wurde im August 2011 eingereicht, die Disputation fand am 15. Mai 2012 statt. Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my Doktorvater Prof. Dr. Peter Paul Schnierer, who encouraged and supported this dissertation throughout, and inspired my interest in poetry in the first place. Thank you to my Zweitgutachter Prof. Dr. Christof Weiand for his advice regarding matters of Italian studies. I am immensely grateful to Adam Crothers, who not only proof-read the entire work, but continuously inspired, motivated and supported me in every way. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to my parents Hildegard and Reinhard, without whose emotional and financial support I could not have done this. I am grateful to my father for his advice on apocalyptic matters. A special thank you to Harry Clifton for very pleasant, interesting and helpful pub meetings. Another special thank you goes to Valeria Cavalli, for assisting me in academic and quotidian matters during my research visit in Dublin, as well as enriching it socially and culturally. For inspiring conversations, I would like to thank Gerald Dawe, Malcolm Guite (thank you for the music, too, of course!), Robin Kirkpatrick and Isabel Wagner. For friendly and helpful email replies, Leontia Flynn and Bernard O’Donoghue. Thank you to Eleanor Chatburn for the publication of my article in Durham University’s Postgraduate English , and to the lovely people at the Centre for Irish Studies in Prague for a great conference and the inclusion of my paper in the conference publication. Thank you to Peter Mackay for inviting me along to Ciaran Carson’s 60 th birthday event and introducing me to poets and scholars at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. Further thanks go to Anke Barzantny and the Heidelberg Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS), for making the PhD process a more structured, social and interdisciplinary experience, and to Michael D. Hurley of Cambridge University for taking part in our workshop in Heidelberg in 2011. Finally, thank you to my friends and family for bearing with me in this (seemingly) unworldly endeavour. 2 Poeta che mi guidi, guarda la mia virtù s’ell’ è possente, prima ch’a l’alto passo tu mi fidi. (Inf. II, 10-12) O poet guiding me before you trust me to this epic task, consider if I’m fit to go with thee. (Carson 2002: 8) 3 “O poet guiding me”: Dante and Contemporary Irish Poetry 1. Introduction 7 1.1 Irish Poets and Dante in the 20 th Century 7 1.2 Influence and Intertextuality: Dante as Precursor and Hypotext 13 1.3 In Heaney’s Shadow? Contemporary Irish Poets’ Dante 19 2. An Irish Inferno 24 2.1 Departure 26 2.1.1 Canto I: Poets in Mid-life Crises 26 2.1.2 Canto II: Heaney Girding Himself 38 2.1.3 Mere Idiomatic Expression? Carson and Flynn in Dante’s Inferno 43 2.2 Crossings 47 2.2.1 Canto III: Peter of Morrone 47 2.2.2 Canto III Continued: Crossing with Charon 49 2.2.3 Heaney’s Crossings 53 2.2.4 Kinsella’s Cantos 64 2.2.5 Boland’s Journey to the Underworld 67 2.2.6 Heaney in the Underground 74 2.3 Lost in Limbo 78 2.3.1 Canto IV: Limbo 78 2.3.2 Alighieri and the Myth of Er 83 4 2.4 Deadly Sins 85 2.4.1 Canto V: Paolo and Francesca’s Irish Afterlife 85 2.4.2 Canto VIII: The Hellish Bogs of Styx 91 2.4.3 Canto XII: The Boiling Blood of Phlegethon 94 2.4.4 Canto XIII: Heaney in the Bleeding Wood 98 2.4.5 Canti XIV-XVI: Two Murphys and Two Dubliners in the Abominable Sand 103 2.4.6 Canti XVIII-XXXI: The Malebolge 111 2.4.6.1 XXI: Malacoda 111 2.4.6.2 XXIII: A Hypocrite 113 2.5 Canto XXVI: The Canto of Ulysses 114 2.6 Canto XXVIII: Carson’s Sectarian War Inferno 122 2.7 Canti XXXIII-XXXIV: Poets in Ice 128 3. A Purgatorial Island 142 3.1 Canto I: Morning Dew, Girdle, and Boat Metaphor 143 3.2 Canto XXVI: Il miglior fabbro 153 3.3 Canti XXVII-XXX: Lethe, Lilies, Flames, Flakes 155 3.4 Purgatorial Voyages: Lough Derg 162 3.4.1 Before Heaney 163 3.4.2 Heaney as Pilgrim Poet: ‘Station Island’ 167 3.5 Immrama: The Voyage of Muldoon 178 3.6 Secular Eden : Clifton’s Earthly Paradise 183 5 4. Paradise in Exile 188 4.1 Like Dante’s Heaven 190 4.2 Canti XV-XVII: Clifton’s Cacciaguida 196 4.3 Canti XXX-XXXIII: Heaney’s Paradise 200 5. Conclusion 211 List of Contemporary Poems 216 Bibliography 221 6 1. Introduction 1.1 Irish Poets and Dante in the 20 th Century a model for all poets T. S. Eliot, “Dante” (Eliot 1951: 268) After the revitalisation and popularisation of Dante in English in the Romantic period 1 and the Victorian era, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were primarily responsible for a reinforcement of Dante’s influence on literature in English in the 20 th century. While Eliot stressed the religious aspect of Dante’s work, Pound concentrated on literary style and tradition, which Eliot criticised as insufficient for a profound understanding of the medieval poet (cf. Ellis 1983: 202; McDougal 1985: 72). Both approaches have had their impact on Irish poetry.2 Around the same time, W. B. Yeats cultivated his own take on Dante. As Stephen Paul Ellis writes, Yeats’s Dante is “less celebrated, partly because references to Dante occur in his prose writings rather than in his poetry and particularly in […] A Vision .” (Ellis 1981: 1) His reception of Dante was “more profound” than Pound’s or Eliot’s “because he regarded Dante’s personal history as an exemplar and attempted to relate his own life and writings to it”, but at the same time it was “more superficial because his acquaintance with Dante’s writing was remote and highly selective and because he did not read him in Italian.” (ibid.) Thus each writer takes from Dante what pleases him most and what applies best to his own life, philosophical or religious beliefs, and work. As a result, their responses to Dante in the critical writings as well as in the poetry are quite different from and at times in opposition to one another; perhaps the main purpose of this is to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries. In order to avoid a clash with his own beliefs, Yeats had to secularise the Commedia : “Yeats had his own beliefs about the afterlife which would rule out a literal reading of Dante. […] 1 The first complete translation of the Commedia into English was published in 1802 by Henry Boyd, an Irishman, followed in 1814 by H. F. Cary’s immensely successful translation (cf. Wallace 2007: 290). 2 Perhaps not as obvious an influence as Eliot or Pound on the Irish poets discussed in this study, Charles S. Singleton (1909-1985) should be mentioned here, since he notably shaped the Dante reception in the 20th century. His work includes a translation of and commentary on the Commedia (1970-75), An Essay on the Vita Nuova (1949), and his Dante Studies (1954, 1958, 1978) (Cf. Singleton 1954 on the Commedia ’s elements of structure). In 1965, Singleton received the Gold Medal for Dante Studies, which had been awarded to Eliot in 1959. 7 they project a cycle of reincarnation which is in part a reaction against Catholicism” (ibid. 16). In the context of the poetic use of Dante, the question of religious beliefs or non-beliefs will always have to be considered. Ellis leniently concludes his essay on Yeats and Dante: “The justification of Yeats’s Dante lies ultimately in the poems he wrote in the last third of his life. We can forgive Yeats his Dante for these; we can even forgive him the hieroglyphics of A Vision. ” (ibid. 17) James Joyce’s erudite reception of Dante needs to be mentioned as well. It is his prose more than his poetry that had a major influence on other writers, but this influence should not be underestimated, as Seamus Heaney demonstrates most obviously in ‘Station Island’. In her seminal book on Joyce and Dante, Mary T. Reynolds calls the spiritual journey undertaken in Ulysses Joyce’s “comedy” and draws a comparison between Dante’s and Joyce’s respective endeavours to symbiotically combine completely different worlds: Joyce has taken Dante’s pattern and epistemology to reproduce in Dublin a spiritual journey, in conscious emulation of Dante’s similar use of Virgil, whose Aeneid in turn adapted Homer. Dante’s syncretism successfully met the challenge of providing a pagan guide for a Christian poet, an achievement closely observed by Joyce. I suggest that his transformation of Dante’s journey required a comparable boldness. He demonstrates simultaneously the continuing presence of Dante’s world in the Dublin of 1904, and the vast gulf between these worlds – a reading of Dante that is continuously informed by a sense of otherness arising from Joyce’s awareness of the relativity of modern man’s view of his universe. (Reynolds 1981: 9) Reynolds observes a development in Joyce’s understanding of the Commedia in the course of his career, reaching its climax with Finnegans Wake (cf.