Poetry in Modern Ireland: Where Postcolonial and Postmodern Part Ways

POETRY IN MODERN IRELAND: WHERE POSTCOLONIAL AND POSTMODERN PART WAYS Christina Hunt Mahony This paper is not about the Uterary burden of the past, but rather about four middle-aged male, canonical poets writing in Ireland today and the poems they have written occasioned by the death of their (biological) fathers. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Thomas KinseUa and Paul Durcan were aU born between 1927 and 1944, and thus are no longer young men. Each of them has been composing elegiac poems for his father which have become more complex with the aging perspective oftheir authors, and are weighted even more heavüy by the association of the death of the father with the death of tradition in Ireland. These four poets are members of a poetic generation in Ireland which is the first to face the fuU impUcations of modernity there. They are Ireland's modernists—not the displaced generation represented by Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevey. Those writers were European modernists who did the bulk of their writing outside Ireland; and, as has been suggested by Terence Brown in his Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1979, those men were rejected in the '30s and later by their colleagues and the reading pubUc in Ireland as being much too urban and petit-bourgeois to be truly Irish at aU. Heaney, Longley, Durcan, KinseUa and others of their generation, however, no longer bear the same burden ofinsistence on exclusively rural convention in Ufe or in art and are able to stay in Ireland to write poems which address, ifoften only indirectly, the continuing preoccupation in Ireland with defining and redefining national identity. Today, as Ireland experiences the 150th anniversary ofthe Great Famine—arguably the defining act of imperiaUsm which resulted in the re-ordering of Ireland as a modern nation—its view ofitself as a modern postcolonial country must continue to develop. Defining national identity is, therefore, a delayed artistic düemma for these poets, and one with which writers in other EngUsh-speaking countries have already grappled. But the sons of the "New" post-1922 Ireland of accelerated communication and mobiUty, greater access to education, increased urbanization and decreased reUgious authority are only now trying to forge fully-mature personal identities in verse which wül be compatible with a new national identity. IronicaUy this process is taking place at a time when national identity as a preoccupation elsewhere in Western Europe is becoming anachronistic due to the gradual, but extensive, assimUative processes of the European Union. This assimüative trend is more apparent among Irish fiction writers who have tended in recent years to write versions ofpostmodern picaresque in which the Irish protagonist no longer attempts to make his way in London, or New York or Boston, but in Spain (CoIm Toibin's The South or Aidan Higgins's Balcony ofEurope), or in Sweden (Higgins's Bornholm Night Ferry) or even in Turkey (Adrian Kenny's Vol. 20 (1996): 82 THE COMPAnATIST Istanbul Diary). These wandering Irish protagonists are just as content, if not happier, being able to shed national identity, and to blend into a decidedly postmodern Europe of transient sophisticates. The poets of the post-1922 generation who remain in Ireland and write about it, are not, however, just woefuUy behind the artistic and ideological curve. They are merely going through a necessary process, just as Ireland herself is going through the necessary process of forging a national identity long denied and delayed. As these poets address this modern, not postmodern, düemma, it is necessary that the critical response to their work—a response made by people in Ireland and elsewhere who focus heavüy on questions ofnational identity—be a response that is, first, appropriate to the sensibüity of the poetry. But it should also be emphasized that in suggesting that this generation of poets is working within a modernist paradigm is not to suggest that the writing ofpostmodern poetry is not being undertaken simultaneously in Ireland. Paul Muldoon, who belongs to the next generation ofIrish poets, has been employed for a number of years now in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton. His poem "The Briefcase" is a...