THE EMERGENCE OF AN IRISH LITERARY TRADITION

AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Modem Ireland provides us with the classic case of an

impressive literature brought to birth by Politics”.1

This astute remark, at first sight simple, brings home exactly the

nature and function of artists in a land wrought by long-standing

political volatility and the resultant socio-cultural adjustments and

alignments to be made by the community in general and the writer in

particular. The Irish are said to have “a deep reverence for their

past”,2 a reverence bordering on an obsession with their history as no

other race. This national self-consciousness is eloquently expressed

by Thomas Davis, considered to be the pioneer Irish poet-statesman:

This country of ours is no sand-bank, thrown up by some

1 Malcolm Brown. The Politics o f Irish Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, p VII.

2 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, Neil Roberts (Ed.), London, Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p 346.

13

recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honored in the

archives of civilization, traceable into antiquity by its piety,

its valor, at its sufferings,3 (Stress mine)

He envisions the interconnectedness between Art and historical milieu

that such contexts will produce:

National Poetry (stress mine) is the very flowering of the

soul, the greatest evidence of its health, the greatest

excellence of its beauty.4

Hence, the peculiar ‘angst’ of the writer belonging to Ireland. Does he

align ‘Art’ and ‘Reality’ in a single response as the demands of the

community urge or could he separate ‘Song’ and ‘Suffering’? Does

‘Song’ entail a “betrayal of suffering”?5 These are some of the central

questions that all Irish writers have confronted throughout; that

whether a delicate balance might be achieved between the poet’s

commitment to the artifice of his or her own creation and the poet’s

responsibility (in this case pressingly so) to his or her immediate

political, historical and social world. What role does the Irish writer

then play in the shaping of the pre-existing “material” (historical and

3 Thomas Davis, “A Nation Once Again”, Source www.google.com

4 Ibid.5 Seamus Heaney. The Government of the Tongue. The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial

Lectures and other critical writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1988, p XII.

*

14

social) with which he grapples? What happens when historical

situation and artistic technique confront each other? Does the Irish

writer demonstrate in his writings the need to reconcile “lyric

celebration” with the demands of an ethical imperative? Commenting

on the nature of poetry emanating out of these compulsions, Seamus

Heaney says:

I think that the drama and interest of the self may be the real

subject, but in this country, the self is closely involved with

the society that produces it, and it’s bonded into a communal

life.6

The result has been an outstanding literature that, though resonating

with a peculiarly and passionately felt sense of history and culture,

ultimately transcends the immediacy of the situation, thus achieving

universal status and acceptability.

Though never a favourite with Post colonial theorists who

prefer the obvious examples of Asia and Africa, Ireland’s history is

tied up with colonialism. Ireland forms part of the British Isles, yet

the Irish never really formed part of the British nation. Race, religion,

history and the ensuing social and economic developments have all

6 Interview in Viewpoints Poets in conversation with John Haffenden, London: Faber & Faber, 1981, p 256

15

helped to keep the two peoples distinct. The majority of the Irish have

remained Roman Catholics and though many leading writers have

come from the Protestant minority, it is the traditional faith that still

colors the background of most Irish writing. The Celtic / Anglo-

Saxon, English / Irish, Roman Catholic / Protestant divisions would

be some of the fundamental issues at stake in the political and cultural

development of the country.

An early as 1557, under Henry the VIII, the English Crown

desired to incorporate Ireland into the realm of British authority and

the vehicle for this was seen to be the implementation of British

settlers into Ireland who would Anglicize the natives. But despite

successive attempts by the central British authority to stimulate

Ireland into the British statS, these efforts never cemented into a

merger: “All Englishmen since the war of the roses understood that' j

the Irish tie was not secure.”

British hegemony over the lesser equipped neighbor was

resisted forcefully, sometimes through insurrection and revolution and

guerilla warfare. Ireland is the first of the English colonies and

7 Malcolm Brown. The Politics o f Irish Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, p 4.

16

continues to be its last at least, if Northern Ireland, ‘the illegitimate

child’ of the union between England and Ireland, is seen in the light

of an imperialist legacy. Ireland was consequently seen as the

prototype of colonial unrest, an advance model for a great deal of

subsequent world history:

Most of the standard stratagems by which a small nation may

defy a great one are Irish improvisations - among then the

very powerful weapon of moral force, the technique of the

boycott, parliamentary obstruction, and urban guerilla

harassment against an army of occupation.8

Ireland’s history thus became one of chronic violence and

dispossession.

Ireland’s native Gaelic tradition was undermined by the

imperial authority of the English presence, which often took

aggressive directions. English ‘heroes’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries like Raleigh, Spenser, Cromwell must temporarily be

converted into villains if the full implications of the brutal colonial

encounter are to be understood. This would also account for the

persistence with which the horrors / bitterness of English imperial rule

still sometimes color Irish writings of the post modem period.

8 Malcolm Brown. The Politics of Irish Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, p 5.

I

17

Deciding Political events that would eventually shape much of

the developments in Ireland include the defeat of the Irish at the Battle

of Kinsale 1601, the Armed revolution of 1798, the Act of Union 1800,

the Movement for repeal of the Act of Union in the 1840’s mostly by

Catholics, the Home Rule movement that occupied centre stage in Irish

Politics from 1874 until 1913 , and finally the Independence struggle,

waged explicitly from 1916 until the secession of Southern Ireland in

1921, the same year of the creation of the state of Northern Ireland.

This partition situation (reminiscent of the division of the Indian

subcontinent) is still the cause of strained Anglo-Irish relations. The

English / Irish question though apparently ‘resolved’ would find a way

to rankle persistently in the form of the ‘Troubles’ - a new lease of

violence that would rock the northern statelet in Dec 1960’s and 70’s

by demands of Catholic Nationalists for Catholic empowerment and

resentment against the splitting of the Nation into two. This is one of

the reasons why poetry from Northern Ireland in particular is prone to

the demands that this troubled history makes over its writers. Seamus

Heaney’s poetry particularly is a case in point. His earlier and powerful

poetry is said at times to be deeply expressive of the agony and tumult

of his community - the Catholics of Northern Ireland.

18

This leads to the next question - that of national and cultural

reconstruction in the aftermath of colonization. First, the task of de-

homogenizing the imperialists construct of the Irish nation, at all

levels. G. J Watson remarks:

The culture clash between Ireland England has been so

enduring because it has expressed itself mainly through

opposing images...and images, as well as being the raw

material for the artist, are always more powerful than rational

arguments.9

This idea would work both ways: The English habit of creating

unflattering images of the Irish would be countered by Irish writers

from Thomas Davis in the nineteenth century to Brian Friel writing in

the postmodern times. In his View o f the Present State o f Ireland

(1596), Spenser had outlined his programme: the Gaels must be

redeemed from their “Wildness”, they must cut their “glibs of

overhanging hair, they must convert their mantles into conventional

cloaks, and above all they must speak the English tongue.”10 The aim

was clearly a Macaulay-like erasure of Irish culture, to impose a

central administration and an attempt to define a unitary Irish

9 G. J. Watson. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival. Synge, Yeats, Joyce, O ’ Casey. London: Trowbridge & Esher, 1979, p 16.

10 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 10.

19

character. In its aim to project Ireland as a retarded child, two major

Irish stereotypes created by the English would become central in the

projection of Ireland as the “other”, namely, the threatening

vainglorious soldier and the feckless but cheerily reassuring servant.

The ‘Stage Irish’ as it is called, finds a place even as far back as the

sixteenth century, in Shakespeare’s character Captain Macmorris in

Henry v. Macmorris’ fundamental queries “What ish my nation?’

Who talks of my Nation? are paradigmatical in Irish studies in general

and Irish English literature in particular though perhaps Shakespeare’s

intention was a parody of the braggart’s inferior status as belonging to

“Ireland”. Macmorris could also be understood as a Caliban-figure

who is deeply sensitive to the concept of Nationalism and its validity

in the formation of identity, an issue that lies at the heart of Irish

studies. The serious overtones of MacMorris’ interrogative regarding

‘his nation’ is borne out by the way the same question enters a

modem Heaney poem, centuries later, called ‘Traditions’. Heaney’s

juxtaposition of MacMorris, himself and James Joyce in the poem

challenge any English assumptions of Stage-Irish stereo typicality.

Since Ireland would enter history like most colonies via

England or the English version of things, the demands on both the

20

political as well as the artistic areas/arenas were strong and manifold.

The Irish Literary Revival was one response to these demands. The

aim of the revivalists was to retrieve the indigenous Gaelic culture

that had been largely destroyed by the Act of Union 1800-1 that

subordinated Ireland into ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and

Ireland”. This resulted in an experience of an unsettling sense of

cultural deracination in the face of growing British political, linguistic

and economic hegemony. The writers of the Irish Literary Revival

attempted to redress this cultural “erasure” by reclaiming Ireland’s

Celtic past. As Standish o’ Grady declared, “These legends represent

the imagination of the country, they are that kind of history which a

nation desires to possess”.11 The Revivalists created a deliberately

national literature with which they meant to foster a spiritual rather

than a particularly anti-colonial identity for Ireland. It is worthwhile

to notice that the task of cultural reconstruction in Ireland was mainly

in the hands of its literary artists since the eighteenth and the

nineteenth centuries. Declan Kiberd comments:

What makes the Irish Renaissance such a fascinating case is

the knowledge that the cultural revival preceded and in many

11 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation.Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 20.

21

ways enabled the political revolution that followed.12 He

further says accurately of the task set upon themselves by the

members of the Irish Literary Revival. No generation before

or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left

such an inspiring (and in some ways intimidating) legacy.13

True and it is this tradition or legacy that the Irish is heir to. Partaker

of a strong tradition, he looks backwards to the storehouse of his

literary ancestry and their contribution to the making of the nation. He

boks forward too; dynamically poised to set forth an indigenous

aesthetic that would build upon the rich foundations of the past, a

hope for the future. Declan Kiberd talks about a “generation” of Irish

writers turning to writing as a means of seeking power “and how it

forged one of the most formally daring and experimental literatures of

the modem movement”.14 The task of cultural reconstruction or the

formation of a resistant tradition opposed to the imperialist’s tradition

has always been undertaken with extreme commitment by Ireland’s

artistic community. In this sense a crucial juncture in Irish cultural

history is also the founding of the Field Day theatre company in 1980,

12 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modem Nation.Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 71.

13 Ibid.,pl>.

14 Ibid., p. 24

22

with poet Seamus Heaney and dramatist Brian Friel as members. This

project sought to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its

members into a productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in

Irish political life. The aim of the group is clear: to combine theatrical

productions and academic pamphleteering culminating in the

publication of the “Field Day Anthology of Irish writing” in 1990.

The Field Day Theatre Company was founded with the belief:

that it could and should contribute to the solution of the

present crisis by producing analyses of the established

opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a

symptom and a cause of the current situation.15

Attempts like these clearly illustrate the nationalist - cultural nexus

that lies at the heart of all Irish literary enterprise.

Clearly, some model/frame work is needed to fit in the concept

of “Irishness”, particularly its obvious importance for the Irish writer.

The postcolonial model offers itself as does Benedict Anderson’s

concept of “Imagined Communities”, or Declan Kiberd’s notion of

“Inventing Ireland.” A brief survey of these theoretical models

follows: The introduction of the English language into the

15 Quoted in Elmer Andrews. (Ed.) Seamus Heaney. A Collection o f Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1992, p. 8.

23

imperialist’s colony in order to deracinate the indigenous peoples and

culture to a subsidiary status is well known. The nexus between

Empire building and the English language has been established by the

post colonial critical canon, whereby language or discourse becomes a

source of power over the colonized.

Thomas Kinsella argues:

The defeat at the battle of Kinsale, in 1601, marks the

beginning of the final phase of English colonization. With the

native Irish aristocracy driven out, poetry in Irish quickly

found a new place, falling from a privileged role into a kind

of internal exile.16

Joyce would later take up the ‘language issue’ aggressively in his

‘modernist’ masterpieces, as will Seamus Heaney after him. The

resultant linguistic scenario enacts the dialectic between the

competing discourses, Gaelic and English. The writer’s commitment

is therefore to a form that is bom out of the “conviction that the

person who owns the language owns the story, and that he who

wishes to change the story must first change the language”.17

16 Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition. An Essay On Poetry and Politics. Carcanet, 1995, source www.questia .com.

17 Helen Vendler. Seamus Heaney. USA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p 126.

24

Kinsella asserts the ‘dual’ nature of the Irish literary tradition as

a result of the Norman conquest of the country. He says:

Within a hundred years, English was the language of the

spreading colony, and the area of settlement had increased

dramatically. This was the beginning of a counter - tradition

in the country, and a series of changes, some gradual and

natural seeming, others violent - which was to have an

extraordinary long term effect. This lead to an abandonment

of one language for another by virtually an entire population.

It is this change in vernacular, with the elements of gain and

loss involved, which gives the Irish literary tradition its dual 18nature.

An understanding of this dialectic interaction is important because

invariably the Irish writer will align himself / herself with this native

Gaelic tradition- linguistically, culturally, even psychologically -

instead of situating himself within the stronger presence of the British

literary matrix out of which he apparently writes. Every Irish writer,

Yeats onwards would grapple with issues of national and cultural

repossession and rediscovery through a clever maneuvering between

these two traditions. Kinsella, himself a practicing poet, therefore

points out from an important, Irish point of view the discrepancy

18 Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition. An Essay On Poetry and Politics. Carcanet: 1995, source www.questia .com.

25

between the British and the Irish traditions. He speaks of the ‘great

inheritance’ that Irish-language literature bequeaths to the modem

Irish writer but it is also a ‘great loss’ because the ‘inheritance’ is

only available “at two enormous removes-across a century’s silence

and through an exchange of worlds.”19 Such a double-remove is a

result of the eclipse of the Irish language through the imposition and

adoption of the English tongue. The modem Irish writer thus works

in what Kinsella calls a ‘dual tradition’; he or she has a necessarily

‘divided mind’, and is thus distinct from the modem English or

French poet, whose tradition is basically monolingual, and relatively

unaffected by linguistic and other forms of colonization.

In view of the above discussion about the history of the Irish

nation, Ireland would appear a very appropriate site for post colonial

explorations. What makes Ireland an anomaly is its position as a

European nation. Post colonial theory developed at its outset upon the

model of European interactions with subjugated non-European

peoples, applying it within an entirely European context would have

perhaps seemed problematic to early post colonial readings but as has

been pointed out, the colonial history of Ireland is certainly longer

19 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (Ed.) Neil Roberts. London: Blackwell, p 354.

and arguably more complicated than those of most of the colonial

ventures beyond Europe that initially provided subjects for academic

post colonial literary and historical theorizing. Yet Ireland provides an

a stereotypical version of postcoloniality, enriching the scope of

postcolonial studies: “Ireland is ... a somewhat awkward fit for post

colonialism; the strains and disjunctions of its own history defy any

totalizing inclination in that discourse. More comprehensively than

most other critical systems, however, post colonialism can embrace

the paradoxes ...Ireland [presents].”20

Yet, Ireland’s proximity to its imperial neighbor and the

cultural intersection between the two countries having at times

reached a point of undetectebility, the teasing out of postcolonial

implications becomes at once more challenging and ultimately more

demanding. To disentangle a canonical “English” writer like W. B

Yeats or James Joyce from the unquiet home of the English literary

tradition is intellectually stimulating as well as amounting to a

reappraisal of stagnant formula that might be a direct result of the

Imperial theme.

20 Luke Gibbons: “Transformations in Irish Culture”. Robert Mahony (Ed.), Swift, Postcolonialism and Irish Studies: The Valence of Ambivalence, www.questia.com..

27

The question becomes two - fold: it veers between theorizing

about the general principles that govern what can be called “Post

Colonial” literature and looking at the more specific instances of such

literary productions. Given the diversity and richness of the field,

culturally, socially, politically and geographically, no sweeping

assumptions can be made. Therefore, a model which would espouse a

post coloniality specific to Irish culture would be a satisfactory one,

just as there could be post colonialism peculiar to the Indian or Asian

model.

Ian Crump pays special attention to Ireland and validates a

post colonial interpretation of its literature. He starts by mentioning

the canonical The Empire Writes Back and its neglect of Ireland as

91a post colonial literature. He counter-claims:

...yet, since its emergence at the end of the nineteenth

century, Irish literature has self consciously defined itself

as primarily a nationalist, anti-colonial literature and add

Moreover, precisely because of its many re(constructions) of

Irish racial, linguistic and sexual identities, this literature

21 Ireland has never been given its due place in post colonial theory: even in the canonical The Empire Writes Back, its position as a post colonial literature is hastily overlooked.

28

offers an esp ecia lly potent paradigm for the p ostco lon ia l

condition in all its m ultiplicity.22

He also points out that the phrase ‘postcolonial condition’ or post

coloniality “down plays” multiplicities of locations and temporality in

the struggle against colonialism, further, it conflates the very different

historical situations of colonialism, post - colonialism and neo

colonialism. He adds ‘yet rather than reject the term ‘Postcoloniality’,

we should follow the lead of critics who have begun to explore its

many permutations.23

He develops further Frantz Fanon’s model of the “three

levels” in the anti-colonial ‘evolution’ of the native writer.

According to him, Irish literature provides an example of a post

colonial literature that can be divided into five stages of development.

Writers from the first stage produce a radically conservative national

(ist) literature that revives the indigenous pre-colonial culture. In

the second stage, writers forge a literature of delegitimation which

is transnational or continental in vision. These writers frequently

22 Ian Crump. ‘“A terrible beauty is Bom” Irish Literature as a Paradigm for the Formation of Postcolonial Literatures’, English Post-coloniality: Literatures from around the world, Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan, (Eds.). Source www.questia.com

23 Ibid.

29

choose to write from exile. In the third stage, after the colony

achieves political independence writers attempt to demythologize the

literature of the first stage. Writers from the fourth stage continue the

process of demythologizing but also create a literature that espouses

the continental vision of the writer from the second stage. And in the

fifth stage, women writers challenge the “double colonialism” which

they have endured by producing a literature that rewrites the male

canon and offers an explicitly female perspective. Interestingly,

Frantz Fanon’s indictment of Imperialism is often read in conjunction

with the Irish cultural resistance which predates the latter by

centuries. Declan Kiberd corroborates:

The history of independent Ireland bears a remarkable

similarity...to the phases charted by Frantz Fanon in The

Wretched of the Earth.24

Similarly other critics have argued for the deconstructive aspect

of postcolonialism with reference to an Irish context:

Rethinking concepts such as irony, hybridity, mimicry, the’

contact zone’ and transculturation in the Irish context will

produce readings of Irish culture which arise out of a

24 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge and Massachusetts: 1996, pp. 551-552.

30 ’ '-a! .Library. ..O:

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recognition of the claustrophobic intensity of the relationship

between Ireland and Britain. It can also allow for the

fractured range of complex cross-colonial affiliations which

have existed within the British /Irish cultural axis...it is these

abilities to read culture as ideological...and to prioritize

cultural interchange within a colonial structure, which makes

postcolonial theory an essential critical tool for understanding

Irish culture.25

Edward Said’s essay on Yeats entitled “Yeats and Decolonization”

strengthened Ireland’s position vis-a-vis post colonial studies. This

essay first published in Culture and Imperialism was later published

as a pamphlet by Filed Day in 1988. His perception of Ireland as a

colonized country and of Yeats as a poet of national liberation is

endowed with an acute sense of the dispossession of a people and its

after effects. Said points out that since Edmund Spenser’s tract on

Ireland, a whole tradition of British and European thought has

considered the Irish to be a separate and inferior race, often

delinquent and primitive. Usually overlooked as an example of

national struggle, Said says, the Irish problem of liberation has

continued longer than other comparable struggles. He goes on to show

25 Eugene O’ Brien. Seamus Heaney. Searches for Answers. London: Pluto Press, 2003,p 124.

31

how England’s colonial exploitation of Ireland received justification

from nineteenth century English ‘liberals’. Said shows that even such

scholars as John Stuart Mill so eloquent on the rights of white

English, approved of English expropriation and domination of

outlying countries and their incorporation into the economic system of

the “ Mother land”. This is one of the revelations of Said’s work:

Scholars and statesmen of the English Enlightenment, he shows, were

completely in accord with the colonial and imperial policies of

England.

Another glaring “official oversight” was also the neglect by

English official records of the Great Famine of 1845 which led to the

death and starvation of millions of Irish people. The Great Famine

had far reaching tortured effects on Ireland:

In the decades of the 1840’s, there occurred a cataclysmic

event, far more dramatic than anything that happened in

England, a very short geographical distance away. That was

of course the famine in Ireland - a disaster without

comparison in Europe. Yet if we consult the two maps of

either the official ideology of the period or the recorded

subjective experience of its novels , neither of them extended

to include this catastrophe right on their doorstep, causally

32

connected to socio-political processes in England.26

It is significant that English fiction of the nineteenth century and the

corresponding literary criticisms have omitted what by many accounts

would be the most significant aspects of the period. The tendency

instead was to engage themes that privileged national experience,

since the Famine was not a national experience in the direct sense, it

is absent from most English versions, literary and historical.

The theme was taken up by Terry Eagleton in his collection of essays

entitled Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture.

He holds that the British have long used Ireland as the

depository of their fantasies. His interpretation of Wuthering Heights

is based on an analogy between Emily Bronte’s text and The Great

Famine in Ireland in December 1840’s - Heathcliffe is seen as an

abandoned Irish child of the ‘hungry forties’ who speaks the

incomprehensible Irish language and grows up to be a threat to the

‘orderly’ Thrush cross Grange. In Eagleton’s view, he stands in the

English mind as the emblem of Ireland, the force of nature that

England cannot tolerate and so must sublimate or destroy, an “other”

26 Bruce Robbins. “Telescopic Philanthropy Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House”, Source www.questia.com

33

whom England has long regarded as hostile and odd. In Eagleton’s

version, it is Heathcliffe as an embodiment of the Irish who is

ascribed the role of the threatening colonial presence inserting itself

into the shapely schemas of historical chronology as the disruptive

temporality of nature.

David Lloyd in Anomalous states: Irish writing and the

postcolonial moment also suggests a need for a reappraisal of the

traditional paradigms of postcolonial theory in understanding Irish

literature. He takes the "deracination" of Irish culture at the hands of

the English as the first issue, which he links with the resultant

insistence with which the question of identity has been posed

historically in Ireland. He refers to the “founding moments” of Irish

cultural politics, those within which the aspirations of Irish identity

and nationality are framed again and again with striking consistency:

Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, the immediate post colonial

period, and the more recent continuing anti-colonial struggle in

Northern Ireland. He speaks quite pertinently of the “theme of

identity” as the central one in Irish culture, to the extent of “saturating

the discursive field, drowning out other social and cultural

34

• • • • 27 ,possibilities”. The lack of and consequent pursuit and definition of

national identity becomes then the master theme of Irish literature.

Nation, Individual, culture, politics mesh with each other at every step

in the task of nation building whether politically or artistically.

The concept of Cultural nationalism is also cited as a valid

approach to a further understanding of the Irish national experience.

Benedict Anderson’s theoretical construct of “Imagined Communities”

in his classic text Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin

and spread o f Nationalism is particularly relevant. In this highly

acclaimed book, Anderson suggests that “nation - ness” is the most

universally legitimate value in the political life of our time, able to

“command profound emotional legitimacy”. In what is by now a

classic definition he states:

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following

definition of the Nation: it is an imagined political

community, and imagined as both inherently limited and• 28 sovereign.

27 David Llyod. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post colonial Movement. Quoted in Post colonial theory and English Literature: A Reader (Ed.). Peter Childs, Edinburgh: Cromwell Press, 1999, p 88-89.

28 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism. Quoted in Post colonial theory and English Literature: A Reader (Ed.), Peter Childs, Edinburgh: Cromwell Press, 1999. p 316.

35

The “imagined” community therefore allows for imaginary constructs-

such as “national character” or national identity and values to be

reified, which in turn makes it possible for patriotic sentiments and

identifications to attach themselves to such reified constructs. This

process entails “imagining” the nation which Homi Bhabha calls

“Writing the nation”29: it involves writing out or erasing difference

and the realities of pluralistic and culturally diverse peoples to

establish an essentialized national character. Such a totalizing

movement was very much behind the Irish Nationalist construction of

an Irish / Celtic National Character post-independence particularly in

the formative years of Irish cultural nationalism, 1910 to 1930.

Seamus Deane in his essay “National Character and National

Audience : Races , Crowds and readers”, shows how the leading

nineteenth century Irish authors including Thomas Davis, Yeats,

Synge, Joyce, Douglas Hyde et al in trying as Yeats put it “ To write

for my own race”30 tried repeatedly to imagine (both for their subject

matter and as their ideal audience) “Imagined” communities which

they defined as the Irish nation and race, with all the desired “national

29 Homi Bhaba. Nation and Narration. Quoted in Post colonial theory and English Literature: A Reader (Ed.), Peter Childs, Edinburgh: Cromwell Press, 1999, p 318.

30 Seamus Deane. National Character and National Audience: Races, Crowds and Readers. Source www.questia.com

character” and radical uniqueness which each one fantasized and

endowed their writing with. In other words Irish writers could be duly

credited with “imagining” and therefore validating Ireland truly.

Declan Kiberd in his illuminating and lucid study of Irish literature,

Inventing Ireland, the literature o f the Modern nation, comes close to

this idea of a forcefully imagined community coming into its own by

literary and cultural means.

Commenting on the lack or absence of a full blown native

tradition with which the Irish writer could align, he says “The Irish

were not so much bom as made.”31 Or “Ireland after the famines of

the mid - nineteenth century was a sort of no where, waiting for its

appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it.”32 The

“national” poet most responsible for providing Ireland its “images and

symbols” would be W. B Yeats.

Declan Kiberd interestingly suggests that:

Most nation - states existed, so to speak, before they were

defined, and they were thus defined by their existence, but

states emerging from occupation, dispossession or denial had

31 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 120.

32 Ibid., p 126

37

a different form of growth.33

Literary and Cultural revivalists from Yeats onwards, but especially

Yeats hence had no indigenous national grand narrative to draw upon.

Yeats’ becomes then a particularly heroic effort at “inventing” an

“Idea of Ireland” on which to base his subsequent themes as well as

technique. The English literary Tradition (which was available to

him) could clearly provide scant material for the stupendity of the task

at hand - national reconstruction .The new material that was available

to the poet was Ireland, “awaiting its shaper like wax upon a table.”34

Such is the extreme demand for identification with the nation

that nationalism imposes upon the Irish Writer. David Lloyd

elaborates on this issue:

Irish cultural nationalism has been preoccupied throughout its

history with the possibility of producing a national genius

who would at once speak for and forge a national identity.

The national genius is to represent the nation in the double

sense of depicting and embodying its spirit - or genius. The

national genius not only presents examples to a people not

yet fully formed by or conscious of their national identity, but

33 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 116.

34 Ibid., p i 17.

38

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is the first Irish author from whom

a whole tradition can be derived. Seamus Deane points out the

particular relevance of a “foundational text” in his case:

A foundational text is one that allows or has allowed for a

reading of a national literature in such a manner that even

chronologically prior texts can be annexed by it into a

narrative that will ascribe to them a preparatory role in the

ultimate completion of that narratives plot. It is a text that

generates the possibility of such a narrative and lends to that

narrative a versatile cultural; and political value.36

Although Deane places Edmund Burkes “Reflections” as the primary

foundational text of Ireland, this status can simultaneously be claimed

for Swift’s Pamphlets and his bitter attack on English administrative

failure in Ireland, as also for W.B. Yeats poem like Easter 1916, or

more recently Seamus Heaney’s Digging.

Swift’s activism on Ireland’s behalf is usually dated from 1720,

when the first of his anticolonial pamphlets appeared in print. A habit

that would find expression in poets after him, Swift too in his “The

song of the Injured Lady” speaks of Ireland as the “Ravished / raped

virgin bride” and England as the male oppressor:

36 Seamus Deane. Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Clarendon Press, 1997. Source www.questia.com

40

I was undone by the common Arts practiced upon all easy

credulous virgins... when he had once got possession, he soon

began to play the usual part of a too fortunate lover, affecting

on all occasions to show his authority, and to act like a

conqueror.37

Drapier’s Letters (1724) was written in Dublin against a proposed

debasement of the coinage. His question about the victim - culture

status of his country would reverberate:

Am I a free man in England or do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the channel?38

A Modest Proposal (1729) recommends with grotesque logic that

Irish poverty can be solved by the breeding up their infants as food for

the rich or as food for English tables.

In these writings and other equally attacking diatribes that

Swift wrote, he gave Irish nationalism a trenchant expression. The

slogan “bum everything English except their coal” is an adaptation of

one of Swift’s phrases.

The centrality of W. B Yeats (1865-1939), to an appraisal of

37 Quoted in Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition: An Essay On Poetry and Politics. Carcanet, 1995. Sourcewww.questia.com.

38 Quoted in Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland. Carcanet, 1995, p 35.

41

the Irish literary lineage is undoubted. Yeats is the figure who is most

credited with the ‘founding’ of the Irish national identity. Thomas

Kinsella, himself an important Irish poet writes:

An Irish poet has access to the English poetic heritage

through his use of the English language, but he is unlikely to

feel at home in it... if he looks back at his own heritage, the

line must begin... with Yeats.39

Literary Studies since the 1980’s onwards have established that the

political questions raised by Yeats poetry are inseparable from

aesthetic ones and his early symbolist aesthetic too is inseparable

from the politics of cultural nationalism .Prominent among these are

studies by Edward Said : Yeats as a poet o f National liberation, Jahan

Ramazani: Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet? Rajeev S. Patke: Post

Colonial Yeats. Declan Kiberd Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f

the Modern Nation.

Edward Said first pertinently points out Yeats’ affiliation with

Eurocentricism and his canonical ‘white’ status:

William Butler Yeats has now been almost completely

assimilated into the canon as well as the discourses of

39 Rajiv S. Patke. “Post Colonial Yeats”. W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. David Pierce (Ed.). London: 2000, p 819.

42

English literature and European high modernism.40

However, there is another aspect to Yeats:

That of the indisputably great national poet who during a

period of anti - imperialist resistance articulates the

experiences, the aspirations and the restorative vision of a

people suffering under the domination of an offshore41power.

His poetry abounds in explicit as well as covert attempts to articulate

a vision or aesthetic which finds its primary grounding in the trope of

nationalism. In a bid to deanglicize his nation, Yeats’ poetry hearkens

back to the pre-colonial and pre - Christian stories and myths of

ancient Ireland. Said shows how Yeats used poetry as a weapon to

liberate his people and his choice of subject matter was used as a

deliberate breaking out from the Eurocentricism in which the

indigenous colonized culture had been subsumed. And he credits

Yeats with forming part of the resistant culture which always

develops as a response to imperial domination. In this respect, Yeats

is likened by Said to poets elsewhere, writing from dispossessed

cultures, especially Palestine. Accordingly to Said, Yeats is strikingly

40 Edward W Said. “Yeats and Decolonization”. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, Random House, p 265.

41 Ibid., p 265.

similar to poets like the Palestinian Mahmound Darwish, in his

impulse to remap and rename the desecrated home land.

Jahan Ramazani places Yeats within a post colonial paradigm

too to “help renew attention to a poet who is often charged with

antifeminism and reactionary politics.”42 But he makes a distinction

between Yeats’ early or pre-independence poems which are explicitly

nationalistic and his politically skeptical post independence poems. A

poem like Easter 1916 becomes in truth, the foundational poem of the

emerging Irish nation state.

But Ramazani prefers the term anticolonial to postcolonial for

Yeats since Yeats’ denunciation of the British imperial devastation of

Ireland as expressed in his poems sometimes reaches “treasonable

lengths".

Ramazani states:

In his anti-colonial denunciations of Britain’s efforts to

exterminate the Irish and to obliterate its indigenous culture,

to quash heroic resistance and to lay to waste Ireland

churches and houses, Yeats is no less “postcolonial” than

Achebe or Kamau Brathwaite, who chronicle the survival of

42 Jahan Ramazani. “Is Yeats a Post Colonial Poet?” IV. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. David Pierce (Ed.). London: 2000, p 795.

44

African gods in the new world despite colonial efforts to

wipe them out.43

For Declan Kiberd too, Yeats is the Irish Whitman, the writer most

responsible for “Inventing” Ireland. The relationship between the

writer and the society is expressed in the following terms:

We call certain minds creative because they are among the

moulders of their nation and not made upon its mould.44

The Irish concept of the self, according to Kiberd, was not a given but

a “project”; and “its characteristic text was a process, unfinished,

fragmenting”.45

It is in this sense that Irish literature presents a more

challenging task both to writer and reader, in so far as the literary

forms are constantly being created and evolved. “Style” becomes an

agent therefore at reconstituting a poetics afresh. To write a

deliberately new style was to seize power for new voices in literature.

According to Declan Kiberd:

Whenever Yeats raised the question of Style, it was as if he

43 Jahan Ramazani. “Is Yeats a Post Colonial Poet?” W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. David Pierce (Ed.). London: 2000, p 798.

44 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 120.

45 Ibid.

45

saw in it the promise of an antidote to Anglicization. Style

before became an enabling technique to Yeats, the surest

basis for intelligent self-scrutiny.46

To Yeats, Joyce, and later Heaney too, the fascination with style

persists. The word style denoting something much more expansive

and demanding than the usual inferences drawn from the word. To all

Irish writers, style was potentially redemptive, charged with the

power to lift the fallen material of the given world to a new world, to

a new plane of consciousness. Clearly, no such model was available

in the English poetic tradition. Through their efforts, poet like Yeats

have turned an otherwise supine Ireland into a living, vibrant even

awe-inspiring “Imagined community”. In this case then, Artistic

form not only military might or political movements defines and

defends the national imaginary .

Yeats is thus a nationalist and perhaps postcolonial writer in the

strong sense of nation maker. In the weak sense of nationalism as

reflecting the majoritarian views of the nation or as supporting the

state, Yeats is less creditably nationalist.

46 . Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 123.

46

This needs some clarification. Yeats famous artistic ‘ambivalence’,

that of a wavering sensibility not ready to uphold any one single

generalizing idea has been demonstrated aptly in his poems.

Paradoxically, his intense nationalistic poem Easter 1916 provides a

case in point (as do many others). Declan Kiberd comments:

[Easter 1916] enacts the quarrel within his own mind

between his public, textual duty...and his more personal urge.

The poem speaks correspondingly with two voices, and

sometimes exacts in single phrases (terrible beauty) their

contestation.47

This ability at self - doubt or ambiguity is a common motif in Irish

poetry. To Yeats, the question was one of aligning himself with his

duty as national bard or to define artistic autonomy in items of a self -

expression. To Declan Kiberd “[Yeats] was abandoning the rather

programmatic nationalism of his youth for a more personal version of

Irish Identity”. This attempt at a liminal position is what will later

attract Yeats poetic successor by decades - Seamus Heaney. The

Yeatsian model was particularly useful for Heaney for its peculiar

blending of the communal and the individual and its capacity for

47 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 213.

48 Ibid., p 213.

47

imaginative transcendence through linguistic innovation. For Yeats as

well as for Heaney, Irish nationalism is best understood as a

dialectical interplay between the various historical and cultural forces

that have determined the turbulent history of the nation. His view in

this regard is illuminative of the dialogic nature of identity in the post

colonial Irish context:

All literature in every country is derived from models, and as

often as not these are foreign models, and it is the presence of

a personal element alone that can give it nationality in a fine

sense, the nationality of its maker. It is only before

personality has been attained that a race struggling towards

self-consciousness is the better for having, as in primitive

times, nothing but native models, for before this has been

attained. It can neither assimilate nor reject. It was precisely

at this passive moment, attainment approaching but not yet

come, that the Irish heart and mind surrendered to England;

and Irish patriotism, content that the names and opinions

should be Irish was deceived and satisfied. It is always

necessaiy to affirm and reaffirm that nationality is in the

things that escape analysis.49

Declan Kiberd calls this powerful and penetrating paragraph “one of

49 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 165.

48

the first Irish articulations of the dialectics of postcolonial

liberation.”50 Seamus Heaney’s poetics too bases itself on such an

awareness of the intersection of voices in the Irish context. In a

Yeatsian manner, he refuses any bondages to a monocular vision of

Ireland.

To view the novels of James Joyce (1882-1941) as merely

‘avant garde’, ‘modernist’ writing is to be poorly equipped for a total

understanding and enjoyment of his works. This approach has the

draw back of missing out the political and cultural vibrancy in texts

like the Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Speaking

of Ulysses “as a supreme instance of the postcolonial text”,51 Declan

Kiberd suggests that the ‘modernist’ masterpiece has at its heart the

issue of the dispossession of a race at the hands of colonization:

The Irish, through the later nineteenth century, had become

one of the most deracinated of peoples; robbed of belief in

their own future, losing their native language, overcome by

feelings of anomie and indifference, they seemed rudderless

and doomed. Though Ulysses is set on a day in 1904, it is

necessarily a portrait of the late-Victorian Ireland which went

50 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 165.

51 Ibid., p 329.

49

into its making and, as such, a remarkable outline of colonial

torpor.52

Consequently, the question of Irish identity will be posed aggressively

throughout his novels:

What does it mean to be Irish? Who qualifies as Irish? What

is Ireland? What is a nation?53

These are crucial questions which Bloom’s mental observations about

himself invoke, they form a key subtext of Ulysses, especially in the

‘Aeolus’ and ‘Cyclops episodes’. There is nothing like Ulysses in the

tradition of the English novel; the point is, there cannot be, for

Ulysses, A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young man and even the

‘fragmentary’ Finnegans Wake draw their sustenance from the

foundational myth of Irish nationalism.

Joyce as Irish post colonial writer “writes back” in the most

potent way he can - through defamiliarization. The norms of Standard

English are by passed and his usage is marked by dialect words,

Irishisms and “place names”. Linguistically speaking, Joyce

52 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 329.

53 Quoted in Eugene O’ Brien. Seamus Heaney: Searches For Answers. Pluto Press, London: 2003, p 17.

50

foregrounds this issue in A Portrait O f The Artist As A Young Man,

thereby embodying in different ways in his work a consciousness of

“linguistic otherness”: a sense of unease with the imperial, alien

English language. The classic quote from the novel which illustrates

this is in the final section of the novel when Stephen Dedalus has an

interview with his English Dean at the university. During their

conversation, Stephen uses the word ‘tudish’ where the dean would

use ‘funnel’. Stephen’s introspective analysis is worth quoting for the

clear colonial ramifications of the language issue in Ireland often

quoted as central to Irish literary studies:

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his

sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. The

language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.

How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his

lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without

unrest of sprit. His language, so familiar and so foreign will

always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or

accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul

frets in the shadow of his language.54

(Years later, Raja Rao would express a similar predicament in his

54 James Joyce. A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man. Wordsworth Suffolk, 1992, p 189.

51

acclaimed postcolonial text Kanthapura) James Joyce converts the

humiliation of this history into a linguistic triumph, sanctioning a new

pride in the language now known by linguists as Hibemo - English.55

In Ulysses, and finally in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce pursues a kind of a

subversive revenge on the English language by radically destabilizing

its lexicon in a promiscuous riot of pun and word play. In these

novels, the authority of English language is constantly undermined by

its exposure to numerous other languages, with etymology becoming

the agency of an antagonistic politics. Stan Smith sees this ‘tundish’

episode as central to Irish literary studies and a crucial episode in

Heaney’s developing attitude towards the legacy of the English

language. Quoting Heaney’s essay “Among School Children”, he

points out the formers comment:“Stephen, in that famous passage

feels inadequate when he hears the English Jesuit speaking English”.56

The differences between them, according to Heaney are of cultural

and geographical placing, in the oral register, ‘on his lips and mine’,

of a difference within a shared ‘language, so familiar and so foreign’.

In the same lecture, analysing Stephen’s discovery of his linguistic

55 A variant of the English language made up of Irish elements and Standard English, immortalized by Joyce in his novels.

56 Quoted in Stan Smith. “The Distance Between”, Seamus Heaney: New Casebooks. Michael Allen (Ed.) Hampshire and London:1997, p 245.

52

displacement as a mark of triumph, Heaney’s comment is significant:

What had seemed disabling and provincial is suddenly found

to be corroborating and fundamental and potentially

universal. To belong to Ireland, to speak its dialect, is not

necessarily to be cut off from the world’s banquet because

that banquet is eaten at the table of one’s own life, savoured

by the tongue one speaks. Stephen now trusts what he calls

‘our own language’ and in that trust he will go to encounter

what he calls ‘the reality of experience’. But it will be his

own specific Dublin experience, with all its religious and

historical freight, so different from the English experience to

which he had heretofore stood in a subservient

relationship.”57 In his encounter with the ghost of Joyce at the

end of Station Island, the poet will return to this episode,

referring to it as “The Feast of the Holy Tundish”,

“canonising it among his stars as Stephen had turned it into a

governing myth in his diary”.58

Thomas Kinsella too places Joyce as central to the ‘healing’ of the

rupture in the divided Irish psyche and calls him “the first major Irish

voice to speak for Irish reality since the death-blow to the Irish

language”.59

57 Quoted in Stan Smith. “The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney”. SeamusHeaney: New Casebooks, Michael Allen (Ed.) London: Macmillan, pp 245-46.

58 Ibid., 246

59 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth -Century Poetry, Neil Roberts (Ed.)London: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p 354.

53

Providing a psychological understanding of the postcolonial

condition in Ireland, Christine van Boheeman-Saaf gives a fascinating

interpretation of Joyce’s postcoloniality. Arguing for the “cultural-

historical importance of James Joyce’s modernity” and its extreme

importance for his novels, she explains the “peculiarly traumatizing

and uncanny effect of Irish historical experience on its writers”,60

Joyce in particular. She sees the Irish writer “separated from an

original mooring”61 and hence it becomes the task of Irish literature to

mourn the gap that divides himself or herself from the possibility of

“interiority and self-presence”62 that might have been had history

been different. Growing up with the oppressor’s language, the Irish

artist can only allude allegorically to what can never be voiced with

immediacy. Hence the “obscurity” of a text like “A Portrait o f the

Artist as a Young Mari’’. Central to this argument is the idea that

Joyce’s encryption of an “ontological void” opened up an “extra-

communicative” but “non-articulable” dimension within literary

discourse, making it possible to honor and enshrine the “presence” of

60 Christine van Boheeman-Saaf. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma o f History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p 1.

61 Ibid., p 2.

62 Ibid.

54

the non-articulated story that cannot be told in so many words - the

“story” of the oppressed, the muted, and the ignored. This hollowness

of the native culture as a direct result of imperial strategy is brilliantly

borne out by this perspective, hailing all Irish literature as a “mimesis

of loss”.63

One of the commonest tendencies of Revivalists like W.B.

Yeats had been to create a myth of the Irish nation as primarily a rural

one. Nationalist writers created a highly idealized version of the Irish

pastoral - where the piety of the land was often viewed through a

haze of sentiments and nostalgia. Such revivalist tendencies, though

important in many ways, would be challenged by revisionary

historians who would revise the default nationalistic narrative of Irish

history as a monological historical narrative, bringing out instead the

fissures and pluralities of the issue, making among other things, the

gender-based (Ireland as suffering female vs. England the male

oppressor) nationalist mythography suspect. An important poet whose

work opposed this tendency to over - idealize the nation was Patrick

Kavanagh (1907-1967). Kavanagh is of prime importance in the

63 Christine van Boheeman-Saaf. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma ofHistory: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999, pp 6-9.

55

cultural tradition of Ireland. First, for his fierce anti- pastoral vision of

rural Ireland, secondly, his bold departure in making poetic themes

out of rural occupations. His great poem The Great Hunger is an

uncompromising exercise in the anti-pastoral, combining in it an

evocation of the local and the communal. Kavangah is important also

because he would eventually provide a strong poetic impetus to

another Irish poet grappling with forging an aesthetic out of his

particular condition and place, Seamus Heaney.

Seamus Heaney confessedly derives inspiration from Patrick

Kavanagh’s habit of encompassing his domestic world within his

poetry and thereby to effect a sense of continuity with his community

and establish his relationship to his origins. Kavanagh’s famous

distinction between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘parochial’ was

illustrative to Heaney of the way the future of writing in Ireland was

going to be if it was to be authentic. A provincial, he writes, “is

always trying to live by other peoples lives, but a parochial is self -

sufficient.”64 A parochial writes of the “fundamentals” and by that

very virtue, is more universal. The ‘parochial’ for Kavanagh, is

distinct from the ‘provincial’ mindset, the latter defining itself solely

64 Quoted in Seamus Heaney. Andrew Murphy. Northcote House Publishers,Devon: 2000, p 19. ,

56

in relation to ‘the metropolis’.

The parochial mentality on the other hand is neVer in any

doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All

great civilizations are based on parochialism-Greek, Israelite,

English. In recent times we have had two great Irish

parishioners-James Joyce and George Moore.65

A parochial writes of the “fundamentals” and by that very virtue, is

more universal. Kavanagh here comes closest to the mapping of an

indigenous Irish aesthetic with himself as seer.

Heaney clearly sums up Kavanagh’s importance:

If The Great Hunger did not exist, a greater hunger would,

the hunger of a culture for its own image and expression. It is

a poem of its own place & time, transposing the griefs of the

past...into the distress of the present, as significant in the

Irish context as Hardy’s novels were in the English...66

The above discussion of four major Irish writers was done first, in

order to establish the development, however complex, of the Irish

Literary tradition in English, which finds genuine representative

voices in each succeeding generation. Secondly, this tradition is to be

65 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Neil Roberts (Ed.) London: Blackwell Publishers. 2001, p 352.

66 Seamus Heaney. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber, 1980, p 126.

57

viewed not merely as a matter of echoes and influences and so on but

a sort of mutuality among the writers, an interdependence which we

call a tradition. Further, the nature of Irishness and the problem of

identity are obsessive themes for each of these literary artistes.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a representative

voice in this tradition has been that of Seamus Heaney (b.1939) - a

contemporary voice which grapples with the continuities and

discontinuities that invigorate and define his poetic development.

Heaney insistently draws on this impressive lineage, not simply as a

matter of self-consciousness but more importantly, with a view

towards an artistic self-definition and the need to carve out poetry’s

destiny in an increasingly volatile world. Seamus Deane places

Heaney in this direct line of succession in Irish literature: “... Heaney

is very much in the Irish tradition in that he has learned, more

successfully than most, to conceive of his personal experience in

terms of his country’s history ... .”67

To have a recognizable set of paradigms is an enabling tool for

a poet, but can easily fall into stereotyping themes and pre­

occupations. The peculiar contribution of Heaney lies in the way he

67 Quoted in Seamus Heaney in conversation with Karl Miller, London, BetweenThe Lines, 2000, p. 104.

58

manages to write a poetry whereby he becomes not merely the

transmitter and re-invigorator of his native tradition but almost

provides a remarkable culmination to the efforts of his literary

predecessors, writing as he does in the modem or even postmodern

world. In this respect, Heaney’s contribution to Irish poetry is colossal.

What makes Heaney’s status in Irish poetry monumental is the

way that he has constantly renewed his thematic concerns throughout

his poetic career. His prose writings or criticism pose fundamental

questions about the nature and role of poetry, the function of the poet

and the precarious balance between politics and poetry, the aesthetic

and the ethical, art and life, fundamental queries the answers to which

his serious artistic endeavors constantly demand. His prose writings

have been much acclaimed which form a kind of manifesto or

declaration of poetic technique and poetic intent and at the same time

have a force and brilliance of their own when read apart from the

poetry.

It would be pertinent to discuss next, his critical discussions.

59