Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition

Preface

Preface Anthony Bradley’s “Pastoral in Modern Irish Poetry” and Sidney Burris’s The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition (1990) inspired me to reconsider the relationship of Heaney and, eventually, other contemporary Irish poets to the pastoral tradition. Bradley divides Irish poets into two groups: those of the Irish literary revival who lacked direct experience of the land, much less an understanding of the people who worked on it; and those post-revivalists such as Patrick Kavanagh, whose firsthand experience of the land made them resist idealizing either the land or those who labored on it.1 Having loved and respected Virgil’s Georgics and the poetic tradition that grew out of it, with its emphasis on the land as the site of labor rather than of leisure, and having been raised in southwest Missouri, where my family farmed a couple of acres, I had an affinity for the georgic, or “anti-pastoral” tradition of the post-revivalists. Although I studied Yeats in college, Seamus Heaney, with his rural County Derry upbringing and his subsequently less romanticized view of country life, was the first Irish poet who really spoke to me. As I began to consider how contemporary Irish poets employed the pastoral tradition in their own work, Bradley’s and Burris’s postcolonial approach formed the basis for my own. Yet I could not ignore a number of other forces that have obviously contributed to and shaped contemporary Irish poets’ particular versions of pastoral. Pastoral poetry since Kavanagh has served not only as postcolonial critique of British imperialism but also as a response to industrialization, modernity, the commodification of landscape, and gendered representations of Ireland and their political and social repercussions. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Irish cultural nationalism was reformulated and to some extent transformed by the environmental movement. n ix  As Glen Love explains in “Et in Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Meets Ecocriticism,” our growing awareness of profound threats to the environment has thrown the study of pastoral open to new interpretation.2 Terry Gifford’s Pastoral draws on Leo Marx’s distinction between sentimental and complex pastoral to differentiate between pastoral in which retreat is an end in itself, and pastoral in which retreat is a means to an end—one that leaves the reader “changed and charged upon return for more informed action in the present.”3 He uses the term “post-pastoral” to describe works in which the retreat serves to prompt the reader to the urgent need for responsibility and action on behalf of the environment. “Post-pastoral” moves from the anthropocentric viewpoint of pastoral, conveying “a deep sense of the immanence in all natural things” and recognizing that our “inner human natures can be understood in relation to external nature.”4 Although there have been many examinations of the pastoral tradition in contemporary American poetry, when I first began my research, I could find no similarly extensive studies in Irish poetry. Since then, Oona Frawley’s Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (2005) has been published, and while it provides an invaluable overview of representations of nature—from early Irish poetry to the anticolonial pastoral of Yeats and the anti-pastoral of Kavanagh—essential for a more complete understanding of the influences on contemporary Irish poets, the only contemporary poets it examines are Boland and Heaney. Frawley’s study, by providing a framework for my own, permitted me to devote more time to contemporary poets, as well as explore more freely the range of uses of pastoral than I could have otherwise. I am grateful to the American Conference for Irish Studies, the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment for providing venues as well as inspiration and ideas for my research in its early stages. Its members provided helpful insights, opportunities to present conference papers and receive feedback on them, as well as the means by which to meet many of the poets in the study. At both the 1994 ACIS and the 1998 Irish Women Writers’ Conference in Dublin, I had the opportunity to hear Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill read from her work. My thanks as well to ASLE member Richard Kerridge and ACIS members Jody Allen-Randolph, Andrew Auge, Christine Cusick, Joan Dean, David Gardiner, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Jack Morgan, Jim Rogers, Mary Ann Ryan, and Eamonn Wall for their support, advice, and, in some cases, their research on the Irish...