Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

The Future of Irish Poetry?

The Future of Irish Poetry? Few readers would question Seamus Heaney’s position as the preeminent Irish poet of the second half of the twentieth century. But few of us have a good grasp of who his successors may be, which poets those of us with an interest in Irish writing might want to read next, which poets readers in future years are likely to see as filling the shoes of Heaney and his peers. Because he does have peers—poets just as rewarding as Heaney for those who love poetry but equally below the radar for readers who have room on their reading lists for only one poet at a time from the literature of a country other than their own. Heaney is, and has been, but one of a group of talented poets to emerge from Northern Ireland in the 1960s. He tends to be grouped with Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and James Simmons, with younger Northern poets such as Mebdh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Ciarán Carson following in their footsteps.And beyond these names, Ireland both north and south continues to distinguish itself in the field of poetry. In 2005 Wake Forest University Press published The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, volume 1, the first in a projected series of anthologies of Irish poetry. I know of no better place to start learning about what has been happening recently on the 193 Tillinghast pt 3 8/20/08 3:26 PM Page 193 poetry scene in Ireland. The poets chosen by Jefferson Holdridge for this anthology are Harry Clifton, born in 1952; Dennis O’Driscoll, born in 1954; David Wheatley, born in 1970; Sinéad Morrissey, born in 1972; and Caitríona O’Reilly, born in 1973. It is illuminating to read these poets against a background of those who preceded them in Ireland. One thing W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney, four major poets in the generations preceding the current one, had in common was their preoccupation with their native country both as a nation and as a place. This is not surprising, but when asked to define Ireland, each would have given a different answer. Yeats as a young man delved into Irish mythology and folklore as a member of the Celtic Revival movement, dreamed of an independent Ireland, and was a major participant in the effort to define the young nation once it came into existence. He was a Senator in the Free State and spokesman for a broad and tolerant national self-definition which took into account the diversity of religions and ethnic strains that had gone into creating modern Ireland. Yeats’s definition of Ireland ultimately lost out to the narrow and destructive nationalism that ultimately ushered in the repressive climate of deValera’s Ireland, which I have alluded to here and there—an insular, priest-ridden society, which managed to outlaw divorce and contraception and ban most major works of modern Irish literature. Though most of his career was spent in London, where he worked for the BBC, Louis MacNeice experienced the excesses of religious intolerance firsthand as the son of an Anglican clergyman growing up in an Ulster characterized by bigotry and ignorance on both sides of the cultural divide. Commenting on the old cliché about Ireland as a “land of saints and scholars,” he wrote in “Autumn Journal”: The land of scholars and saints: Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, The Future of Irish Poetry? Tillinghast pt 3 8/20/08 3:26 PM Page 194 Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints, The born martyr and the gallant ninny; The grocer drunk with the drum, The land-owner shot in his bed, the angry voices Piercing the broken fanlight in the slum, The shawled woman weeping at the garish altar. Patrick Kavanagh’s focus on the local can be seen as a reaction against Yeats’s lofty rhetoric and grand ideas about the emerging Irish nation. Unlike Yeats, Kavanagh just went about his business as a poet and did not engage in polemics except indirectly . One should bear in mind that historically, the idea of Ireland as an entity, a focus of individual identity, began to jell only with the drive toward Home Rule and independence in the nineteenth century. Most Irish people would still tend to identify themselves, except when traveling abroad, in terms of locality within Ireland...