Poets' Staying Power

Poets' Staying PowerHow's the Poetry Going? Literary Politics and Ireland Today by Gerald Dawe; Louis MacNeice:The Poet in His Contexts by Peter McDonald; Patrick Kavanagh: Born-Again Romantic byAntoinette QuinnReview by: Peter DenmanThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 12 (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 175-179Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735667 .

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REVIEWS 175

beat or a heart-beat. At its most powerful, it is incantation. In 'Child Burial', the absence of the heart-beat is taken up like a pulse in the poem:

Ignorant you must remain

of the sun and its work,

my lamb, my calf, my eaglet,

my cub, my kid, my nestling...

Paula Meehan is a seer. Like the child in 'The Pattern', her poems yearn for

other seas, other lands, other heavens, other ethers. Though they are rooted

firmly in the dilemma of being alive on this earth at this time, they are as

vivid and exotic as a length of wildly coloured hand-woven silk from

Samarkand.

KATE NEWMANN

Poets' Staying Power

Gerald Dawe. How's the Poetry Going? Literary Politics and Ireland Today. Belfast: Lagan Press, 1991. ISBN 1-873687-00-1. Stg?4.95.

Peter McDonald. Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1991. ISBN 0-19-811766-3. Stg?30.00.

Antoinette Quinn. Patrick Kavanagh: Born-Again Romantic. Dublin: Gill and

Macmillan, 1991. ISBN 0-7171-1704-9. IRG35.00.

Gerald Dawe is one of the most alert and engaged literary journalists in the

country at the moment. It helps, of course, that he is also a poet and an

academic and an editor. His pieces in How's the Poetry Going? are essays and

reviews contributed to various periodicals over the past five or six years. His

title as blazoned on the front cover wants it both ways: the easy gesture of the

colloquial first part, and the weightiness of the second. What, pray, is 'literary

polities'? Should that read 'Literature and Polities'? - as the book is some?

thing of a bibliographical curiosity, being without a title-page, we are left

wondering. At times it is as if Dawe sees writing being done by a select

committee, a star chamber of the Irish imagination wearily taking up the

burden of thinking for the excluded: 'the role of the writer in Irish society is

intimately bound up with compensating rather than questioning. In place of a social world, in which each citizen performs certain basic obligations and

receives, in return, certain freedoms, our literary culture (in the main) shoul?

ders this responsibility and becomes a chronicle of failure'. The parenthetical

qualification does not quite rescue this statement from being too peremptory.



176 REVIEWS

For myself, I am quite happy to leave literature to cope with failure; it does it

rather well.

The coherence of Da we's critical approach is evident in that these pieces do

have a predominant theme; the attempt to understand 'the nature of the Irish

literary community' and the image of the society in which it sees itself placed. We are offered tantalizing glimpses of Dawe's own literary community: the

question which gives the eponymous essay its title was put to him by 'a well

known academic and writer'; at a conference he overhears 'an undoubtedly well-intentioned academic'; he meets an 'EC literary journalist accompanied

by an avid Irish intellectual trend-spotter'. Who are these people? I think we

should be told - Dawe is obviously in a position to name names, and it is no

more than he demands of S?amus Heaney in a review of The Government of the

Tongue. But Dawe's strength is his insistence on rising above gossip. This

book is a testimony to the quality of his reviews and occasional articles, and

Lagan Press is to be complimented on making available these pieces which

are a vigorous report-back from the frontline of engagement. At the centrepiece of How's The Poetry Going? is a fine bipartite essay on

Louis MacNeice, in the course of which Dawe remarks: 'Why MacNeice's

experience, knowledge and acomplishment is [sic] not better known and

studied inside the country he came from makes for a very complicated story indeed'. Dawe probably knows the story, but isn't telling it at the moment.

MacNeice has been well served of late by critical commentaries, and yet he

remains somehow elusive, a fugitive figure discerned through his influence on Irish successors, not as a clearly defined presence. Patrick Kavanagh has

suffered from being too well known in his own country, his poems - some of

them - recited at the drop of a hat, and overlain by the character that he

created or had created for him. If Private Eye were to do an Irish version of its

'Great Bores of Today' column, high up there would be The Person Who

Knew Patrick Kavanagh: '.... I saw him carried out he used to come for

sandwiches to our house, naturally we'd give him his tea but he had a terrible

loud voice and that old jacket of his and his glasses broken, it was the drink

that did terrible things to him, he was a lovely man sometimes when he got to

know you...' And yet the shadowy MacNeice is the subject of a book a year, while Kavanagh's poetry has remained almost out of sight of any serious and

sustained assessment up to now.

The books by Antoinette Quinn and Peter McDonald are a reminder to us

that the two poets were close contemporaries. Kavanagh was just three years older than MacNeice. The only Catholic MacNeice knew in his childhood

was a servant from Tyrone; Kavanagh's encounters with Protestants are not

recorded. While MacNeice progressed through Sherbourne and Marlborough,

Kavanagh left school at thirteen and moved on to his sister's copy o? Interme?

diate Certificate English Poetry and Prose. While MacNeice read classics at

Merton College, Oxford, Kavanagh was in Monaghan 'sitting at the end of

the day upstairs in a cold corner by the light of a candle. A mother's voice

calling every now and then: "Come down and throw a lock of turnips to the



REVIEWS 177

unfortunate cows".' The contrast is facile, but nonetheless striking for that.

The contrast has also been apparent in the way Kavanagh and MacNeice

have been read - MacNeice, his right leg stretched creating speed is seen as

tangentially departing from the subject of Ireland, Kavanagh bogged down it

it like a car with its back wheels sinking in soft ground. McDonald cautions

us that 'Clearly, MacNeice's imaginative engagement with Ireland may be

distinguished from that of, say Patrick Kavanagh, but the difference between

the two should not be simplified into that between "exile" and "belonging". These two books taken in conjunction will be a critical prophylaxis against such simplification; the essential value of Quinn's book lies in its baring of

the complexities of Kavanagh's relationship with Ireland - not an Ireland

that he had imagined, terrible and gay, but one which resisted imaginative assimilation. Patrick Kavanagh: Born-Again Romantic charts the progress of his

struggle with that resistance.

McDonald gives a useful chapter to MacNeice's juvenilia and undergradu? ate poems of the 1920s, showing how it cleared the lines for the concerns of

his mature work. MacNeice's first volume was Blind Fireworks in 1929; at the

same time Kavanagh had seen his first printed pieces in the poetry column of

the Irish Weekly Independent, where he was fifteen times among the runners

up but never won thehalf-guinea for the best poem. Kavanagh's early work is

scanted by Quinn, who speaks dismissively of 'newspaper verse'. But there is

a strong tradition of such verse in Ireland; it endures, impervious to social

change - and to literary politics

- to this day, celebrating the local. Its strength

provided Kavanagh with a model that he outgrew, but he retained enough of

it to enable a poem such as 'Raglan Road' which is now seeping back into the

anonymous popular ballad tradition.

In any book on Kavanagh, one naturally looks to the discussion of The

Great Hunger, which Quinn subjects to a curiously agley cinematic metaphor,

presumably prompted by the fact that later in life Kavanagh was for a time

film critic on The Standard. Her treatment is informed more by duty than by

insight. But perhaps it is just a clearing of the ground, for on the subsequent

period of Kavanagh's career Quinn is stimulating. The chapter 'Writing Catholic Ireland' shows the presence of Catholicism, not as a credal or

confessional force, but as the social set of beliefs and customs binding him to

the world. It leads into a chapter dealing with 'Parochialism', highlighting the ramifications of this key term in Kavanagh's 'sectarian literary myth' by

which he challenged the hegemony of the Protestant ascendancy in the

Literary Revival.

Not long after MacNeice had written Autumn Journal, he deprecated it,

claiming that 'it fails in depth'. This was the time Kavanagh was writing The

Great Hunger, which he too was to reject, as failed comedy. The two poems stand as the great poetic statements of mid-century Irish poetry

- Yeats was

dead, Clarke was silent, and contemporaries such as MacGreevy, Devlin,

Rodgers, Coffey and Hewitt has hardly begun. It is perhaps indicative that, while Kavanagh's Maguire faces a life that 'is broken-backed over the Book /



178 REVIEWS

Of Death', MacNeice is able to write a 'Journal'; his was a life with generous

margins to accommodate the jottings and glosses. He portrays himself thus

in the opening of The Strings are False, and in a more contemporary account of

the 1941 Atlantic crossing which he contributed to an early number of Pen?

guin New Writing: one of his fellow passengers is an Irishman, 'a big old man

with a bog-trotter's face who liked the drink', who lurches into MacNeice's

cabin as he is trying to write and offers to correct his grammar. I could

suggest a name for that intrusive Irishman... but no, Kavanagh was in Dublin

at the time, and scarcely old enough. Section XVII of Autumn Journal is crucial, suggests McDonald, quoting

Virtue going out of us always; the eyes grow weary

With vision but it is vision builds the eye; And in a sense the children kill their parents But do the parents die?

MacNeice's classicism is on show in that 'virtue'; its failing makes the point, in an abstract way, that the individual is not self-sufficient. Maguire in The

Great Hunger, caught in the familial shackles of rural Ireland, finds that out

through experience. What Quinn tells us is that Kavanagh learned - earned? - his abstraction the hard way; it was not until after The Great Hunger that he

was able to announce his passivity. And as Quinn's treatment comes into its

strength in the chapters following the discussion of that poem, she throws a

proper and valuable emphasis on the work done between The Great Hunger and the Canal Bank sonnets of the 1950s, and shows that comedy was far

more than a stick with which to beat the long poem; it was an approach to

revelation. There are some illuminating treatments of individual works in

Quinn's book, in particular of Tarry Flynn, 'Shancoduff (a keynote poem, she

demonstrates convincingly), 'Father Mat' and 'Lough Derg', but its real value

is the overall view which it offers of Kavanagh's writing career. There is an

unremitting, if uneven, progress towards the relaxation and dispersal of the

later poems which constitute a poetic self-(re)creation. If these are careless in

composition and attitude, they signal a shedding of the cares which had

shaken Kavanagh's heart since 'Shancoduff; the easy freedom of writing which Kavanagh adopted was hardwon, and in the respectabilities of the

Ireland of the early 1960s offered a gesture of salutary rudeness. Quinn is

very good on the 'automythology' which Kavanagh constructed, and which

incidentally foreshadowed his posthumous translation into urban myth. McDonald similarly shows a steady developmental pattern in MacNeice's

career by rehabilitating the poems of the late forties and early fifties as

precursors to the lyric vitality of his last three volumes. McDonald's treat?

ment is meticulous. Although it is part of his method to discriminate among the weave of contextual factors operating on MacNeice throughout his po?

etry, he reserves his final chapter for a full discussion of MacNeice's imagina? tive engagement with Ireland. Its placing, meant to be climactic or conclusive,



REVIEWS 179

reads a little post-scripturally. MacNeice, we are told, is a poet of exile after

all, and his personal myths are myths of loss: 'Ireland always functions to some extent as a parental presence in his work, in one way lost (the mother) and in another partially rejected (the father and his north)'. The danger of this

approach is that it risks making MacNeice sound rather like too many other

Irish poets. But while, as McDonald concludes, 'MacNeice's uses for Ireland, and Ireland's for MacNeice, are both complex topics', one of the features of

MacNeice's poetry is its tendency to use 'Ireland' as if the name referred to, or

ought to have signified, a culturally homogenized blend; in that particular context, he has difficulty with any difference beyond the topographical.

Quinn tells us that the aim of her book is partly 'to introduce Kavanagh's oeuvre to a wider overseas

readership'. We have always been a little embar?

rassed by Kavanagh and what happened to him. We have kept him at home

and tried to look after him. MacNeice could take care of himself; he made his

way in the world, and the occasional visit or letter home seemed all that was

necessary to keep in touch. Antoinette Quinn's book goes a great way to?

wards explaining a figure whom we have merely indulged. Peter McDonald

shows a poet who has too often been put in the guest bedroom on his visits

back; he needs to be given the room he had as a child, and perhaps he will

stay.

PETER DENMAN

History is What Hurts

Ian Duhig. The Bradford Count. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991. ISBN

1-87224-138-1. Stg?5.95.

Gerald Dawe. Sunday School. Oldcastle: Gallery, 1991. ISBN 1-85235-063-6.

IR?4.95 (pbk). ISBN 1-85235-064-4. IR?8.95 (hbk).

Eavan Boland. Outside History. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991. ISBN 0-85635 899-1. Stg?6.95.

Brendan Kennelly. The Book of Judas. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991.

ISBN 1-85224-171-3. ?8.95 (pbk). ISBN 1-85224-170-5. ?25.00 (hbk).

Poetry and history, perhaps a more benign twin of Conor Cruise O'Brien's

'unhealthy intersection' of literature and politics, continues to thrive. Ever

since the success of 'revisionist' historiography was sealed in the 1960s by historical events - the modernisation of Irish society set in motion by the

O'Neill/Lemass reforms - Irish poetry has been an encounter not simply with history but with the way in which history can be written. In this sense it

could be argued that Murphy's The Battle of Aughrim was the exemplary work



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Poets' Staying Power