James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical by Carol Baraniuk (review)

Carol Baraniuk’s new study of James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical is the most important recent contribution to the historical study and criticism of Ulster Scots writing. Emerging slowly from the cultural twilight, in a movement led by John Hewitt and most significantly encouraged by Liam McIl-vanney’s pioneering work on the early Irish reception of Robert Burns, Ulster Scots writing has recently been engaging the attention of a number of significant scholars. As this important new study attests, Baraniuk is among the most distinguished of this group. Her book, a revised version of her University of Glasgow PhD thesis, builds upon her earlier publications in this field, including an article in Scottish Studies Review (2005), to address the literary career of one of the best-known of the so-called ‘weaver poets’.

James Orr (1770–1816), from Ballycarry, in county Antrim, was recognised in his own lifetime as a major figure in the Irish literary tradition. His verse appeared in the Northern Star, the newspaper of the United Irishmen, and evidenced wit and couthy humour alongside outrage at the inequalities then suffered by Protestant dissenters and Catholics. Orr was politically committed. In 1798, he fought alongside Henry Joy McCracken’s United Irishmen in Antrim, after which he fled to Philadelphia, where he continued to publish his work. Returning home under the terms of an amnesty, Orr published his Poems on Various Subjects (1804) and contributed verse to newspapers, sometimes celebrating his radical past, until his death, which may have been linked to his dissolute habits in later life. The publication of The Posthumous Works of James Orr of Ballycarry (1817) was incomplete, as the discovery of twenty-nine additional texts by D. H. Akenson and W. H. Crawford demonstrated in 1977, but the volume consolidated its author’s transatlantic reputation, as is demonstrated in a laudatory article in an American journal, the Irish Shield and Monthly Milesian (1829). Nevertheless, Orr’s reputation quickly went into eclipse. His complex and nuanced combination of religious and political radicalism did not survive the simplifying redactions of identities in nineteenth-century Ireland, and the community of readers that could most appreciate his Scots language was increasingly challenged by the politics that language was used to convey: for Orr slipped into obscurity as Presbyterian identities were increasingly untangled from those of the United Irishmen, and while the politics of canon formation excluded his work from consideration within the broader contexts of the Irish and Scottish traditions by which it was informed and to which it also contributed. But for all that Orr’s work recognised its influences, it also pushed readers to recognise the particularity of the community out of which it emerged, a community that was neither Irish nor Scots in any uncomplicated way, and in which the values and habits of Enlightenment and Romanticism could be creatively combined.

Baraniuk’s book is the first major study to address the significance of Orr’s work. Her commentary is insightful and occasionally polemical, as is necessitated by the case she has to make for the significance of her subject. Rescuing Orr from the historians by whom he has most often been discussed, Baraniuk refuses to regard her subject merely as a data-source to be mined for glimpses of the everyday. Instead, she pursues a rigorous and detailed critical reading of key texts, offering illuminating observations that situate Orr’s work within the generic and linguistic contexts of Irish and especially Scottish writing, as well as within the broader religious and cultural movements within his regional Romanticism. After an initial discussion of Orr’s critical reception, James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical works through four chapters of biography. These chapters are followed by others on the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, the tradition of Scottish poetry, the experience of rebellion, the legacy of Burns and the broader combination of Enlightenment and Romantic values.

Throughout its extensive and detailed readings, Baraniuk’s book illuminates the life and literary work...