Northern Irish Poetry

The American Connection

E. Kennedy-Andrews

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137330383
• eBook ISBN: 9781137330390
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through discussion of the ways in which major Northern Irish poets (such as John Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon) have been influenced by America, this study shows how Northern Irish poetry overspills national borders, complicating and enriching itself through cross-cultural interaction and hybridity.

1

Transnational Poetics

Two poetries, Northern Irish and American

There is of course an element of artificiality in hiving off ‘Northern Irish’ poetry from ‘Irish’ poetry more generally, especially when the poets themselves identify with a conglomerate cultural Irishness and disregard political partition. Nevertheless, I have retained ‘Northern Irish’ as a means of designating a group of poets who are all products of a particular geographical, historical and cultural matrix which has uniquely shaped their responses to both their native place and the world beyond. Equally, there is an element of artificiality in hiving off ‘American connections’ from the network of precursors, rivals and supporters in which any poet is inscribed: the creative imagination in its infinitely mysterious operations is no respecter of national or any other kind of boundary. However, the long history of transnational human and cultural flows between Ireland and America gives ‘American connections’ a special force in the consideration of Northern Irish poetry in its international contexts. Northern Irish, like Irish poetry more generally, largely as a result of, or reaction to, its colonial inheritance, has a particular reputation for being insular or nativist in comparison with other modern and contemporary poetry, and this makes it all the more interesting as an example of what a transnational critical methodology can bring to light and a more strictly ‘Irish’-centred approach neglect to see. The assumption that Northern Irish experience is unique and distinctive discourages criticism that probes the web of transnational affiliation and interaction that pervades Northern Irish poetry. Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), a key text of the Field Day movement, is a powerful warning against fetishizing and embalming the myths of a pure national culture, and a proclamation of the need to check the recuperative drive through a dynamic process of translation, adaptation and reinvention. Translation affirms change as well as continuity. Arguably, Northern Irish poetry has been more open than the novel or the drama to outside influences and the impulse to play with and work upon the given reality in order to open up new possibilities of meaning. Unless Northern Irish poetry criticism, in the era of transnational imagination, takes account of the poetry’s wide-ranging scope, including its deepest and most pervasive ‘foreign’ constituent – its American connections – it is in danger of looking increasingly old-fashioned and provincial. Modern globalized culture makes it impossible for literary study to continue operating on traditional nation-based, canonical or exceptionalist models. Indeed, the organization of literary study within the academy and its literary histories, anthologies and curricula along national lines tends to obscure the true nature of poetry as intrinsically hybrid, interstitial and fluid. Taking a different tack from other studies of Northern Irish poetry which locate it within an Irish or British literary history, this book represents an alternative approach to Northern Irish poetry that aims to elucidate its powerfully transatlantic dynamics. By highlighting various instances of cross-national connection and hybrid affiliation exhibited by Northern Irish poets, this study shows how Northern Irish poetry complicates and enriches itself through cross-cultural bricolage and hybridity, or struggles to preserve a sense of unique identity and local attachment in the face of globalization, interstitial migrancy and postmodern scepticism. By examining a variety of themes and modes thrown up by transatlanticism – globalism and localism, migrancy and rootedness, diaspora and nativism, traditionalism and modernism, world consciousness and provincialism, ‘closed’ form and ‘open’ form – it is possible to indicate the many ways in which Northern Irish poetry overspills national borders and engages in transatlantic circuits of poetic connection and cross-national dialogue. The mobility generated by new technology, the growth of travel and tourism, the influx of foreign investment, the influence of mass communications of TV, film and the internet, have all contributed to the creation of ‘the global village’ and the erosion of traditional cultural values. Place is increasingly viewed as the product of global, interconnecting flows of peoples, cultures and meanings – of routes rather than roots. Concepts of place, identity and history that are essentialist and exclusionary, based on notions of rooted authenticity, homogenous territory, single identities and internally generated history have become increasingly unsustainable in the (post)modern world. The processes of globalization and migration, and the resulting compression of the space–time continuum, are producing new senses of both placed and placeless identity, new relations between rootedness and mobility, centre and periphery, global and local.

To study the dialogic interactions between Northern Irish and American poetries presumes the existence of two distinct literary traditions – Northern Irish and American – though that is not to discount the already mixed and plural composition of each, nor to embrace a monologic understanding of either. Transnationalism is not post-nationalism: it does not imply a floating free of national identity, though it does stand in sharp contrast to ideas of a pure, immutable nationalistic identity. Before starting to map out how Northern Irish poets confound regional and national boundaries by forging alliances of style and sensibility with their American cousins, it is necessary to have some idea of the differences between the two traditions. Introductions to twentieth-century anthologies of American and British/Irish poetry (‘Northern Irish poetry’ often being subsumed under either the ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ rubric) are a good place to start, since it’s largely through anthologies that traditions and canons are constructed, and contemporary debates over terms and values are made manifest. W. H. Auden’s introduction to the Faber Book of Modern American Verse (1956) is centrally concerned with comparing and contrasting the two poetries on either side of the Atlantic. It opens with the resounding statement that ‘From Bryant on, there is scarcely one American poet whose work, if unsigned, could be mistaken for that of an Englishman’.¹ Nor for that of an Irish poet, we may assume, since Auden’s contrastive element shifts between ‘English’, ‘European’ and ‘Old World’ in the course of his introduction. The first distinctively American characteristic to which he alludes is diversity: ‘no two poets could be more unlike each other than Longfellow and Whitman’.² Then there’s the sound of American poetry – its ‘pace’ and ‘pitch’ – which, Auden claims, is quite different from English poetry: ‘Any Englishman … will still be as far from speaking American English as his Yankee cousin who comes to England will be from speaking the King’s’.³ The European writer could presuppose ‘a nature which was mythologized, humanized, on the whole friendly, and a human society … in race and religion more or less homogeneous and in which most people lived and died in the locality where they were born’.⁴ Not so in America, where nature was virgin, devoid of history, usually hostile. American poetry reflects a landscape of infinite variety and expansiveness, and a wild nature which cannot be thought of in human or personal terms. Old World society is rooted, settled, evolutionary, traditional; New World psychology, formed on the frontier, is attuned to restlessness and impermanence: ‘In America … to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction or failure’.⁵ This readiness at any time to break with the past means that for the American writer the significance of the past is lessened, and the only future which counts – the immediate future – is unpredictable, experimental and improvisatory. Where British poetry reflects a concept of society as ‘organic peaceful growth’,⁶ American literature, born of revolution, pictures ‘the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new’: ‘There is indeed an American mentality which is new and unique in the world but it is the product less of conscious political action than of nature, of the new and unique environment of the American continent’.⁷ And, finally, there is the American emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual. The sense of a tradition which the poet may fit into, or draw from, is more readily available to the European than to the American poet, yet not being identified with any particular tradition has the advantage of encouraging curiosity and freedom to experiment. The quotation from de Tocqueville that closes the essay reflects Auden’s own belief that if America, unlike Europe, was free from the weight of the past, it was America’s ‘technological civilization’ which was Europe’s and the world’s future.

The first edition of New Poets of England and America (1957), with its all-American editorship of Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, and a brief introduction by Robert Frost, made no distinction between English and American poets. Known as ‘the Academic anthology’ because of its preference for academic poets and metrical verse, it was touted as the flagship of Anglo-American New Formalism. A few years later, Donald Hall, having readjusted to altered conditions, was championing the new poets who followed William Carlos Williams, declaring in his introduction to Contemporary American Poetry (1962) that ‘from the mid-twenties until very recently, American poetry has functioned as part of the English tradition’, and that ‘the colloquial side of American literature – the side which valued “experience” more than “civilization” – was neglected by our younger poets’.⁸ It was when the ‘younger poets’ moved away from the civilized English tradition represented by Eliot, Hall declares, that American poetry found its unique voice in native speech rhythms, free verse, improvisation and a poetry of experiences rather than ideas. Among the poets in Hall’s anthology who represent this colloquial strain of American poetry are Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, the later Robert Lowell, the Beats, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, John Ashbery.

Hall’s anthology marked a clear break with the New Critical idea of poetry as expressed by Cleanth Brooks. In his influential Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), Brooks sees his tradition as an English one, and is suspicious of claims about American literary nationalism. Dividing his modern poets into those who relate to the longstanding English tradition, and those who reject it to ‘write of American scenes, American things, and American people’,⁹ he considers this ‘violent repudiation of the poetic tradition’ to be responsible for an unhealthily ‘self-conscious nationalism’.¹⁰ It risks a superficial originality; it can ‘make the poet content merely with the presentation of a surface. Sandburg, for example, often displays a crust of modern American materials thrown over statements which are as vague, and sometimes as sentimental, as those of Whitman’.¹¹ Whitman is to blame for the rejection of the English tradition which Brooks finds so problematic in his own contemporaries, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters. In Brooks’ view, the future of American poetry depended on the American poet’s embracement of the English Metaphysical tradition, and determination to forge a formal unity in poetry between past and present, between local or national and universal.

The importance of the avant-garde strand in American poetry was reflected and consolidated by the appearance of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), which contained the work of 43 poets arranged in five groups or schools – ‘the Black Mountain Poets’ (including Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Dorn, Oppenheimer, Levertov), ‘the San Francisco Renaissance’ (including Duncan, Spicer, Ferlinghetti, Lamantia), ‘the Beat Generation’ (including Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Snyder, Whalen), ‘the New York Poets’ (including Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara), and a fifth group which has ‘no geographical definiton’ but who have ‘evolved their own original styles and new conceptions of poetry’ (including Whalen, Snyder, Perkoff, McClure, Wieners, Sorrentino, LeRoi Jones). That only four of the poets included were women testifies to the sexism of the ‘progressive’ or bohemian countercultures of the time (Hall’s more conservative, rival anthology contained seven female contributors out of a total of 51). Allen offered his selection as representing ‘the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry’,¹² poets who did not see themselves as part of a continuous, evolving tradition, reaching across the Atlantic or back into the past. At the back of the book came a series of ‘Statements of Poetics’, starting with Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’. One of the most influential anthologies in the US since World War II, The New American Poetry has been hailed as ‘a crucial cultural document, central to defining the poetics and the broader cultural dynamics of a particular historical moment’; ‘a wholly prophetic volume … THE great anthology of avant-garde poetry, the book that determined the direction it would take in the second half of the century’.¹³ The volume reflected a growing separation of British/Irish and American poetries. Since then, British/Irish poetry has continued to lose ground in American schools and colleges, almost disappearing from the general American cultural scene, leaving American poets, students and poetry readers with a rather different historical perspective from that of their British/Irish counterparts: for Americans, American poetry has a two-hundred-year past and is mainly Modernist, while British/Irish literary perspectives reach back to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowulf …

Not all poetry readers this side of the Atlantic have found the developments in the American poetic congenial or meaningful. In an essay for Poetry Review, ‘Mind the Gap: On Reading American Poetry’ (2006), the Scottish poet John Burnside describes a discussion among some distinguished British poets in which ‘a consensus was soon reached that American poetry was in a bad way, poetically speaking. The American poem was thin, overly-expansive, self-regarding, pseudo-intellectual … sentimental’.¹⁴ Rising to spirited defence of a poetry which, he says, has been ‘vitally important’¹⁵ to him, Burnside detects in American poetry a profound ‘dissidence’ which lies not only in its capacity to challenge political and social conventions, but to propose ‘a new way of thinking about the most basic facts of existence’.¹⁶ The ‘new way of thinking’ involves ‘bringing forth the internal process of reasoning, where the poem resembles something improvised, sometimes at the expense of the polish we, on the other side of the water, so value’.¹⁷ Burnside responds to the commonly accepted critical view that the Americans suspect norms, traditions and laws, that they tend not to accept without question the givenness of the world, in all its diversity, and consequently cannot rely on any shared sense of reality held by poet and reader. Rather, American poetry privileges the individual’s particular vision of the world, his capacity, as Wallace Stevens would say, to invent a fiction, to improvise a unique reality rather than reproduce the lineaments of an already agreed order of things. The American poet, so the generally accepted argument goes, takes nothing for granted, cannot merely accept life; his concern is for authenticity, exploration, the creation of an individual vision, improvising his own unique verbal environment. Contrastingly, the British/Irish poet emphasizes native values and traditions, suspects experiment and newness for its own sake, and values perfection of the craft.

This dichotomy between a poetry of process and a poetry of formal precision is not new. It is reflected in Robert Lowell’s notorious 1960 comment on post-war poetry:

Two poetries are now competing, the cooked and the raw. The cooked, marvellously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry and a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Transnational Poetics
• 2 John Montague: ‘Circling to Return’
• 3 Seamus Heaney: ‘the Appetites of Gravity’
• 4 Derek Mahon: ‘Resident Alien’
• 5 Paul Muldoon: Expatriate Transnationalism
• 6 Ciaran Carson: Indigenous Transnationalism
• 7 Conclusion: a Widening Circle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index