Irish Poetry and 'Internationalism': Variations on a Critical Theme

Irish Poetry and 'Internationalism': Variations on a Critical ThemeAuthor(s): Edna LongleySource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 30 (Spring - Summer, 2003), pp. 48-61Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736103 .

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Irish Poetry an^cj^tprnationalism': Variations on a Critical Theme

EDNA LONGLEY

I

want to complain about fuzzy uses of the word 'international' in criti?

cism of Irish poetry. A spoof blurb I once wrote may serve as epigraph:

X is one of Ireland's internationally minded young European poets. The

sly postmodern subversiveness of the poems reflects his/her spell in

Amsterdam's sex-industry, the ideas of Baudrillard and the mood of

German politics after die Wende. X currently works in an Irish pub in

Prague.

Irish poetry, like Irish society, is often congratulated on having become

more outward-looking. For Peggy O'Brien, 'a newfound self-confidence'

distinguishes poetry of our own period from the 'self-consciously' Irish lit?

erary revival. She says: 'Witness the cultural eclecticism, say, of Muldoon or

Ni Chuillean?in's immersion in Europe.'1 Well, witness the cultural eclecti?

cism, say, of Yeats or Beckett's immersion in Europe. Again, 'Out of

Ireland', the last chapter of John Goodby's Irish Poetry since 1950, ends:

'There is for Irish poetry now no "isolation".'2 This ignores the possibility that Irish poets might have been outward bound before some of their com?

patriots. Indeed the editors of the Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry boasted a decade ago: 'Irish poets . . . have always looked abroad.'3 Yet this

ignores another possibility: that looking out or abroad is not itself a literary value (nor, perhaps, is 'confidence'). Non-literary narratives lurk behind

these formulations, as they often do in accounts of Irish poetry. The first

narrative identifies poetic developments with the post-1960 expansion of

the Republic's political horizons ? the Europoem as a new currency. The

second is an older story of diaspora and links with continental Catholicism.

Either narrative can involve a backwards or sideways look since the implied

48 LONGLEY, 'Irish Poetry and Internationalism', Irish Review 30 (2003)



insular opposite is usually English poetry. Neither distinguishes mid-twenti?

eth-century Irish poems from their complex mesh of internal and external,

physical and intellectual contexts. Some threads in that mesh were failures

of critical conceptualization now replicated in retrospect. In fact, British and Irish critics share an anxiety of insularity that leads

them to polarize home and abroad as the locus of poetry. In The Irish

Review 28 Leontia Flynn wrote of Caitriona O'Reilly's The Nowhere

Birds: 'The collection has that Bloodaxe thing where a certain proportion of the poems have to be set in mainland Europe.' With mobility now rou?

tine, the quota is easily met. Meanwhile, cultural eclecticism has gone on

line. And there is a circularity whereby international conferences discuss

Irish poets' internationalism with respect to poems they might not have

written had they not attended international conferences or noticed the

weather in Japan. Owing to restrictive and coercive categories like 'exile',

'emigration' and 'colonialism', the question of Abroad in Irish literature has

been only patchily explored. Further, as Ciaran Carson's 'Ballad of HMS

Belfast' re-emphasized, the poetry of departures is not a literal enterprise. Thus Joep Leerssen's interesting concept of Irish 'auto-exoticism' can be

understood in creatively positive terms. Leerssen calls auto-exoticism 'a

mode of seeing, presenting and representing oneself in one's otherness'.4

Being abroad without leaving home is also a definition of poetry. But we have not disposed of 'internationalism' ? a hydra-headed beast ?

when we have disproved its more literal-minded applications to poetry. In

'Internationalism: a Breviary', Perry Anderson targets the fuzziness of inter?

nationalism as a political notion:

Few political notions are at once so normative and so equivocal as inter?

nationalism . . . while nationalism is of all political phenomena the most

value-contested ... no such schizophrenia of connotation affects inter?

nationalism: its implication is virtually always positive. But the price of

approval is indeterminacy . . . It is claimed on all sides as a value, but who

can identify it without challenge as a forced

Anderson's proposition broadly fits internationalism as a literary-critical notion too, including his view that this formerly radical mantra has been

stolen by the globalizing Right. The parallels will help me to question US

influenced ways of aligning the international with the 'modernist': the

critical systems that generated, for instance, Keith Turnas Oxford Anthology

of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (2001), published in New York.

Sean O'Brien has compared Tuma (an American) to Superman's chaotic

counterpart Bizarro 'who would escape now and again and ? with the best

of intentions ? make a complete bollix of the universe'.6 Yet Tuma's

LONGLEY, 'Irish Poetry and Internationalism', Irish Review 30 (2003) 49



cosmology, centred on 'modernist and international poetries'7 ? a bar?

barous plural ?

carries wider sanction.

Goodby's study is less bizarre. He begins with the 'international recogni? tion' accorded to Irish (especially Northern Irish) poetry since the 1960s.

Rightly, he queries internationalism as 'recognition': i.e., of'small nation

literatures whose largest audiences are located ... in more powerful states'.

Goodby's purpose, however, is not to expose an indeterminate criterion

but to establish that 'modernist' Irish poetry is more cosmopolitan than

poetry whose Trishness' allegedly popularizes it abroad. He seeks to correct

perceptions of Irish poetry as 'conservative (by comparison with US poet?

ry) and anomalous (by comparison with British poetry)'. Yet he also

reinstates such perceptions: 'This is not to say that Irish poetry is not, gen?

erally speaking, anomalous or conservative in comparison with

Anglo-American, or general Western norms. Nor is it to deny that these

factors have made it unique, at least in European/US terms, and given it

something of its peculiar interest.'8 Whereas Goodby rather patronizingly

opposes modern Irish poetry to Anglo-American 'norms', I would suggest that ? thanks to Yeats ? it has had significant (if academically undernoted)

agency in the dialectic of norms and forms. Paradoxically, Goodby accepts nationalist structures of thinking about Irish poetry in order to contradict

them with his version of internationalism.

Anderson defines nationalism as 'an outlook that treats the nation as the

highest political value'; internationalism as 'any outlook, or practice, that

tends to transcend the nation towards the wider community, of which

nations continue to form the principal units'. ('Cosmopolitanism' occupies a more

purely transcendental plane, carrying a citizen-of-the world pass?

port whose suppression of the nation makes it ever suspect.) Anderson then

argues that the history of internationalism 'is best mapped against [the

shifting] co-ordinates of nationalism'. Most relevant to literary criticism are

those linked co-ordinates which Anderson calls 'the operative definition of

the nation' and the 'prevalent philosophical idiom' of nationalism. His

starting-point is the Enlightenment when 'the ideals of patriotism and cos?

mopolitanism marched together'.That equilibrium was upset by Herderian

'romantic nationalism' whose mental world 'was no longer cosmopolitan, but in valuing cultural diversity as such, it tacitly defended a kind of differ?

entiated universalism'.9

'Differentiated universalism' is where Yeats comes in, as when he desired

Irish poets to emulate American poetry's nativist turn and praised Emerson

as an antidote to 'cosmopolitan water-gruel'.10 Yet soon Yeats was

obliged

to contradict those for whom the nation was the highest literary value. He

asserted in 1894: 'The true ambition is to make criticism as international




and literature as National as possible.'11 A decade later, in 'Poetry and Tradi?

tion', he was declaring: 'while seeing all in the light of European literature

[I] found my symbols of expression in Ireland'.12 These well-known pas?

sages exemplify a gyre whereby Irish pressures lead Yeats to identify literary

practice and criticism with an international or extra-national field of oper? ations. In 'The Day of the Rabblement' Joyce rebukes Yeats for not

accepting this necessity at all times, and hence 'surrendering to the trolls'.

The analogous process traced by Anderson is the rise of international

socialism in response to nation-state capitalism.

This national-international gyre, with its partly rhetorical character, with its aspect as a quarrel within the artistic self, set a pattern

- as in the

argument between Daniel Corkery and Sean O'Faolain. Nationalist literary criticism still suspects the international or cosmopolitan in certain literary

guises. In the 1980s Seamus Deane wrote equivocally: 'Many Irish writers, sensitive to the threat of provincialism, have tried to compensate for it by

being as cosmopolitan as possible. In consequence, they became citizens of

the world by profession.'13 Here Deane sees 'trying to be cosmopolitan' as

denial of Ireland. Yet deliberate cosmopolitanism is usually inseparable from

a writer's relations with Irish ? or Scandinavian ? trolls.

Nationalist literary criticism has shifted its co-ordinates since the 1980s

which, according to Anderson's scheme, should affect 'internationalism'.

On a wider front, internationalism is now more positively conceived as sig?

nifying Irish cultural power in the world. A less isolationist but still

identitarian nationalism often rhetorically converges with internationalism.

Thus the editor of Being Irish proclaims:

The end to introspection, the turning outwards to the world and the

new self-confidence which are the results of both the Celtic Tiger expe?

rience and the involvement in Europe have had other remarkable

effects. Our cultural influence extends through the whole world in

many different forms. This process has been called the hibernicization of

Europe but it is fair now to talk about the hibernicization of the world.

Our music, dance, films, pubs, literature, theatre, athletes are every?

where.14

This not untypical gush hardly reinstates an Enlightenment equilibrium.

Rather, it is 'differentiated universalism' as ethnic boosterism, internation?

alism as extroverted Irishness. In poetry criticism, convergences of

internationalism and nationalism manifest a latent tendency. For the editors

of Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s: 'Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Samuel Beckett [and] Denis Devlin . . . shared an admiration

for the anti-realist and internationalist writing of Joyce [and rejected] Yeats

LONGLEY, Irish Poetry and Internationalism', Irish Review 30 (2003) 51



as poetic ancestor-figure'.15 Besides implying that Yeats was not 'anti-realist

and internationalist' and that Joyce is never realist, this scenario overlooks

the possibility of nationalist impulses within a professed internationalism.

Some Irish invocations of Eliot or Pound as poetic exemplars, whether in

the 1930s or today, challenge Yeats's authority not just as a 'formalist' but as

Anglo-Irish progenitor of the Irish Revival. Patrick Crotty comments: 'The

"Irish modernists" share with the Kinsella/Montague generation an eager? ness to accommodate European and American influences. Internationalism

and nationalism are close companions in Ireland as they are in Scotland, where poets from MacDiarmid to Kenneth White have cultivated a cos?

mopolitan formal lineage to underscore their separateness from an insular

English tradition.'16 Nor has Irish criticism really probed the (post-dated,

Anglo-American, academic) category of modernism itself relative to Yeats's

role in the making of modern poetry.

Despite Goodby, and despite English poetry's own vocal neo-modernist

cohort, poetic Irishness is often seen as more compatible with internation?

alism than poetic Englishness (Philip Larkin's jokes gave hostages to

fortune). Witness Dillon Johnston's The Poetic Economies of England and Ire?

land 1912?2000 which valuably broaches internationalism within the

archipelago but succumbs to Irish boosterism:

One of the most certifiable and important differences between post

Second World War English and Irish poets concerns their facility with

secondary or tertiary languages, the Irish being relatively polyglot com?

pared to the English. Although we can name famous translators among

the English poets . . . most grew up insular and appear to be reasonably

content with their one superior language . . .The bilingual English-Irish

education in the Republic and among many Catholics in the North

partly accounts for such facility. Yet even Protestant poets . . . and poets

who otherwise had little access to Irish . . . made other languages, espe?

cially Latin and French, central to . . . their writing. Generally, Irish

poets were more self-conscious about their language and more aware of

the relativity of language.17

It does not strike Johnston that 'awareness of the relativity of language' (his

single accuracy) has lately been most pronounced in Northern Irish poetry, and that there might be further reasons for this. Again, as Adrian Kelly shows in Compulsory Irish: Language and Education in Ireland (2002), the

extent to which southern Irish schools had to carry a failed Gaelicization

policy largely proved an educational disaster. Today the UK and Republic come equal bottom of the European 'polyglot' league.

Is there any substantive distinction between how poets from all parts of

our islands have negotiated foreign or ancient poetry since Arthur Symons

52 LONGLEY, Irish Poetry and Internationalism', Irish Review 30 (2003)



published The Symbolist Movement in Literature? Or since the Penguin Mod?

ern European poets series began? Or since Ovid was collectively

metamorphosed? Poetry Review (London) has been flying the international

flag for years, if with evident anxiety of insularity, in issues with titles like

'The International Brigade', 'New Maps of World Poetry' and 'The New

Internationalism'. Dennis O'Driscoll, a frequent contributor to such sur?

veys, published in 1995 a rather gloomy article on Irish poetry's 'Foreign Relations' which concluded: 'On the whole ... it must be said that the

curiosity of most Irish poets and readers is severely limited, so that outside

developments are discovered late and only those foreign poets [this includes poets from Britain] who have made unignorably large reputations become known here.'18 O'Driscoll's gloom needs qualification, since real

poets - to use a theoretically incorrect term - are endlessly curious about

poetry. He also wrote 'Foreign Relations' before Metre's diplomatic mission

got going. But his word 'curiosity' pinpoints the sine qua non of a function?

al internationalism ? with the proviso that curiosity does not always write

essays about itself for the convenience of academics. Whether imitatively or

dialectically, it may inform deeper structures.

One measure of trans cultural trace-elements is translation. Yet translation

can be a one-way street. And is there any way out of the catch-22 that any

poet seizes on the familiar in the foreign to elaborate a pre-existing myth or trope (Paul Durcan's Going Home to Russia)? Only rarely, perhaps, does

translation, in either its strict or loose sense, become a two-way transaction

mutually extending horizons of expectation. Ciaran Carson sketches an

ideal scenario when he says of his translations from Rimbaud, Mallarm?

and Baudelaire:

Language may be dodgy but we need it to talk with . . . The funny thing is that I think the essences of things can cross space and time, maybe

because of that very dodginess ... I thought of these very French poets

as being very Irish, and tried to make myself into something very

French. I hope it was a fair exchange.19

Carson affirms the credo (to which I subscribe) that poetry potentially

smuggles strangeness across frontiers. Yet the French symbolists' appeal (as to Derek Mahon) is also psychologically, aesthetically and culturally telling.

Carson stresses their 'negotiations with the idea of a republic, with free?

dom, whether it be of language or of morals or with drugs'. In 'The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas'

Pierre Bourdieu outlines the barriers to 'furthering the internationalization

of intellectual life'. The most obvious difficulty is that 'texts circulate with?

out their context . . . they don't bring with them the field of production of




which they are a product, and the fact that the recipients, who are them?

selves in a different field of production, re-interpret the texts in accordance

with the structure of the field of reception . . . generate[s] some formidable

misunderstandings'. Bourdieu surveys the conditions under which texts

enter a 'field of reception': the self-interested 'gate-keepers', 'the complex network of international exchanges between holders of dominant academic

posts', etc. He also makes a point central to internationalism, modernism

and Irish poetry:

Heretical imports are often the work of marginals in the field, bringing a

message, a position of force from a different field, which they use to try

and shore up their own position . . .

Foreign writers are often subject to

such instrumental use, and forced to serve purposes which perhaps they

would refuse or reject in their country of origin. One can often use a

foreign thinker to attack domestic thinkers in this way.

As it happens, several critical advocates of Irish neo-modernism are English

(double heretics?), while neo-modernist English and Irish poets appeal to

the US cavalry. Despite the obstacles, Bourdieu hoped that international

circulation could improve beyond 'alliances or hostilities based on mutual

misunderstandings'.20 Misunderstandings or

part-misreadings are of course

the very stuff of poetry, as in Carson's Franco-Hibernian transvestite trips or Seamus Heaney's Polish pilgrimages. But perhaps they should be less

prevalent in literary criticism ? especially in Irish criticism, whose volatility

means that orthodoxy and heresy, like nationalism and internationalism, are

not easily decideable.

Contextless importations of (usually post-colonial) theory affect the cat?

egory of internationalism. One example is an essay in Modernism and

Empire called 'The anti-colonial modernism of Patrick Pearse'. Here

Pearse's 'bi-culturalism' (English father, Irish mother) is seen as enabling him to occupy 'a position in the multiplicity of cultures and traditions

which characterised both the modernist mode of thought and twentieth

century Ireland'.21 This dubious equation of an epistemology with a

country capitalizes on the prestige of modernism by turning Pearse into

Joyce. Conversely, in studies which overstress Joyce's affiliation to Irish

nationalism, Joyce mutates into Pearse. So Pearse becomes a nationalist

internationalist, Joyce an internationalist nationalist. Joyce himself might have seen all this as a 'surrender to the trolls'. Certainly it engrosses inter?

nationalism in the sense of the aesthetic or intellectual space whereby Irish

cultural conditions came to be mediated in the matrix of modern litera?

ture. Here we do, of course, have influential models of international

curiosity and exchange. Joyce's portrait of the artist as omnivorous if




pretentious reader is to the point. As regards poetry, much still depends on

Yeats's relation to French symbolism, English aestheticism and his Ameri?

can formal 'opposite' (as he called him) Ezra Pound.

I argue elsewhere22 that the Yeats?Pound dialectics about poetic form,

culminating in Yeats's introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse

(1936), largely stake out the field of structural possibility for 'modern poet?

ry' in English. These dialectics pivot on how the dynamics of form

negotiate the dynamics of flux and history. Yet in surveys of modernism

Yeats's aesthetic is often read through that of Eliot or Pound whose ver?

sions of modern literary history carry such weight in the weighty American academy. Critics cite his poetry to validate principles that run

counter to its theory and practice. Now modernism is quite as fuzzy a cat?

egory as internationalism. Put the two together (as Keith Turna does) and

you are asking for trouble. Astradur Eysteinssen notes: 'the majority of crit?

ical studies of modernism . . . are mostly restricted to the very national

categories that modernism is calling into question, or they are confined to

the (only slightly wider) Anglo-American sphere'.23 Thus 'international

modernism' too can mask national premises and foreclose analysis of

transnational literary interactions, including those between Ireland, Eng? land and the US.

There is, perhaps, a distinctively American brand of literary-critical internationalism: internationalism in one country. (By the same token, Irish

and English critics sometimes equate American with international.) Perry Anderson argues that in modern American usage, political internationalism

departs from its usual counterpoint with nationalism:

In the US from early in this century . . . the term internationalism

acquired a pregnantly different antonym: here its opposite

was isolation?

ism. The antithesis of the two terms . . . makes clear their common

presupposition: at stake was never the primacy of national interest,

which formed the common ground of both, but simply the best way of

realizing it. The historical origin of the couplet lies in the peculiar com?

bination created by the American ideology of a republic simultaneously

exceptional and universal . . .This is a janus-faced messianism, allowing

either for a fervent cult of the homeland or for a missionary redemption

of the world . . .Today, American hegemony has . . . been able to impose

its self-description as a

global norm.24

If Tuma has launched a globalizing mission to redeem British and Irish

poetry from un-American activities, an odd view of internationalism also

characterizes a wholly American anthology: the Norton Postmodern Ameri?

can Poetry (1994). Its editor Paul Hoover writes:




In his poem 'The Rest' (1913) Ezra Pound alluded to the United States

as a culturally backward country

. . . But by the end of World War II, the

United States had become the primary exporter, as well as market, for

advanced ideas in the arts. Today the young Ezra Pound would leave his

Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote not for London and Paris, but rather

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, San Francisco's

New Langton Arts, or the Nuyorican Poets' cafe. His work would be

published in such magazines as Sulfur, Conjunctions

. . . O-BLEK, Temblor,

The World and Hambone, and his books would be published by such

presses as Black Sparrow, Coffee House, North Point . . .25

Surely this exudes a sad parochialism as Poundian chickens come home to

roost. Or perhaps it belongs in an anthology called Being American. Tuma

does admit a lack of curiosity in the US about British and Irish poetry ?

but his illogical solution is to highlight the Americanized bits.

Tuma's anthology is actually quite conventional in its earlier stages, as in

his provision of the usual Norton framing. Where it becomes 'revisionist' is

in the number of contemporary 'neo-modernist' or 'language' poets select?

ed, such as his Irish contingent Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully and Catherine

Walsh. He espouses the cause of poets who feel marginalized by what, in a

common paranoid and superior vocabulary, is invariably called the 'main?

stream'. He writes: 'it is the contemporary poetry that is most obviously indebted to an international modernism that has fared worst in many of

the anthologies of British and Irish poetry published over the last thirty

years [thus] perpetuating the influence of the Movement's anti-modernism

as it emerged in the 1950s'. He finds 'the logic that declared a British (or

Irish) poetry engaged with modernist traditions somehow "foreign" to

traditions purportedly more native or indigenous altogether suspect'. While

attacking what he regards as the fetish of'Englishness' ?

though wisely

wary of Trishness' ? Tuma claims, in exceptionalist-universalist style, to be

unmarked by nationality:

Some readers . . . will be eager to point out that I am an American, and

that my insistence that twentieth-century British and Irish poetry be

recognized for its contributions to modernism reflects American values.

Forms of this insidious representational logic, in which national identity is paramount and citizenship magically confers expertise have had a

devastating effect on much of the poetry produced in this century . . .

there is ... a problem with the use of reified or shallow notions of tradi?

tion to exclude whole ranges of poetry.26

Yes indeed, including reified or shallow notions of modernism-as-tradition.

Sean O'Brien comments: 'There is no dominant notion of "Englishness"




in English poetry ... It is far more of an issue forTuma, who feels the need

to go on throwing (or snatching) off the Saxon yoke to the crack of doom, as though assuming that to be unconvinced by Olson means being in thrall

to Betjeman.'27

Ireland mostly remains in brackets during Tuma's Anglo-American in

house quarrel. Essentially, Tuma fails to understand 'tradition' as the

aesthetic dialectics that historically constituted, and continue to constitute, modern poetry either within or between Anglophone countries. He nei?

ther registers the variety of ways in which Irish and British poets have

engaged with a variety of American poetry (including several modernisms) nor follows the archipelago's internal poetic dialectics and diverse 'fields of

cultural production'. He writes loosely: 'it is simply no longer possible to

pretend that that modernism never happened in English poetry, and with

Hugh MacDiarmid . . . Scotland also obviously was home to a poetry con?

scious of international modernism . . . Ireland too had a modernist practice

beyond the towering presence of William Butler Yeats, who strikes some

readers as a transitional figure, and others as a modernist . . . MacDiarmid

might be read as simultaneously engaged with international poetic prac? tices and local Scottish ones.'28

That passage illustrates a recurrent contradiction between avant-gardism as immutable and avant-gardism as historical. Is international modernism a

long-branded global franchise ? McModernism ? of which poets 'locally' become 'conscious', the national being sealed off from the international?

Or is it irresistibly progressive, having rendered Yeats 'transitional' and all

previous structures obsolete or conservative? Or should modern Anglo?

phone poetry (including the fore-mentioned critical rhetorics) be

historicized in a way that reckons with all its fluid contexts and dialectics?

Given Tuma's polemic, it's a cop-out to leave Yeats hanging in the wind.

Further, how can a cultist relishing of'obscurity', in both senses, coexist

with concerted academic bidding for hegemony? John Goodby gives the

show away when he says that Medbh McGuckian's poetry 'flaunts an

obscurity without parallel among mainstream Irish poets'.29 Tuma mentions MacDiarmid without Patrick Crotty's sense of how

Scottish specifics complicate 'modernism'. MacDiarmid's best work does

not conform to the ideological terms, reactionary as well as revolutionary, in which he promoted modernism as an origin-myth for his own and

Scottish poetry. This mix already showed itself in his response to the Irish

Revival where he was more drawn to Corkery than to Yeats. And his well

known comparison of Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary to Ulysses is

another case of transcultural creative misreading. Joyce helped to license

Synthetic Scots, but MacDiarmid's archaisms are grafted onto the idiom




and syntax of his Langholm childhood and onto traditional verse-forms.

Above all, his early work is immensely conscious ('misunderstandings'

included) of Ireland's role in the modern movement. Some Scottish poets are brilliantly experimental: Edwin Morgan comes to mind. But once he

does so, so do a formal versatility and eclecticism that seem alien to the

fundamentalist drive of'language-poetry' theorists to purge poetry of

every attribute by which it has traditionally been enjoyed. Moreover, as

Bourdieu says regarding the self-purifying momentum of French poetry towards both expulsion of the 'poetic' and independence of external con?

texts: 'Paradoxically in those fields which are the site of a permanent

revolution, the avant-garde producers are determined by the past even in

their innovations which aim to go beyond it, and which are inscribed, as in

the original matrix, in the space of possibles, which is immanent in the

field.'30 Self-consuming avant-gardism is not the inevitable end of poetry. And if it is characteristic of art (as contrasted with other forms of cultural

production) to revisit its 'original matrix', Irish poetry may have helped to

keep open the entire 'space of possibles' by maintaining a keener sense of

modern poetry's dialectical origins.

My final critical example is J. C. C. Mays writing on Trevor Joyce. While

Mays admits that 'Irish writers do not fall into two camps labelled national

and international . . . traditional and experimental', he finds most Irish

poetry formally 'peculiar' (Goodby's adjective too) owing to independent Ireland's 'cultural conservatism' ?

surely another confusion of political his?

tory with literary history. Mays says:

Dictionary words began to enter Joyces vocabulary [in the early 1970s] . .

.Joyce is interested in a different kind of words and in a different way

of using them. He is indifferent to the semantic webbing that underlies

ordinary surface meaning. He does not pursue the interp?n?tration of

undertones or overtones as they thicken to the social gaze

. . . Meanings

and sounds are preserved in their faceted angularity, lumpen and non

multiplying . . .

language is not a digest of experience.31

Well, whoever thought it was? Here richer speech-acts, both inside and

outside poetry, are presumed to lack all metaphysical complexity. Even

'semantic webbing' becomes 'ordinary surface meaning' as it reaches the

'social gaze' ('social gaze' signals the would-be anti-bourgeois radicalism in

language-poetry rationales). Single words are no more or less abstract than

multiplied words; 'dictionary words' only appear to exist in social isolation;

and syntax fights back, if in impoverished form, as 'faceted angularity'. Trevor Joyce is not to blame for Mays's readings. But not every diction?

ary-loving poet thinks that words or poets can opt out of semantic webs or




that it is heresy to weave them. Poetry may be aleatory without being arbi?

trary. Ciaran Carson suggests how it turns webs into fishing-nets:

Looking for rhymes and scansions, I use the appropriate dictionaries and

thesauruses a lot. These books continuously remind one of one's igno?

rance of language. There are always words you never come across till

then. And almost always, the word that you have to hunt for in a

dictionary or thesaurus is the right word, the exact word; yet you never

used it until then. It makes me feel that there's some kind of hidden law

within the language that makes you stumble on the right things. You

don't find the right word, it finds you.32

Carson's interest in 'the right word', let alone 'rhymes and scansions', seems

unlikely to appeal to Mays, who indeed writes rather grudgingly of a poet who should cause him to revise his thesis: 'Ciaran Carson's inventiveness

makes his writings coruscate with a professional high polish that Maurice

Scully might eschew because it overlays the truth of the materials.'33 An

appeal to 'truth' is inconsistent in this context.

Muldoon, Carson and McGuckian can be called, in diversely inventive

senses, 'language poets'. That is, in comparison ?

and perhaps in relation ?

to the practice of their Northern Irish seniors they tend to raise the anar?

chic profile of language over its formal shaping. Here socio-linguistics and

metaphysics interpenetrate. It is also as if they subject theYeatsian stanza to

different kinds of (James) Joycean breakdown. Except that ? as in Joyce too ? the flip side of language relativistically slip-sliding away is often elaborate

pattern and refrain. After all, Finnegans Wake is simply the longest pun ever

made. Too much loose talk about internationalism (although there is abun?

dant scope for precise talk) sometimes diverts attention from the really

strange goings-on in contemporary Irish poetry. 'Postmodernism' is invoked by some critics of Muldoon, Carson and

McGuckian without regard to Irish circumstances that helped to constitute

modern poetry in the first place. And if too little poetic history is written

from aYeatsian-symbolist as opposed to a Poundian-modernist angle, this is

partly owing to the power of the American academy, partly to the prob? lematics of Yeats's Irish reception. Further, the latterday inclination to

oppose Yeats to Joyce (like Rangers to Celtic) falsifies aesthetic dialectics

and overlaps which continue in Ireland. Thus a combination of national

and international perceptions, both of which polarize the national and

international, means that (as regards academic criticism) Ireland has more

successfully exported individual talents than tradition. Tuma and Mays

anachronistically make the English 'Movement' of the 1950s the straw

antagonist of their neo-modernist poets. This suggests either ignorance or




denial of how contemporary Northern Irish poetry might require critics to

reappraise the international trajectory of modern poetry in English.

Notes and References

1 Peggy O'Brien (ed.), Irish Women's Poetry 1967?2000 (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest

University Press, 1999), p. xix.

2 John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manches?

ter University Press, 2000), p. 320.

3 Peter Fall?n and Derek Mahon (eds.), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry

(London: Penguin, 1990), p. xxi.

4 Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 37.

5 Perry Anderson, 'Internationalism: A Breviary', New Left Review 14, March-April

2002, pp. 5-25 (5). 6 See Sean O'Brien, 'Bizarro's Bounty', review of Keith Tuma (ed.), Anthology of Twenti?

eth-Century Irish & British Poetry, in Poetry Review 91, 2 (Summer 2001), p. 109?10.

7 Keith Tuma (ed.), Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xxiv.

8 Goodby, op. cit., p. 1.

9 Anderson, op. cit., p. 6?9.

10 John P. Frayne (ed.), Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan,

1970), vol. I, p. 289.

11 John Kelly and Eric Domville (eds.), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 3 vols.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), vol. I (1865-1895), p. 409.

12 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 248.

13 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals (London: Faber, 1985), p. 156.

14 Paddy Logue (ed.), Being Irish (Dublin: Oak Tree Press, 2000), p. xvii.

15 Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (ed.), Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s

(Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 1.

16 Patrick Crotty (ed.), Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995), p. 4.

17 Dillon Johnston, The Poetic Economies of England and Ireland, 1912?2000 (London: Pal

grave, 2001), p. 170.

18 Dennis O'Driscoll, 'Foreign Relations: Irish and International Poetry', in O'Driscoll,

Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings (Loughcrew: Gallery Press,

2001), p. 91.

19 Ciaran Carson, interviewed by John Brown, in Brown, In the Chair (Galway: Salmon,

2002), pp. 151-2.

20 See Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas',

in Richard Schusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),

pp. 220-8.

21 M?ire ni Fhlath?in, 'The anti-colonial modernism of Patrick Pearse', in Howard J. Booth & Nigel Rigby (eds.), Modernism and Empire (Manchester: Manchester Universi?

ty Press, 2000), pp. 156-74 (171). 22 See Edna Longley, '"Modernism", Poetry and Ireland', in Marianne Thormahlen (ed.),

Elusive Modernism (London: Palgrave, 2003) forthcoming. 23 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1990), p. 86.

24 Anderson, op. cit., pp. 23-4.




25 Paul Hoover (ed.), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (New York: Nor?

ton, 1994), p. xxvii.

26 Tuma, op. cit., pp. xxi?xxiii.

27 O'Brien, op. cit., p. 109.

28 Tuma, op. cit., pp. xxii, xxv.

29 Goodby, op. cit., p. 238.

30 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p.

188.

31 J. C. C. Mays, 'Scriptor ignotus, with the fire in him now', Dublin Review 6, Spring

2002, pp. 42-65 (46, 53). 32 Brown, op. cit., p. 150.

33 Mays, op. cit., p. 48.




Documents

Irish Poetry and 'Internationalism': Variations on a Critical Theme