John Hewitt: Commentary & Quotations

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Robert Greacen, review of Rhyming Weavers [rep. edn.], in Books Ireland ( Dec. 2004), p.261, quotes Hewitt:‘Regionalism is based on the conviction that as man is a social being, he must, now that the nation has become an enormously complicated organisation, find some smaller unit to which to give his loyalty.’ (Q. source.) Greacen quotes Hewitt’s estimate of the Weaver poets: ‘There is no Robert Burns or John Clare to be discovered here, but the reader will encounter several companionable men and a number of memorabl liines of verse’ - and adds, ‘Just so.’ (p.293.)

Robert Greacen, reviewing Glenn Patterson, Lapsed Protestant, in Books Ireland (Nov. 2006): ‘John Hewitt was a notable Belfast poet, art historian and political theorist who had much of the thirties intellectual in him. He died in 1987 shortly before his eightieth birthday. A lifelong Socialist, he also clung to the idea of regionalist as defined by the American Lewis Mumford in books such as The Culture of Cities. Hewitt believed that the common ideal of regionalism - a nine-county Ulster - would solve the tribal problem of identity.’ Goes on the mention the “John Hewitt” bar in the Cathedral quarter of modern Belfast - ironically named since Hewitt was only a ‘token drinker’ and quotes Patterson: ‘Michael Longley thinks that naming a pub after John Hewitt is a little like naming a massage parlour after Mother Teresa.’

Sam Hanna Bell, ‘A Banderol’ [Introduction], in sThe Arts in Ulster (London: Harrap 1951): ‘John Hewitt, who as contributed much to the knowledge of his contemporary as to what they may justly claim in their tradition, reminds us of the crippling and retarding effect that unsettled conditions and the lack of a leisured and appreciative urban community had had on the development of the Ulster artists. His subject is painting, and to a lesser extent, that volatile and muscular art, the drama.’ (p.14.)

Padraic Fiacc, ‘An Ulsterman’s Search for Identity’ [undated review; ?Irish Times], refers to recent Anthony Cronin broadcast on Rado Éireann, speaking on Louis MacNeice, and recalling his appearing confused and questioning on his visits to Ireland as if to ask, what country am I from?; quotes Hewitt poem on reading Terence de Vere White’s comment on Landor, ‘Ironically, Hewitt is the very good poet who articulates most essentially the Protestant territorial mentality.’

Seamus Heaney, review of Hewitt’s Collected Poems, 1932-67, in Threshold (Summer 1969), pp.73-77: [...] A number of these poems reveal a quest for personal identity that must strike many of Hewitt’s fellow-countrymen as a remembrance, involvmg a stubborn determination to belong to the Irishry and yet tenaciously aware of a different origin and cast of mould. A dramatic monologue, “The Colony”, transmutes the Protestant Planter experience into a Roman situation where the citizens of the colony are on the verge of turning native: [Quotes “A Colony”; 75]. [/ ...] The continuous process in Hewitt’s work has been one of coming to terms, of measuring the self against circumstances. Very roughly, the pattern shows an early period when he examines himself against his native community; then, after his shift to England in 1957, he sets his lonely present against a rooted past, in terms of a lost community and family; and finally, his sensibility surrenders to an inundation by the far but half-remembered world of Greece. [...] This is an accumulation of honesty and craft, with its beautifully pointed moments of definition and its inevitable realizations of development.Perhaps John Hewitt’s attention to the craft of poetry in his earlier period, his devotion to the couplet, the sonnet, the blank verse, the intense and muted lyric, could be regarded as a mask for what he wished to be - true, rooted, within a tradition. Shouldered out of his island on to “The Mainland” and knowing that if he sails back he will “find it rich in all but what he sought”, he is evolving into a man without a mask. The verse has become free, the statements grope towards something irreducible: / ‘Hand over hand eagerly I crawl back to uncertainty.’ [76] That is the kind of authority without dogma that poet stand for and John Hewitt’s collection will be cherished for what has been familiar to us - poems like “The Owl” and “Hedgehog” - and for those accurate, painful quests towards self-knowledge that at once rebuke and reward us.’ (p.77, end; for longer version, see RICORSO Library - attached.)

[See also lengthy remarks in Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’, in Preoccupations (1980), pp.145-48, as in RICORSO Library, “Irish Critical Classics” - attached.]

Seamus Heaney, ‘The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh’: ‘[H]is [Hewitt’s] poems arose from a mind-stuff and existed in a cultural setting [which] were at one remove from me and what I came from. I envied them, of course, their security in the big world of history and poetry which happened out there, far beyond the world of state scholarships, the Gaelic Athletic Association, October devotions, the Clancy brothers, buckets and egg-boxes where I had had my being. I envied them but I was not taken over by them the way I was taken over by Kavanagh.’ (The Government of the Tongue, Faber 1988, pp.3-14, p.8; cited in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, Macmillan 1996, p.14.)

Seamus Heaney, ‘The Frontiers of Writing’ [Oxford Poetry Lecture, 23 Nov. 1993], in The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber 1995): ‘Then, beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, John Hewitt attempted to write into the imaginative record the Ulster Planters’ sense of difference and entitlement by deliberately recognising and affirming the colonial nature of the Ulster Protestant experience. ... Hewitt’s move was original and epoch-making, a significant extension of the imagining faculty into the domain of politics, but it could not wholly reconcile the Unionist mystique of Britishness with the Irish nationalist sense of the priority of the Gaelic inheritance. [...] Hewitt’s regionalism suited the feeling of possession and independence of the empowered Protestants with their own Parliament and fail-safe majority at Stormont more than it could ever suit the sense of dispossession and political marginalisation of [195] the Catholics. The poet was personally a man of the deepest tolerance and sympathy, principled in his sense of diversity, passionate for social justice, but in his imaginings he could not include the Irish dimension in anything other than in an underprivileged way. The pre-eminence, as he saw it, of the British intellectual tradition, the obscurantism as he saw it, of the Roman Catholic church and the logic of his colonial trope which naturally validated the culture of the colonising power over that of the native - all this meant that he stood his ground in the North as a resolute democrat, with a vision of the just society based on regional loyalties, but a vision that was slightly Nelson-eyed, as it were, more capable of seeing over the water than over the border. ... the fact that Gaelic was a dying language was enough for Hewitt to absolve himself of any imaginative obligation to the Gaelic order. [196; ...; cont.]

Seamus Heaney (‘The Frontiers of Writing’, 1995) cont.: ‘What I am saying does not take away from the artistic strength of Hewitt’s poetic achievement. It merely questions the adequacy in present circumstances of his particular planter’s myth [...]. Poems like “The Colony, and “The Search” have the feel of work that springs form an ache in need of appeasement. They are not diagrams out of a political bind but ventures of an imagination simultaneously seeking a way out and a way in. In fact, while I have been emphasising [Hewitt’s ... way of retaining] an ancestral bond with the mother culture of England, it is equally true that his insistence on the English link is a compensation for the new displacement within Ireland which his northern planter people suffered in 1921. Until then [197], diversity was the norm within the Union ... everybody had a home, if they were not quite at ease with an old dispensation they were at any rate held equally in place by it. But partition created crisis. It kept the protestant majority out of Ireland’s Ireland every bit as effectively as it kept the Catholic minority within Britain’s, and it created the conditions with which Hewitt’s paeculiar mixture of lyric tenderness and secular tough-mindedness had to make do. His poems are best read as personal solutions to a shared crisis, momentary stays against confusion.’ ( Redress of Poetry, 1995, pp.195-98; prev. printed in Bullan: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2, Spring 1994; quoted in part in Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1994; see further under Heaney, supra.)

Derek Mahon, ‘An Honest Ulsterman’, review of Ancestral Voices: Selected Prose of John Hewitt (ed. Tom Clyde) quotes Hewitt as follows: ‘He must be a rooted man. He [sic] must carry the native tang of his idiom like the native dust on his sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist, thistle-down, a twig on a stream ... he must know where he comes from and where he is; otherwise how can he tell where he wishes to go?’ - and offers the comment: ‘This is a bit tough on thistledown; and, speaking as a twig in a stream, I feel there’s a certain harshness, a dogmatism, at work there. What of the free-floating imagination, Keats’s “negative capability”, Yeats’s “lonely impulse of delight[”]? Literature, surely, is more than a branch of ethics. What about humour, mischief, wickedness? “Send us war in our time, O Lord!” [quoting Mitchel]. / Human nature cries out for more than ethical prescriptions, and it may have been his severe refusal to accept this which laid, and still lays, him open to charges of worthiness and dullness. Besides, what is all this about “the Ulster writer”. What about the Munster writer, the East Anglian writer, the Scottish writer? ... I fail to see why his chosen region should have been Ulster rather than Ireland as a whole: a point on which we stuck more than once, myself sitting forward in my chair, himself puffing pugnaciously at his pipe. [... &c.]’ (The Irish Times, 2 Jan. 1988; rep. in Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Dublin: Gallery Press 1996, pp.92-94; p.94.)

Richard Kirkland: ‘in relation to this urban-rural polarity [...] John hewitt found his aesthetic home in the Glens of Antrim rather than in Belfast or Coventry.’ (Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger, Harlow: Longman 1996, p.52; quoted in Daniel McAllister, ‘Subversion in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson’, UG Diss., UUC 2002.)

C. L. Dallat, review of Two Plays (Lagan Press 2000), 122pp., in Times Literary Supplement (25 Aug. 2000), supplies summary: in The McCrackens James Hope discovers ‘class consciousness’; UI conspirators incl. Weaver Poets; play concerned with collective failure that eliminates this vigorous Republican strand from Protestant memory. The Angry Dove consists of episodes from the life of Columcille, whom the author sees as more exemplary than St. Patrick. (p.31.)

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Barra Ó Séaghdha, reviewing Jonn Brown, ed., In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Salmon 2002), writes: ‘John Hewitt worked hard to make the ground more fertile and manage to sustain his own talent to the end of his life. However, there was an unresolved tension between the internationalist, critical pull of his Marxist politics and the unionist inflection of his regionalism. A memo quoted in the Northern Ireland chapter of Lionel Pilkington’s recent and scandalously unreviewed and almost unfindable Theatre and the State in Twentieth Century Ireland indicates how culture was envisioned by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts in the 40s and 50s: “The question of control is of paramount importance ... and I do not see any difficulty in arriving at a formula whereby it can be assured that control will always be invested in what may be termed ‘the right hands.’” In the context of such official thinking, and with Northern Ireland itself only 20 years old, to defer analysis of the relationship between cultural region (Ulster or Northern IrelanC and political unit (Northern Ireland) was ultimately to give comfort to Stormont notions of culture: the kind that insisted that the British national anthem should be played at the beginning rather than at the end of cultural events, for example. It would be difficult for Hewitt to galvanise the cultural energies of both political communities around tactically blurred principles. Roy McFadden, one of the few active poets who remained in Belfast, was initially drawn to Hewitt’s regionalism: “There was common ground there, but I feel that Hewitt made a dogma of regionalism to the point of dishing up minor poets for consideration on the basis of their birth in Ahoghill, or their qualifications in lint-pulling.” Hewitt’s move to Coventry, after one battle too many with official pettiness, seemed to signal the failure of a generation’s hopes.’ (‘Ask Me Another One’, in Magill, July 2002, p.20-21; p.20.)

Terence Brown, ‘John Hewitt and Memory: A Reflection’, in Irish Studies in Brazil, ed. Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra (Associação Editorial Humanitas 2005), pp.175-84: Brown engages with the question whether Hewitt is a poet of memory, and if so, whether in the atavistic sense predicated on a (here unspoken) association with nationalist identity and sense of loss. ‘Hewitt was always a poet who took for granted that bearing in mind the dead was part of a poet’s duty. Although he asserted of himself “I have no ghosts. / My dead are safely dead” (Coll. Poems, p.42) a considerable portion of his poetry, if not haunted, is certainly aware of the dead and his responsibility to them and conscious of their presence in his imagination.’ (p.176.) ‘Obituary verse in Hewitt may be a duty accepted and discharged by the poet as responsible citizen; but there is also evidence that the poet was in fact imaginatively absorbed by death itself. […] As Hewitt’s editor, Frank Ormsby[,] remarks: “Hewitt depicts the approach and arrival of death as piteous, clumsy, aimless, crude and lonely, and is not disposed to be comforted by visions of an afterlife.” (Coll. Poems, p.lxxi.) For Hewitt, death truly seems to be the end of things. His is a secular consciousness for which death is cruel in its defining finality.’ (p.177.) [Cont.]

Terence Brown (‘John Hewitt and Memory: A Reflection’, 2005) - cont.: ‘For Hewitt’s imagination is dominated by a consciousness of the patterns life weaves through the ages. Humankind is a product of nature, of place and weather, of cultural formations that determine habits and mores, of change that can disrupt long-settled ways. The family, the ties of kinship, for Hewitt are central to him as a poet for whom the patterns of human social existence are an abiding theme. His sense of the past is accordingly centred in familial acts of remembrance.’ (p.179.) [Cont.]

Terence Brown, ‘John Hewitt and Memory: A Reflection’ (2005) - cont.: ‘So many of Hewitt’s best poems are in fact poems of memory, in the sense that they are couched in a deliberative past tense, that they make recollections seem his characteristic stance in life. This then, as a mode of consciousness, becomes associated in the reader’s mind with one of the pleasure principals Hewitt’s verse affords: that sense of the world being received into the steady accumulative structures of his conscientiously composed stanzas. The effect is to suggest a reality, the past, made amenable to a sustained, reflective ordering that does not deny deep familial, communal, even national emotion. To remember past experience is to share in one of the mind’s most creative activities, the recalling and ordering of experience as the past constantly makes its presence felt in the continuous present tense of our lives. That activity, as Hewitt makes it known to us in his poetry, is a curiously exhilarating one, remote from mere nostalgia or easy sentiment, different from regret or romantic longing for what has gone. Rather it makes memory seem a living principle of mature sensibility without which the present would be bereft of real meaning. […]’ (p.183.)

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Poetry

Native ... as any: ‘Native in [his] thoughts as any [here]’; ‘Not his that gaunt mask. Fool’s comparison / No Florence his sick town. / Yet ther was exile once after a defeat, / and years spent walking through an alien place / among bland strangers kinder than his kin / and then there was return - / as some translated poet wrote- / to this betraying, violent city / irremediably home.’ (John Hewitt, cover poem quoted in brochure for John Hewitt International Summer School [‘The City and its Creators’] 1994.)

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My own kind: ‘I write for my own kind / I do not pitch my voice / that every phrase be heard / by those that have no choice: / their quality of mind / must be withdrawn and still, / as moth that answers moth / across a roaring hill.’ (Quoted in Intro. to Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley, eds., Across a Roaring Hill, The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland (1985), p.i.

“Once Alien Here”: ‘... because of all the buried men / in Ulster clay, because of rock and glen / and mist and cloud and quality of air / as native in my thought as any here.’ (, in No Rebel Word, 1948; cited in Michael Parker, reviewing Michael Longley, in Irish Studies Review, Spring 1996, p.50.)

“The Glens”: ‘Groined by deep glens and walled along the west/ by the bare hilltops and the tufted moors,/ this rim of arable that ends in foam/ has but to drop a leaf or snap a branch/ and my hand twitches with the leaping verse/ as hazel twig will wrench the straining wrists/ for untapped jet that thrusts beneath the sod. // Not these my people, of a vainer faith/ and a more violent lineage. My dead/ lie in the steepled hillock of Kilmore / in a fat country rich with bloom and fruit./ My days, the busy days I owe the world,/ are bound to paved unerring roads and rooms/ heavy with talk of politics and art./ I cannot spare more than a common phrase/ of crops and weather when I pace these lanes/ and pause at hedge gap spying on their skill,/ so may fences stretch between our minds. // I fear their creed as we have always feared / the lifted hand between the mind and truth./ I know their savage history of wrong/ and would at moments lend an eager voice,/ if voice avail, to set that tally straight. // And yet no other corner in this land/ offers in shape and colour all I need/ for sight to torch the mind with living light.’

“The Colony”: ‘[...] for we have rights drawn from the soil and sky; / the use, the pace, the patient yuears of labour, / the rain against the lips, the changing light, / the heavy clay-sucked stride, have altered us; / we would be strangers in the Capitol; / this is our country also; no-where else; / and we shall not be outcast on the world.’ Also, ‘The use, the pace, the patient years of labour, / the rain against the lips, the changing light, / the heavy clay-sucked stride, have altered us; / we would be strangers in the Capitol; / this is our country also, no-where else; / and we shall not be outcast on the world.’

Posted by Jane Fairburn - online; 17.05.2024.

“Conacre”: ‘This mad island full of bloody ghosts’ (“Conacre”); ‘This our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster/crazily tangled as the Book of Kells’. (Quoted in Alan Warner, A Guide to Anglo-Irish Literature, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1981, p.15.)

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“Ireland”: ‘We are not native here or anywhere. / We were the keltic wave that broke over Europe, / and ran up this bleak beach among these stones: / but when the tide ebbed, were left stranded here / in crevices and ledge-protected pools.’ “The Modelled Head”: ‘and I am left with these alternatives, / to find a new mask for what I wish to be, / or try to be a man without a mask, / resolved not to grow neutral, growing old.’ (quoted with foregoing Seamus Heaney, review of Hewitt’s Collected Poems, 1932-67, in Threshold, Summer 1969, pp.73-77; p.75.)

“An Irishman in Coventry”: ‘This is our fate, eight hundred years’ disaster, / crazily tangled as the Book of Kells; / the dreams distortion and the land’s division, / the midnight raiders and the prison cells [...] Yet like Lir’s children banished to the waters / our hearts still listen for the landward bells.’ (The foregoing all from Collected Poems, 1968; quoted in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975; also in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.35.)

The whole mosaic: ‘Give us instead / the whole mosaic, the tesserae, / that we may judge if a period indeed / has a pattern and is not merely / a handful of coloured stones in the dust.’ (Cited in Eve Patten, Introduction, Returning to Ourselves: John Hewitt Summer School Papers (1995) [rev. Books Ireland, Dec. 1995, p.322.].)

“An Ulsterman”: ‘Kelt, Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane and Scot, / time and this island tied the crazy knot.’ (’Ulsterman’) ‘This is my country. If my people came / came England here four centuries ago, / the only trace that’s left is in my name.’ (Cited with other lines in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.17-18; and again in Kavanagh, ‘Bywords’, Times Literary Supplement, 2 Aug. 1996, p.16, where he calls the poet ‘ ‘the least bruited, in England, anyway’]. Also, ‘[I] suppressed the fancy, smiled a cynic thought, / turned clicking heel on marble and went out. / Not this my father’s faith, their walls are bare; / their comfort’s all within, if anywhere. / I haad gone there a vacant hour to pass, / to see the sculpture and admire the glass, / but left as I had come, a Protestant, / and all unconscious of my yawning want; / too much intent on what to criticise / to give my heart the room to realise / that which endures the tides of time so long / cannot be always absolutely wrong ...’. (Idem; verses on going into a Catholic church when, tempted to light a candle.)

Walking in the country ...: ‘Once walking in the country of my kindred / Up the steep road to where the tower-topped mound / Still hoards their bones, that showery August day / I walked clean out of Europe into peace [...]’ (Quoted in Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird, London: Methuen 1991, p.166.)

Ulster Planter: ‘I am an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I am an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago, and English is my native tongue, so I am British. The British archepelago is offshore to ... Europe, so I’m European. This is my hierarchy of values and so far as I’m concerned, anyone who omits one step in that sequance is falsifying the situation.’ (In Geoffrey Grigson in Poetry of the Present, 1949; quoted in Eavan Boland, ‘The Clash of Identities’, The Irish Times, 4 July 1974. Also in Alan Warner, Introduction, Selected John Hewitt, Blackstaff, 1981, p.6; Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, p.230, ftn.30, citing Boland; Anthony Hamilton, Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century British Poetry c.1991, citing The Irish Times, 1974; and Brian J. Graham, ‘No Place of the Mind, Contested Protestant Representation of Ulster’, Ecumene, Journal of Environment, Culture, Meaning, 1.3 (1994), p.261 [each with vars. & abbrevs.]).

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Prose

“The Peace League”, in The New Northman, 11:3 (Autumn 1934), pp.20-23: Hewitt launched the Belfast Peace League in student magazine called The New Northman (1934) in which he wrote: ‘Do you realize it?- War’s in the air; and will be from the air. There will be no diplomatic courtesies about 200 m.p.h. airplanes. No formal declarations and demands. Just a lever release, so - and a town blown to the wwinds as the lungs of a thousand civilians retch into bloddy phlegm. ” (Quoted in Amy Smith, ‘“The far-off hills of the imagination”: W. R. Rodgers and the Second World War’, in Irish University Review, 2016, pp.209-32, p.312.)

Smith goes on to write: ‘Hewitt’s image of aerial destruction is haunted by the mass slaughter and the use of chemical weapons during the First World War. Striving to predict the future and to promote a pacificist response to Nazi aggression, Hewitt deliberatel evokes emotive historical and literar memories. Similarly, in “The Airman”, [W. R.] Rodgers aligned the two wars by describing a pilot caught on “barbed air ” and dying like a foot-soldier in No Man’s Land (p.27.) The widel publicized conflicts in China and Spain - which Hewitt knew of through the direct testimon of his friends Shelley Wany and Peader O’Donnell - also informs the Northman article. Rodgers addresses these ideas and concerns most explicitly in three poems, “The Far-Off Hills ”, “The Raider ”, and “The Airman ”. [...]’ (Smith, op. cit., 2016, p.312.)

‘“Bitter Gourd”: Some Problems for the Ulster Writer’, in Lagan, No. 3 (1945), pp.93-105: ‘If writers in an isolated group or in individual segregation are for too long disassociated from the social matrix their work will inevitably grown thin and tenuous, more and more concerned with form rather than content, heading for marvellous feats of empty virtuosity [...]. We must have ancestors. Not just of the blood, but of the emotions, of the quality and slant of mind [...]’ (Rep. in Selected Prose, 1987, p.115.) Further: ‘The Ulster writer must, if he is not to be satisfied in remaining “one of the big fish in the little pond”, seek to secure some recognition outside his native place. But the English language is the speech of millions. There is no limit to its potential audience. Yet I believe this had better not be achieved by his choosing materialism and subjects outside or beyond those presented by his native environment. He must be must be a rooted man, must carry the native tang of his idiom like the native dust on his sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist, thistle-down, a twig on a stream. Tolstoy sat at no Monmartre café. Even Yeats came back to climb his lonely tower. An artist certainly in literature, must have a native place, pinpointed on a map, even if it is only to run away from, like Joyce to his Trieste boarding house, and when his roots snapped, we got Finnegans Wake.’ (Quoted [in part] in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.50; also in Elmer Andrews, Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Andrews, Macmillan 1996, Introduction, p.13.)

‘My tradition is basically the freer elements in Xtianity—the deists, the Drennans, the John Tolands. They are my people, not the John Knoxes, the Calvins’; further, ‘people should be free to do anything that doesn’t harm other people or nature’ (Quoted in Damien Gorman, ‘Religion and Non belief’, Part One, Living Without God’, in Irish News, 25 Nov. 1986, p.6; cutting in John Hewitt Collection at Univ. of Ulster.

Impatriation: ‘In my experience, people of Planter stock often suffer from some crisis of identity, of not knowing where they belong. Among us you will find some who call themselves British, some Irish, some Ulstermen, usually with a degree of hesitation or mental fumbling. [...] I set about deepening my knowledge of Ulster’s physical components, its history, its arts, its literature, its folklore.’ (‘No Rootless Colonist’, Aquarius, No. 5, 1972, pp.90-93; quoted in Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, 1977.)

Mother-tongue: ‘My mother tongue is English, instrument and tool of my thought and expression; John Ball, the diggers, the Levellers, the Chartists, Paine, Cobbett, Morris, a strong thread in the fabric of my philosophy, I learned about in English history ... I also draw upon an English literary tradition which includes Marvell, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Clare [...].’ (Ancestral Voices, 1987, p.148; cited in Edna Longley, ‘Defending Ireland’s Soul: Protestant Writers and Irish nationalism after Independence’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.147.)

‘The Course of Writing in Ulster’: ‘This bringing together of English and Scots verse draws some attention to the fact that ther were in Ulster practically two kinds of colony, one very similar to Engsh colonies in other parts of the world. deriging cultural standards and sustenance from London, the other a transplantation of Scots from not very far away to a climate and an economy very like home, and to which the language folk culture and lore had been carried without dilution.’ (Rann, No. 20, June 1953, p.44; quoted in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, pp.9.

Rhyming Weavers -I: (‘Ulster Poets 1800-1870’, MA [QUB], 1951]: ‘In summary it may be asserted then, that Robert Burns, writing a speech the same as, or closely kin to their own, taught them to do better what they should have done anyway, that the Ulster bards were no mere derivatives but existed in their own right, within a sub-region of the same folk culture.’ ( p.102; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, pp.8-9.)

Rhyming Weavers -II: ‘But I could not have read so many thousand lines if the forgotten and often clumsy poets themselves had not now and then given me, in stanza, couplet or turn of phrase, some sense of the humanity that was in them, and some feeling that, for better or worse, they were my own people ...’ (Rhyming Weavers and Other Country Poets of Antrim and Down, Belfast: Blackstaff 1974, p.vii.)

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Speaking to his people?: ‘Yet they [my poems] are quoted in The Irish Times but not in the Belfast Telegraph. I am not speaking to my people. They are public utterances but they ar taken up by a more distant audience than that for which they are intended ... But linked with this is the important fact of the total lack of literary interest amongst Unionists of the North, the lack of a fixed literary tradition.’ (Interview among papers in Hewitt Collection; cited by Patrick Walsh, draft DPhil, UUC 1995.)

‘Planter’s Gothic’: ‘The whole point of the ideal Ulsterman is simply that he must carry within himself elements of both Scots and English with a strong charge of the basic Irish. When I discovered, not long ago, that the old Planter’s Gothic tower of Kilmore Church still encloses the stump of a round tower and that it was built on the site of a Culdee holy place [older than Saint Patrick’s mission], I felt a step nearer to that synthesis. It is the best symbol I have yet found for the strange textures of my response to this island of which I am a native. I may appear Planter’s Gothic, but there is a round tower somewhere inside, and needled through every sentence I utter. (Ancestral Voices, pp.8-9; quoted in Britta Olinder, ‘Creating an Identity: John Hewitt and History’, in Ireland: Towards new Identities?, ed. Michael Böss & Karl-Heinz Westarp, Aarhus UP 1998, pp.120-33.) Note that ‘Planter’s Gothic’ is the designation of an architectural style in Ulster (see Denis O’D. Hanna, ‘Architecture in Ulster’, in Sam Hanna Bell, et al., eds. The Arts in Ulster, Harrap 1951, pp.25-47).

Belfast Art Gallery: ‘It must become an instrument of general culture, a lively and efficient agent acting upon the total community, and participating in the emotional and imaginative experiences of that area, drawing its strength from levels wherein the region is strongest, but resolute to counterbalance accidental emphases and to modify regional deficiencies.’ (Belfast’s Art Gallery, in The Studio, Jan. 1947; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, p.92.).

Growing up Irish?: ‘Growing up in Ireland of the thirty-two counties, until I first set foot outside I never consciously thought of myself as Irish or of any nationality at all. As a boy of seven or eight I was fascinated by a book I received as a Christmas present, Deeds that Won the Empire, and proud when Michael O’Leary won the Victoria Cross. Both were firmly part of my personal myth. I accepted Sir Edward Carson and his twin, John Redmond, as men from the same country as myself, who had diverging ideas about the governing of it. There were unionists and nationalists, just as there were people with red hair and people with fair or black. There were Protestants and Catholics and Jews, and we played together in Gaw’s Field’ (‘No rootless Colonist’, in Aquarius, No. 5, 1972; rep. in Ancestral Voices, pp.148-49.)

‘No rootless exile’: ‘By means I have never been able to understand, The Democrat became the monthly organ of the Connolly club, a Communist-inspired Irish Association in London, and continues to this day. It seems to me now an altogether deplorable production, its pages well padded with the words of sentimental Irish songs...Wildly wrong in its interpretation of Irish affairs, foolishly supporting the reactionary IRA, lacking in frankness, blatantly opportunist, it has nothing to do with what we intended.’ Further: ‘Yet when, on the fringes of an open-air meeting in an English city, a young man with a thick brogue invites me to buy a copy, I always experience a momentary thrill of emotion for those far away days of the Left Book Club, The Popular Front, Aid for Spain, the snug in the Brown Horse, and take my copy and, turning its pages, rage at the betrayal of our dream.’ ([Q. title,] quoted in Edna Longley, ‘Progressive Bookmen: Left-wing Politics and Ulster Protestant Writers’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.115). [Qry titles ‘colonist’ and ‘exile ’.]

No Rootless Colonist: ‘We have had enough of the rigid clichés of stubborn politicians, the profit-focused intensity of men of business, the dogmatic arrogance of the Churches, the intolerance of sectarians, the lack of human sympathy of doctrinaire ideologues, of all those whose ready instinct is for violence in word and act.’ ([Q. title,] rep. in Ancestral Voices, p.156; quoted in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (Macmillan 1996), p.17 [as supra].

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