How Does Your Garden Grow?

Why a particular place at a certain time suddenly produces a bunch of interesting writers is the kind of unanswerable question on which literary history thrives. In the last forty years an extraordinary number of fine poets have emerged from Northern Ireland, and an outpouring of talent that has included Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley in the 1960s, as well as Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Tom Paulin a generation later, has inevitably attracted plenty of journalistic and critical explanation. However, with so many of the major participants still alive and writing, the terms in which such a remarkable period of creativity is to be accounted for are still unclear. What were the wider reasons for this ‘renaissance’? Was there a distinct ‘Belfast Group’ or ‘Northern School’ in the 1960s or was it, as Derek Mahon claimed in 2004, ‘a load of hooey cooked up by some journalists at the time’ (p. 4)? And if it did actually exist, how was it formed and what was its effect on poetry?

To what extent these questions actually get in the way of reading poetry, particularly poetry written in the recent past, is open to debate; but in the current critical climate such questions will continue to be asked, and in this regard Heather Clark’s The Ulster Renaissance is a welcome intervention. Focusing on the decade in which the poets emerged, and drawing on a wealth of archive material deposited by Heaney, Mahon, Muldoon, James Simmons, and Michael and Edna Longley at Emory University, Clark concentrates on what was actually said and written by poets at the time. She stays close to the empirical details in an admirably straightforward fashion and does not allow any of the figures involved to stray too far out of the local context. This reveals that the ‘renaissance’ was both fortunate and no accident. It was fabricated in that it was both unreal and also consciously created, the writers involved operating collectively in the literary marketplace as surely as they operated within any literary coterie. Personal friendships and rivalries clearly influenced artistic development; but efforts to promote themselves as a Northern Irish literary community, distinct from that of London or Dublin, also helped these poets to find an audience.

Discussions of a posited Northern School have often centred on the arrival in Belfast of the English poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum as a lecturer at Queen’s University in 1962. During his four years in the city he sought out local writers and invited them to weekly writing workshops at his home, possibly acting as a poetic mentor and bringing a longer-lasting coterie into being. Since the 1980s the poets involved have mostly rejected the idea of a Northern School somehow created by Hobsbaum and have downplayed his influence – perhaps growing frustrated as a story useful in terms of collective promotion became a restrictive journalistic cliché. But Clark manages to deepen our knowledge of the nature of Hobsbaum’s group. Hobsbaum was a student of F. R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge, in the early 1950s and it was while studying there that he formed his first poetry group, with attendees including Peter Redgrove. When he moved to London he chaired another workshop – to which Peter Porter, Alan Brownjohn, Ted Hughes, and again Redgrove all came along – before moving to Sheffield to work with William Empson towards a Ph.D. on language theory in 1959. By the time he arrived in Belfast his methods in the workshop and his ideas about poetry were well developed. Direct expression and clear diction in forms such as the dramatic monologue and the personal lyric stood up best to the Leavisite scrutiny, as well as proving most effective in performance when read aloud at the beginning of a session. So Heaney’s ‘bleeding hunk of experience’ (p. 64) was favoured over Michael Longley’s ‘rhythm of the singing line’ (and Longley admits that his poetry may have subconsciously become ‘more rooted and more...