Notes CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING HISTORY? 1. Irish Times, Weekend Section, September 3, 1994. 'Ceasefire' has sub­ sequently been reprinted in Longley's collection The Ghost Orchid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995, p. 39). The poem continues Longley's discovery in the classics, and in Homer particularly, of passages and incidents pertinent to the present. His collection before The Ghost Orchid, Gorse Fires (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1991), also contains moving, freely translated excerpts which press upon events in the North of Ireland. 2. 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth', Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), p. 177. 3. Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 167. 4. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 9. 5. Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992), pp.662-90. 6. 'The Irish Writer', Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and the Irish Writer, writings by W.B. Yeats and Thomas Kinsella (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), p. 66. 7. Francis Ledwidge: Selected Poems (Dublin: New Island Books, 1992), p. 11. 8. Field Work (London: Faber, 1979), p. 60. 9. Station Island (London: Faber, 1984), p. 37. 10. 'An Ulster Twilight', Krino, No.5, Spring 1988, p. 100. 11. Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 1994; London: Anvil Press, 1993. In the poem 'Irish Cuttings' from the latter collection, O'Driscoll has written a horrific and modern version of the aisling or vision poem in which Ireland is described as a young maiden, as an old farmer is blown up by a booby-trapped bomb in a copy of Playboy (p. 16). 12. 'Squarings', xli, Seeing Things (London: Faber, 1991), p. 101. 13. Guide to Kulchur (London: Peter Owen, 1952 reprint), pp. 60, 83. 14. Selected Prose ofT.S. Eliot, p. 38. 15. 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1979 edition), p. 233. 16. Padraic Fallon, Collected Poems (Manchester /Loughcrew: Carcanet/ Gallery Press, 1990), p. 16. 17. Terence Brown's Field Day pamphlet, 'The Whole Protestant Community: the making of a historical myth', dramatizes the circular and entrapping dominance of history on both sides of the religious divide: 'Since history is to be understood as a series of events occur­ ring as time passes but [also] as a permanently existing reality to which appeal can be made in order to endorse contemporary political deeds, a sense of historical repetition is inevitable' (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1985, p. 6). 207 208 Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation 18. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 3, 2,149. 19. See Chapter 6 below for a discussion of these issues in Heaney's writing. It is possible to discover, at least subliminally, some kind of reciprocal influence between Vendler's and Heaney's critical thinking about the uniqueness of the aesthetic. Heaney's lectures given as Oxford Professor of Poetry, collected as The Redress of Poetry (Faber: London, 1995), more readily acknowledge the pressure of historical context upon a poem than Vendler does. But ultimately (and rather repetititively) each lecture concludes by defending and celebrating the Keatsian 'fine excess' of poetry, its flight beyond all such forming con­ ditions, and the renewal that that flight can offer the individual reader: ' ... there is always a kind of homeopathic benefit', he claims, in experiencing the rhythmic life of the poem, which 'furthers the range of the mind's and the body's pleasures' and helps the reader the better to know him or herself (p. 37). Heaney's surprising celebration of the work of George Herbert (work so integral to the native English tradi­ tion) in the opening lecture establishing the idea of redress holding throughout the series perhaps also reveals the effect of Vendler's criti­ cal work on his own thinking. Vendler's The Poetry of George Herbert appeared in 1975, her book on Keats, of whom she finds Heaney the natural successor, in 1988. 20. 'A More Social Voice: "Field Work''', in The Art of Seamus Heaney, edited and introduced by Tony Curtis (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press 1982 (1985, 2nd edition)), pp. 104, 115. In describing how Heaney in other poems seems to seek to more directly involve himself in Irish 'facts of life', Curtis adopts a presumptuous holistic approach. He claims that the pastoral imagery in 'The Strand at Lough Beg' and 'Casualty' prove that 'For peace to return to Ulster the people have to re-establish the rhythm of the natural world' (p. 115). His reading of Heaney's casual reference to the fact that a hammer and a cracked jug were standing on a windowsill in 'At the Water's Edge' is even more inflationary in its desperate assertion of the poem as site of a unity of being unimpinged upon by those harsh 'facts': 'They are the male and female, the sense of belonging to a place, trees, water, construction and survival; they have the symbolic force for which Heaney has trav- elled ... he is again in touch with the elemental, the basic possibilities of life ... ' (p. 110). Writing from within the North of Ireland, Robert Welch has recently also accepted the space of the poem as one in which Heaney's transactions work to translate ordinary 'doings' into 'a different order of experience by the aura of mystery'. Poetry there­ fore offers a language which is freed from the intransigent and divi­ sive tug of those 'doings': on Heaney's 'Bone Dreams', Welch writes that 'There is a conflict between Ireland and England; it often seems insoluble to the mind trained in the discourses of politics, negotiation, opposition. It may be, in fact, insoluble. But a poem such as this wit­ nesses to a space human creativity can create where history is set aside and the problem is viewed objectively' (Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), Notes 209 pp. 260, 254). The nature of such objectivity is revealed when Welch claims that 'the country of writing is a country of movement .. .Inside it things flow together in a unity which can accommodate', alongside various mythic figures, 'Catholics, Presbyterians' (p. 283); the precise means by which the 'discourses' about ordinary worldly 'doings' are translated in the space of the poem remains in Welch's commentary mysterious, however. 21. Terry Eagleton has argued that organicist ideas have historically had little impact in Ireland, and that in this lies one of the main distinc­ tions between that country and England: 'From Burke and Coleridge to Arnold and Eliot, a dominant ideological device in Britain is to transmute history itself into a seamless evolutionary continuum .... Society itself, in this view, becomes a marvellous aesthetic organism, self-generating and self-contained. This is a much rarer sort of dis­ course in Ireland.' He attributes this rareness to the apocalyptic laying waste of the Irish countryside during the years of the Great Hunger: ' .. .in the British context history becomes Nature, in Ireland Nature becomes history. And this both in the sense that, in a largely pre­ industrial society, the land is the prime determinant of human life, and in the sense that in the Famine history appears with all the brute, aleatory power of a seismic upheaval, thus writing large the course of much Irish history' (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 4, 11). Several poems on the Famine, including' At a Potato Digging' and 'For the Commander of the "Eliza''', contribute to the anxious, terminal pastoralism conveyed in the title of Seamus Heaney's first collection, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber, 1966). The impact of the Famine on the historical vision of Thomas Kinsella and of Brendan Kennelly forms an impor­ tant feature in my discussions of them below. 22. Fortnight, No. 174, December 1979-January 1980. 23. 'Edna Longley in conversation with Carol Rumens', Krino No. 15, Spring 1994, p. 10. 24. Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986), p.196. 25. Ibid., p. 185. 26. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), p. 62. I discuss the particular impact of Longley's stance on her reading of individual poets - and, in her battles with Field Day, her surprising championing of the Republic's Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan - in Chapter 5 below. 27. Ibid., pp. 194,260. 28. The Mllsic of What Happens, p. 5 29. The Living Stream, p. 267. 30. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: RKP, 1986 paperback edition), p. 491. 31. Ibid., p. 261. 32. Ibid., pp. 30, 35. 33. Edna Longley is, as the opening chapter of Poetry in the Wars shows, vehemently opposed to 'Modernist-based or biased criticism' whose 210 Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation 'formalist emphases' she considers 'largely redundant in the presence of [poetry] where form has always been the sine qua non.' Against what she sees as the unnecessary disjunctions and emphases of mod­ ernism, its tendency to 'collapse history or anticipate the millenium', Longley favours a more 'evolutionary' approach: 'the history of forms comments on social conditions, and its pace cannot be forced' (pp. 13-15). Longley's rejection of modernism here echoes the terms of the distinction she draws between Protestant and Catholic imagery as displayed on murals and banners in the essay 'The Rising, the Somme and Irish Memory': ' ... Orange insignia work as reminders which are also warnings. They are not icons, but exempla or history-lessons: a heritage-pack as survival-kit. Republican iconography, on the other hand, merges memory into aspiration.