Introduction

This feature is the companion to the feature of younger British poets I introduced last spring. A greater accuracy would have required me to alter British to English, and a similar problem of nomenclature intrudes here. These poets were all raised in Northern Ireland, and for that reason the present government would consider them residents of the United Kingdom. There is no doubt that some members of the government believe, at least in public, that the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland guarantees its political affiliation, just as many of its private citizens recognize that such affiliations are a matter of history and inconvenience. The weekly and monthly murder of soldiers and the assassination of the postman and the farmer are conveyed in the London press with a matter-of-factness that verges on insolence—but it is perhaps a casualness that is weary and hopeless. The outrage is reserved for the bombs that go off in Hyde Park.

This poetry derives more from the effects of violence than from its origins or implications. It is written from a context, and some of the despair of that context should be apparent, because the political problem is almost wholly without solution. As with other violent moments, any poetry that does not refer to or derive from it can be accused of evasion. That is not an accusation made against—or a judgment made on—poets afflicted with peacetime; it indicates when politics no longer informs but comes to condition artistic response. Michael Longley has noted in a lecture how tentatively and with what reservations Irish poets first attempted poems referring to the violence. Necessity can seem opportunism to critics, who are with impunity students of politics.

English poets are still searching for a historic context—there is a sense in which English life is not unhistoric but brutally ahistoric, denying what it subconsciously would embrace. That is perhaps one reason the Irish poets have been so well received in England. If one remembers Pound’s similar reflections and the vogue for Ossian that disfigured literary life in the eighteenth century, an old pattern of interaction between England and its client cultures reveals itself. England is famous for its empirical attitudes.

Whatever erosion violence has made into Northern Ireland, its spasmodic and secretive nature does not make everyone a witness, and domestic life proceeds. It would be more surprising if these poets wrote only about the afterimages and echoes of violence than if they wrote nothing about it at all. Indeed, domestic life is the embracive subject of these poets; and, if there are cultural reasons for that, they have secured the prolonged tension between politics and the resentful privacies of Irish life, privacies dramatized by Joyce more than Yeats. If the familial fabric of many of these poems suggests the poetry that Northern Ireland might have developed without the troubles, the slow bleed of politics through them shows how Yeats remains a brooding presence. The domestic seems now not a restriction but a private freedom the state can no longer afford.

If these poets have been determined by politics, they have arrived by accident as well. The Writers’ Group founded by Philip Hobsbaum during his appointment at Queen’s University during the early Sixties has perhaps been over-mythologized, though it was important to Seamus Heaney and to a lesser extent Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. That fortuitous gathering has affected much of the present generation of Irish poetry, not only by its tenor but by the reaction of others to it. Seamus Heaney is the missing person in this feature because he is so vast a presence outside it. To pretend to introduce him to an American audience would have been an amusing impertinence, though I don’t believe that Heaney can be read without reference to his fellow poets in Ireland, both older and younger. Americans have been tempted to ignore the context from which Heaney’s poetry emerged and to treat him with the isolation that makes critical practice such a sharp one.

It occurs to me that sharp practice is a British idiom, and that similar allowances may have to be made for terms enclosed by these poems—or for books like Tom Paulin’s recent Liberty Tree, which revels in the dislocations of dialect. Such advocations of a divisive language—and Paulin teaches now in in England—imply the continuing drive for an identity separate from England’s, a drive present also in Wales and Scotland. The Welsh-language activists understand, perhaps better than the arsonists who burn down the Englishman’s holiday home, that without a separate language the juxtaposed culture is overwhelmed. There is not much point in reviving Cornish any longer.

Largely due to the efforts of Wake Forest University Press, recent books by many of these poets are more widely available in America than those of their English peers. These books have not been sufficiently reviewed, however, at least not to a degree commensurate with their standing here. For the past decade American poets have concentrated on translations of poetry from languages they scarcely understand. This poetry struggles with more recognizable traditions, even if we are divided from it by a common tongue.

Cambridge, England
July 1983