The Other Irish Renaissance: The Maunsel Poets

A "renaissance" is a combination of the talent and the times. From Henry Howard to Houston Larmour Doak to Langston Hughes to Seamus Heaney, talent and time often have to be mixed with some good old-fashioned critical smoke and mirrors to create a renaissance. Though an English, Irish, Harlem, or Northern Irish Renaissance does not spring fully fledged and critically inviolable from some spirit of the age, there is much to be gained by reassessing the actual critical judgments that construct any renaissance. The very same reason why H. L. Doak is not immediately associated with the Irish Renaissance may likely be the reason that the others are. Like living anthologies, renaissances are made. To question their making is not simply a matter of recovering forgotten artists; in the best instances, it is a matter of re-creating the contentiousness of the times in which these authors wrote.

While working with W. B. Yeats at Stone Cottage, Erza Pound looked back to the previous renaissances and reflected succinctly upon the construction of cultural movements that ". . . we have not realized to what extent a renaissance is a thing made—made by conscious propaganda."¹ Irish writers have rarely been at a loss for recognizing the hostility and inertia also cited by Pound. Indeed, the Irish Literary Renaissance might be seen as the most intense generational reaction, among many options, against the inertia of the Irish parliamentary tradition and the hostility of British policy.

The Irish Renaissance was strongly defined by the tendency to create propaganda—art driven by agenda. From Charles Read's Cabinet of Irish Literature (1884) and Justin McCarthy's Irish Literature (1904), which marked one beginning of the revival, through to the 2002 launch of the second Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, there has been a nearly constant search for, and critique of, the effort to establish a canonical group of Irish writings.² Throughout the past hundred and twenty-five years, schemes like the New Library of Ireland project in the 1890s emerge with regularity. At the outset, a simple reason behind the first anthologizing efforts was the attempt to resuscitate something that had never been.³ Intimately connected with that more practical drive was the desire of writers in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century to reach the growing reading public in Ireland and throughout the United Kingdom.⁴ Ironically, one of the most important venues for publishing during the Irish Literary Revival, the Maunsel Press, has been nearly written out of the narrative of the Irish Renaissance.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Maunsel's reputation throughout the United Kingdom stood in stark contrast to this fact. In 1916, the Glasgow Evening News highlighted the importance of Maunsel in light of its role in Ireland:

The Irish literary movement, measured by the successes in book production, is becoming quite a formidable affair. Unfortunately, we do not fully appreciate its extent, because the majority of the volumes, running to many hundreds yearly, from the pens of Irishmen, are introduced by a London imprint on the title page. . . . At the present moment there is really only one firm—that of Maunsel & Co.—who set themselves out to keep the publishing tradition alive.

From 1905 on, the Maunsel Press sought to reach Irish audiences throughout the United Kingdom through projects that included a wide array of publications: theater work; instructional texts; translations, such as the Modern Russian Library project; chapbooks, such as their Tower Press booklets; street ballads; and a journal of more established writers, The Shanachie (1906-7), edited by J. M. Hone. Maunsel's list clearly indicated that the press consciously set out to engage readers on a popular and national level.

From 1905 to 1926, the Maunsel Press was rightly referred to as "a national institution." Publishing nearly six hundred original titles during those twenty-one years, the press became a vital outlet for publishing...