History Class: Northern Poetry, 1970-82

On September 1, 1970, the Belfast Telegraph published a centenary edition marking 100 years of continuous publication of the Belfast-based daily newspaper. The edition also included a revealing self-critical view of Northern political and social life. In "The Arts Reviewed: a Survey of the Past 100 Years," the playwright and broadcaster John Boyd went directly to his key point when discussing the early decades of twentieth century literary life in "the province": "The four northern poets associated with the Irish literary revival—A.E., J. H. Cousins, Alice Milligan, and Joseph Campbell—lived most of their lives outside the province, largely because the climate of opinion was unsympathetic, to say the least, to their nationalistic as well as their artistic ideals." ¹ Boyd extends his time frame to embrace "the note of communal menace" registered by "later poets, notably John Hewitt, W. R. Rodgers, Roy McFadden, Louis MacNeice, Robert Greacen, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, James Simmons." "Each poet, of course," Boyd maintains, "has his individual imaginative reaction to the unease never absent from our fractured society." The next generation of poets, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, emerged out of the truly shocking "communal menace" of the "Troubles" that engulfed northern society in the 1970s.

I am interested in tracing the younger generation of poets whose first collections were published at the same time as their appearance in a clutch of anthologies that identified as a group the growing prominence in the English-speaking literary world of such poets as John Montague, James Simmons, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. What follows is an internal audit for the record. I do not propose to rehearse the story that has been told many times about the critical visibility of the "group" of Northern poets listed by John Boyd. I am curious, however, about how the younger generation of poets found themselves related to the term "Northern poetry," a term which was to grow by the 1980s and 1990s into a pedagogical and critical truism taken for granted in most studies of modern Irish poetry.

To begin with, it might be no harm to state the obvious: "Northern poetry" did not always exist in the minds of critics and commentators. Its governance as a critically accepted term of reference is relatively recent. Indeed, one of the first significant signs of a growing responsiveness to what was happening in the work of poets from the north came from Brendan Kennelly in his introduction to the highly popular Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970), where he remarks on "the younger poets, Heaney, Longley and Mahon" as writing "with a confidence and expertise which proves that the voice of the north is resonant and distinct and will be heard more and more in time to come." ²

The following year, 1971, Radio Telefís Éireann broadcast the Thomas Davis Lectures on "Irish Poetic Tradition" which were subsequently published as Irish Poets in English (1972), edited by Seán Lucy. In this collection there is scarce enough notice of any "new" development taking place in the North. Certainly Thomas Kinsella's concluding essay does not seem mindful of any such beginnings: "It seems that every writer has to make the imaginative grasp at identity for himself, and if he can find no means in his inheritance to suit him, he will have to start from scratch." ³

Maurice Harmon's contribution, "New Voices in the Fifties," identifies John Montague as a poet acutely "aware of racial origins and influences. . . increasingly concerned with the identification of those forces that have shaped his own relationship with Ireland." Harmon extrapolates that concern of Montague from

his rural background, with the ways and the customs of the people who live there, with the culture they once formed. And beyond them lie the religious and racial patterns of Northern Ireland . . . [Montague] is directly concerned with his Ulster background, with figures from his own family and with...