Northern Irish Poetry and Theology

G. McConnell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349465880, 9781137343833
• eBook ISBN: 9781137343840
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Northern Irish Poetry and Theology argues that theology shapes subjectivity, language and poetic form, and provides original studies of three internationally acclaimed poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.

1

Religion and Identity Politics in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry: The Critical Landscape

Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.

John Gray

Religion, n. A goodly tree, in which all the foul birds of the air have made their nests.

Ambrose Bierce

If The Devil’s Dictionary is to be trusted, the legacies of sectarianism in Northern Irish political culture are nests for foul birds. In attempting to address these legacies, criticism of Northern Irish poetry has at times nestled sectarian difference within its modes of analysis in ways that are not always transparent. But Bierce defines the dictionary as ‘a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic’ (96). In writing about the foul birds, Northern Irish literary criticism from the 1980s can be commended for acknowledging and addressing religious and political difference during grim decades of political violence and death. Critics of Northern Irish poetry employ sectarian, secular and spiritual frames of reference but, in each, identity politics assumed on the basis of religious culture is a significant touchstone. The sectarian model demarcates Protestant/Catholic poetry on the basis of the poet’s socio-cultural background rather than by reading poetry in relation to Protestant or Catholic theology, and the distinction is often also used to identify unionist/nationalist politics but usually in very subtle ways. This subtlety itself manifests the difficulty critics have had in speaking about their historical moment of violent political conflict. But such subtlety also risks masking the theological and political arguments motivating particular critical analyses. This chapter attends to such subtleties in order to reconsider the role of theology in contemporary criticism.

The focus on identity politics is a prominent feature of contemporary Northern Irish poetry criticism even in analyses that explicitly purport to do away with it. Some critics render poets (and poetry) secular or atheist, but frame their reading according to the sectarian framework and thereby reinscribe Catholic/Protestant identity without further analysis of how theological and secular influence might fruitfully commingle or valuably pull apart. Alternatively, spiritual modes of analysis highlight sacred and numinous poetics without differentiating such poetics in religious or theological terms. These, too, often ultimately operate within a sectarian paradigm. This is unsurprising, given that part of the attraction of analysing poetry with spiritual vocabulary is its potential for bypassing political and religious controversies. This desire is elsewhere expressed in critical demands for aesthetic sanctuary through the well-made poem, for transcendent poetics or for a pluralist poetry, capable of overcoming the sectarianism of its historical context. This chapter critiques each of these modes of analysis and examines the theological vocabulary of Northern Irish criticism. It concludes by considering the wish for an escape from sectarianism and the consequential importance of New Criticism as a critical paradigm that enables aesthetic transcendence and a way out of history.

I

The nature and history of the Troubles has left indelible marks on Northern Ireland’s literature and literary criticism. In seeking a means of response to the political turbulence and rising death toll in Northern Ireland, critical expectations during the 1970s and 1980s began to centre on the willingness and ability of a poet to represent the Troubles poetically. Writing against the escalation of the IRA’s campaign of violence, the hunger strikes and thwarted political agreements, critics sought to measure poetry’s political import according to the extent to which a poet spoke from within his political and/or religious community and, indeed, as its spokesman.¹ This Troubled context codifies the intertwining of political and religious loyalties, so as to read them as metonymic. Where political allegiance cannot be determined, religious culture functions as convenient shorthand, and vice versa: Catholic for nationalist; Protestant for unionist.

Although a reductive method for determining political and religious belief and practice,² the persistence of this shorthand form in Northern Irish culture is hard to overstate. In Northern Irish literary criticism the prevalence of this metonymic strategy of differentiation attests to a willingness on the part of its critics to take seriously the violent conflict and its associated politics in the assessment of poetry. This can be seen in how the revisionist/postcolonial³ debate of the 1980s absorbs and mirrors the politics of the Troubles. This criticism reflects its historical moment and constitutes a historically conscious critical response. In attending to the sectarianism of the poets’ socio-political landscapes, however, such criticism stopped short of imagining theology’s formative role in poetry’s production; the task with which this study is charged.⁴

Partly as a means of celebrating what is controversially termed the ‘Northern Revival’ or ‘Ulster Renaissance’,⁵ critics such as Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley focused critical attention on the presence of ‘the Protestant imagination’ in Ireland. Their work exposed a critical tradition within Irish literary studies (from Daniel Corkery to, in their view, the Field Day project), which associated ‘Irishness’ with Catholicism, and countered it promoting the work of Protestant poets such as Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt and Michael Longley. In political terms, the revisionist project was seen by Field Day critics, among others, as a literary form of Ulster Unionism that sought to demarcate and celebrate the uniqueness of Northern Irish literature; a northern version of Irish exceptionalism. Concomitantly, critics such as Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin reproached some of the writers championed by Edna Longley et al. for their failure to speak directly to the injustice and violence of the Northern Irish conflict. This stimulated the perception that shell-shocked northern Protestants hid behind high windows to indulge in lyric poetry while Seamus Heaney tackled directly the violent confrontation taking place. Revisionists, in turn, saw the Field Day project as a reworked Irish nationalism, dressed up in ‘theory’.

Caught in the crossfire of this highly political criticism, Heaney, Longley and Mahon have suffered the weight of what Edna Longley (1986: 185) calls ‘improper expectations’; the hazard of the ‘First Generation’ effect. Longley’s and Mahon’s first and Heaney’s second volumes coincided with the outbreak of violence and the early years of the Civil Rights campaign in Northern Ireland in what was to become a seemingly interminable, bloody, bitter conflict. Often criticized for their poetic and political failures, and seen as spokesmen for political communities, these poets have laboured under intense pressure, both close to home and internationally. The violent historical conditions against which their work is read implies important, if ill-defined, poetic responsibilities. Fran Brearton (2003b: 95) observes that, as historical parallels are drawn, W. B. Yeats casts a shadow over the reception of these poets’ work:

The Irish Revival, with its nationalist agenda, its emergence from a context of political stalemate and literary silence, and its link with violence through the poet-revolutionaries of Easter 1916, appears to set a precedent for a further literary revival in the North, also inextricably intertwined with Irish/British politics, and running parallel to, if unconnected with, campaigns of violence: the ‘ghost of analogy’, as Richard Kirkland points out, ‘shadows events’. ‘Yeats to Heaney’ is more than merely a convenient marketing ploy.

Competing Yeats mythologies have sprung from revisionist and postcolonial responses to his poetry and legacy: mythologies which make his example and influence in a Northern Irish context a vexed affair. It is worth asking, using Brearton’s terms, how the Irish Literary Revival appears to set a precedent for a Northern Irish renaissance, why and how the parallels are drawn and under what conditions the northern version of the historical precedent is imagined. The utility of Yeats’s example for poetry in Northern Ireland from the 1960s fuels a political and theological debate about the politics of poetic form and the status of the lyric in time of civil war.

Deane’s description of Northern Irish literature as ‘autonomous, ordered’ and ‘stand[ing] over against the political system in its savage disorder’ (1991: xxvi) has provided an important provocation in this regard.⁶ While his equation of literary formalism with the maintenance of an orderly political culture (in which Protestant unionism was culturally and politically dominant) appears simplistic, Deane’s interest in the desirability of aesthetic immunity from political violence and in poetic responsibilities in time of civil war is wholly necessary. At one level, then, Northern Irish poetry has been read as a distinctive school, if not quite a monolith, which values formal and political order. John Goodby characterizes Northern Irish poetry by its ‘formal conservatism’ (8) in political and aesthetic terms; likewise, Alex Davis links formal experimentalism with political radicalism and argues that the after-effect of the Northern renaissance has led to the dominance of ‘a Movement lyric fractured by the impact of political violence’ that ‘contemporary Irish poetry, in the North and the South, has done little to problematise’ (160). By contrast, Edna Longley claims ‘Northern Irish poetry is revisionist’ and ‘A poem’s revision, its power to “disturb” […] represents a blink of liberty’ (1994: 62; 55); Fran Brearton suggests, ‘Northern poetry’s radical formalism raises questions as to whether experimentalism may become its own form of conservatism’ (2003b: 109).

The attempt to read Northern Irish poetry as an expression of political conservatism or radicalism is superficial at best, in part because of the difficulty of defining ‘formal’ and ‘formalist’ poetry. The failure of the attempt also fruitfully problematises any assumed congruity in the category ‘Northern Irish Poetry’. While the New Critical literary paradigm that began to govern critical and creative practices at Queen’s in the 1960s privileged the well-wrought poem, within both the School of English and the Belfast Group under Philip Hobsbaum, the poetry produced by Heaney, Longley and Mahon demonstrates a range of perspectives on the meaning, value and stability of poetic form that renders redundant the association of lyric poetry with a particular strain of politics. Indeed, Mahon’s textual practice challenges the liberal humanist underpinnings of that paradigm as well as its poetic assumptions.

Having inherited practical criticism and Movement aesthetics, the ‘formalism’ of ‘the Heaney-Mahon-Longley Tight Assed Trio’ (Foley 40–1) has also been read in contrast with the ‘experimentalism’ of what is seen as the ‘second generation’ of poets from Northern Ireland. Reading the poetry of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, Clair Wills sets ‘the dislocated, formally improper and deliberately unresolved poetry of the younger Northern Irish writers’ (28) against the Heaney ‘generation’ that includes John Montague, Michael Longley and James Simmons (15). As Miriam Gamble’s work has shown, the historical and formal similarities between Heaney’s and Muldoon’s ‘generations’ of poets render such generational distinctions a problematic shorthand for critical differences. Surveying the postcolonial/revisionist debate, Wills provides a brilliant study of the calcification of critical expectations that poets act as spokesmen for political tribes. But by reading the younger poets’ work as a departure from tribal politics and a paradigm shift in poetry’s political import, Wills implies that the demands of critics on Heaney’s ‘generation’ of poets to display tribal political loyalties were met in the poetry.

Instead of stressing generational differences, Stan Smith’s critique of Northern Irish poetry demarcates Catholic and Protestant writers. He praises Heaney and Montague for their poetic explorations of tribal complicity – the theme Smith’s introduction identifies as poetry’s primary task, using ‘Digging’ to do so – and makes Mahon representative of the ‘shell-shocked Georgianism that could easily be mistaken for indifference before the ugly realities of life, and death, in Ulster’ by which Smith characterizes Protestant writers (1982: 189). Smith places Mahon within a Protestant tradition and, on this basis, reads his poetry as constituting a retreat from Northern Ireland’s violent conflict and history to Protestant (unionist) middle-class privacy and the well-made poem. Smith’s religious categories are socio-political rather than theological, and his critique overlooks Mahon’s sustained reflection on guilt, complicity and inadequacy. That Heaney addresses directly the utility of art in time of civil war in ‘Feeling into Words’ and The Government of the Tongue has perhaps afforded him a measure of censure from critique. But Smith’s categories have proved an influential mode of differentiation and judgement in all three poets’ critical reception, perceiving poetic responsibility in terms of allegiance to, and representation of, tribal communities.

In Seamus Deane’s interview with Heaney, published in the first issue of The Crane Bag (1977), Deane presses the poet ‘and the Northern poets at large’, to take a ‘political stance’ and thereby avoid ‘corroborat[ing] the recent English notion of the happy limitations of a ‘well made poem’. It is in this interview that Heaney declares, famously, ‘I think that my own poetry is a kind of slow, obstinate, papish burn, emanating from the ground I was brought up on’ (Deane 1977: 67). Heaney’s poetic mythology takes as its origin the Irish soil, in a narrative connecting his poetry both to nationalism and Catholicism. His nationalism is silhouetted again with the publication of a verse letter to Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, editors of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982), in which Heaney was included on the understanding that the anthology would be called Opened Ground, a phrase from ‘Glanmore Sonnets’. In ‘An Open Letter’ Heaney writes, ‘be advised / My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen’ (1985: 25). The performance of identity politics in this stanza is counterbalanced by others referencing British magazines, poets and publishers – a list that includes, of course, Heaney’s own London-based publisher, Faber. The silhouette cast by this rhetorical display of nationalism, then, is far less distinct than it might appear. As Denis Donoghue notes, Heaney’s protest to his inclusion in the anthology came slowly.⁷ The text’s publication as a Field Day pamphlet in 1983 and its republication in Ireland’s Field Day in 1985 places it within a critical tradition more immediately than a creative one. The poem crystallizes the postcolonial politics of the Field Day project to which it is a contribution but Heaney did not reprint the poem in any of his subsequent volumes or anthologies. Following Heaney’s Crane Bag interview and his involvement with Field Day, Deane (1987: 175) renders the poet ‘characteristic of his Northern Irish Catholic community’, since ‘His guilt is that of the victim, not the victimizer’. The lens through which Deane reads Heaney focuses on ‘an alliance between [Heaney’s] own poetry and the experience of the oppressed culture […] (the Catholic Irish one)’ (176). By reading culture in terms of oppressed/oppressor, Deane establishes Heaney as spokesman for Catholic Northern Irish and/or Catholic Irish culture.

In Across a Roaring Hill: Essays in Honour of John Hewitt: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland (1985) Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley seek to redress what they see as a paucity of critical attention to Irish Protestantism by spotlighting religious culture rather than theology: ‘Irish cultural Protestantism, like cultural Catholicism, is a socio-politico-religious spectrum with many different shadings’ (ii). The acknowledgement of Irish Protestant diversity is well meant, as is the idea that ‘“Catholic” and “Protestant” (like “male” and “female”) are metaphors for complementary artistic modes – often of the same writer’ (iii). But the effect of such language works to reinstate theological (and gender) binaries even in the attempt to collapse them, and the claim that the work of one writer attests to dual religious inheritances is not sustained or evidenced in the focus and structure of the book as a whole. These modes appear competitive rather than complementary.

Since its presentation of Irish Protestant literary culture is indebted to what the authors see as a predominant narrative of critical enquiry focused on Irish Catholicism, a reactionary tone creeps into the introduction. In stating that ‘spiritual and social Protestantism’ will be the volume’s focus, Dawe and Longley move towards presenting a theological examination of literary texts, but generalizations persist: ‘The former breeds individualised moral and philosophical perspectives; the latter, versions of selfhood in a problematic relation to society’ (iii). The authors admit the wide-reaching modern applicability of these terms by offering a revealing caveat (iii):

But an ineradicable consciousness of difference, of being defined in and against another culture, makes Irish Protestantism and its literary consequences a special case.

These remarks underline an analytical and representative crisis at the heart of Irish literary criticism: the endless cycle of defining writers and writing ‘in and against another culture’, whether within Ireland or Northern Ireland; a cycle that makes a special case of neither, and makes culture look rather anaemic.

As the subtitle suggests, the book proposes the existence of a religiously motivated imagination, usefully differentiating Methodism, Anglicanism and Calvinist Presbyterianism in its attention to Irish Protestantism. John Wilson Foster’s essay on John Hewitt and W. R. Rodgers, for example, explores how ‘nonconformism, even when disavowed or ignored as a religion, can be a powerful cultural, even aesthetic, and therefore pervasive affair that has its roots in the doctrines ignored or disavowed’ (140). Noting that ‘the Bible, prayers, psalms, hymns, the rhetoric of preaching […] influence poetic language and cadences’ (v), Dawe and Longley succeed in creating a context for theologically inflected criticism. But if the question of theology’s significance in Irish literature is raised in this volume, it is not quite answered either. Since the book’s larger aim is the retrieval, recovery and reassertion of the socio-political culture of Protestantism in Ireland, the Protestant/Catholic dichotomy framing the work and the underlying sense of marginalization ensures that the analysis of the relationship between theology and literary form is of only secondary importance.

In its local row about the politics ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Religion and Identity Politics in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry: The Critical Landscape
• 2 ‘Its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine’: Iconography and Sacramentalism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
• 3 ‘A hole / In the cathedral wall’: Iconoclasm and Catechism in the Poetry of Michael Longley
• 4 ‘The only way out of “the tongue-tied profanity”’: Calvinism, Rupture and Revision in the Poetry of Derek Mahon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index