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Five Contemporary Irish Poets and America Seth M Martin a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Un View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository The Poetics of Return: Five Contemporary Irish Poets and America Seth M Martin A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: George Lensing Erin Carlston Patrick O’Neill Thomas Reinert Christopher Armitage © 2013 Seth M Martin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT SETH M MARTIN: The Poetics of Return: Five Contemporary Irish Poets and America (Under the direction of George Lensing) A thematic study grounded in transnational and transatlantic studies of modern and postmodern literatures, this dissertation examines five contemporary Irish poets – John Montague, Padraic Fiacc, James Liddy, Seamus Heaney, and Eavan Boland – whose separation from Ireland in the United States has produced a distinct body of work that I call, “the poetics of return.” As the biological heirs of the Civil War generation and the intellectual heirs of the Irish high modernists, these poets are some of the leading lights of the renaissance in Irish literary arts after midcentury. This dissertation argues that an important aspect of this era has been its reevaluation of narratives of political and artistic exile; those created by nationalists and republicans, on the one hand, and modernists such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, on the other. Drawing on the criticism of Patrick Ward and Seamus Deane, I argue that the atomization of the critical vocabulary of exile has enabled modern poets greater means to consider the cultural anxieties surrounding their separation from Ireland. Accordingly they have become less interested in the meaning of leaving Ireland and more interested in the meaning of return. This project engages a range of scholarly literature devoted to the Irish poets and poetry of the last half century and reevaluates a number of standard readings and assumptions. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At some point in our academic lives we are all advised to follow our bliss. I find, as I read over these completed chapters, that I have come close to doing that here. While the work itself has presented its own peaks and valleys, I have found consistent strength and solace in the many conversations with friends, family, and colleagues who have supported, advised, critiqued, and inspired my thinking. George Lensing’s insight and persistence in keeping me moving in a positive and fruitful direction – often despite my best efforts – have been a gift to me as a student and a model for me as an aspiring teacher. I also thank the members of my committee – Erin Carlston, Thomas Reinert, Christopher Armitage, and Patrick O’Neill – who have been generous with their time, wisdom, and, most of all, patience. Dr. Carlston, in particular, was instrumental in helping me transition from my first dissertation project to this one. Important, too, has been the financial support and travel grants provided by various departments of UNC-CH, particularly the Graduate School, as well as the research support provided by the librarians overseeing the Rare Books Collection at Round Wilson Library. Looking beyond Chapel Hill, I would like to thank the English faculty at the University of the South, Sewanee for giving me institutional support in my final year of writing and to a number of scholars who have helped to shape this project, including Nicholas Allen of the University of Georgia, Daniel Tobin of Emerson College, Michael Parker of the University of Lancashire, Richard Rankin Russell of Baylor University, James Chapson of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and Andrew B. Leiter of Lycoming College. iv For arduous and thankless task of helping me edit the final drafts, I am indebted to the good sense of Jonathan Williams. My deepest appreciation goes out to my parents, the Rev. Paul and Christine Martin, who have encouraged me during a lifetime of learning. Lastly and most importantly, I wish to thank my wife, Grey Gibson Martin, without whose guidance, trust, and encouragement I would not have been able to complete this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. SOME NOTES ON EXILE AND RETURN ................................. 1 Chapter I THE DOUBLE BIRTH OF JOHN MONTAGUE AND PADRAIC FIACC ...................................................................... 16 Narratives of Succession ........................................................................ 31 American Influences on Montague’s The Rough Field ......................... 39 Fiacc’s “Hellfast” ................................................................................... 59 Prodigal Sons ......................................................................................... 75 II BIRTH, EXILE, AND POSSIBLE RETURN: JAMES LIDDY AS VOYAGEUR ....................................................................... 80 Personal Odyssey, Poetic Departures .................................................... 87 The Irish American Voyageur ................................................................ 95 Arriving At Nowhere ........................................................................... 107 III IN EXTREMIS: SEAMUS HEANEY’S AMERICAN VISION ................................................................................................ 112 Of Bogs, Prairies, and Wastes .............................................................. 117 Imaginative Return in the California Poems ........................................ 135 Vision and Apparition .......................................................................... 154 III FAILURE TO RETURN IN EAVAN BOLAND’S THE LOST LAND ................................................................................ 158 Journeys and Maps ............................................................................... 162 Ireland. Absence. Daughter. ................................................................. 175 vi CONCLUSION. THE “NEW IRISH” EXILES .......................................................... 193 WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................... 205 vii INTRODUCTION SOME NOTES ON EXILE AND RETURN “It is suicide to be abroad but what is it to be at home?… A lingering dissolution.” (Samuel Beckett, “All that Fall”)1 Exile, most agree, is a tired subject in Irish literary studies. In his Field Day pamphlet “Heroic Styles” (1984) Seamus Deane warned fellow Irish writers that they were guilty of “fetishizing” exile.2 Two decades later Michael Kenneally wrote to fellow critics that “the synonymous association of Irish writers with exile and emigration is…a donné in literary criticism.”3 In plainer terms, Gerald Dawe dismissed most discussions of exile as “faddish talk.”4 Poets, too, share in the fatigue. In his light verse sequence The Prince of the Quotidian (1994), Paul Muldoon bristled at Deane’s description of him in the Times Literary Supplement as a poet “in exile.” Flanked at Princeton University by expatriate dissidents like Joseph Brodsky and Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, Muldoon was eager to beg off of Deane’s comment: The term serves mostly to belittle 1 Samuel Beckett, “All That Fall” (1957) The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984) 6. 2 Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea” Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985) 57–58. 3 Michael Kenneally, [untitled] New Hibernia Review 8.1 (Spring 2004) 146. 4 Gerald Dawe, “A Testimony to the Human Spirit” Irish News (28 April 1994). the likes of Brodsky and Padilla and is not appropriate of me.5 And there are stranger examples. Eamonn Wall, for instance, describing what made his friend James Liddy’s poetry unique, explained that Liddy “could never feel like an exile and he has never written through the voice of one.”6 In his memoir, The Doctor’s House, Liddy himself was less dismissive about the importance of exile to his poetic voice, yet he sensed a hint of the poseur or the cynic in the term’s use: I am an exile, I am not an exile. “Exile” has enough alienation in it to be a real condition, yet it can be read as part of the flashy itinerant supernaturalism of the voyageur. The spirit whence it is employed or patroned.7 It seems that in the current literary climate it is the Irish critic’s duty to be weary of exile and the poet’s duty to be wary of it. Yet exile persists – stubbornly, inevitably – in critical and creative conversations about Irish poetry, and the longer it remains the more the relevant question becomes not if it should but why it does. The following passage from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism is often evoked as though it contains the seeds of an answer. “Exile,” Said writes, is predicated on the existence of, love for, and real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss…No one today is purely one thing.8 Is exile then the inescapable condition of modernity? It stands to reason that poets from Ireland, whose history since Tudor colonization is suffused with bitter arguments over 5 Paul Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian (Wake Forest, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1994) 36. 6 Eamonn Wall, “From El to Axel’s: Irish Poets Stateside,” Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy, ed. Michael S. Begnal (Galway: Arlen House, 2006) 29. 7 James
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