Whenever one or two figures seem dominant in a country’s poetry, several others are writing in a different but not equally acclaimed or recognised way. When Yeats was at the height of his powers towards the end of his life, an anthology, Goodbye, Twilight (ed. Leslie Daiken, 1936), was published containing the work of poets who saw themselves as writing a very different kind of poetry from that of Yeats and other distinguished Celtic Twilighters. In 1993, Gabriel Fitzmaurice edited an anthology, Irish Poetry Now: Other Voices which, he holds, contains a kind of poetry different from and interesting as the mainstream of contemporary verse in Ireland. Such oppositions, such alternatives, are a healthy sign; they lessen the likelihood that readers may fall into attitudes of lazy categorisation; and they suggest that the scene is more vigorous, varied and complex than we had hitherto realised. Further, they create the possibility that poets in scrupulous opposition to each other may produce better work. There should be fewer cosy coteries, more fierce and intelligent opposition. That’s the stuff of which genuine friendship between poets is made.
Yeats’s Cuala Press published Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem The Great Hunger in 1942. Kavanagh went on to denounce Yeats as being “protected by ritual” in his poem, “An Insult” (Collected Poems, 1964, p.185); he also criticised him severely in several essays. This was Kavanagh’s way of distancing himself from Yeats. He went on to explain and express his own vision, a vision which in the end has, ironically, some remarkable similarities to Yeats’s. Kavanagh called it “comedy” (“Signposts”, Collected Pruse, p.25; also Collected Poems, p.xiv.); Yeats called it “tragic joy”. (“The Gyres”, Collected Poems, 1958, p.337.) Kavanagh’s castigating references to Yeats and others helped him to create for himself that space, that freedom from other poets’ work (even as they are deeply aware of it) that most poets need. Poets’ vicious denunciations of the work of others can be forms of self-liberation.
Creating space is always a problem, particularly, perhaps, in the congested Irish scene. Poets such as Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Thomas MacGreevy created this cultural space for themselves in ways which indicate that their poetry is not widely read today. (Why should it be? - some purists will ask.) Much of Beckett’s poetry is knotted and ironic; it often transmits the sense of a man muttering to himself in no particular method or order; yet it gives the reader the feeling that he’s listening to a private monologue, labyrinthine and tortuous at certain times, at others, [55] comic and self-mocking. It is at once inviting and offiputting, like a nutty conversationalist with a kindly countenance. It is particularly striking when read aloud, as indeed all poetry should be, if subtleties of rhythm are to be properly grasped.
Traces of Beckett’s oddly fascinating qualities are to be found in the work of contemporary poets such as Tom McIntyre and Hugh Maxton. Paul Durcan’s ability to write like a comic Hamlet suggests that he has listened to Beckett at some stage. He has also listened to Kavanagh’s call for a comic poetry which, in its spirit of self-criticism allied to criticism of society, brings Swift to mind and reminds poets everywhere that they must avoid becoming pompous or pretentious. Most of the reservations about Yeats’s work which I hear expressed here and there throughout Ireland and other places centre on his tendency towards rhetorical pomposity. This tendency may be due to his compulsion to mythologise and dramatise everyone, including himself. His aesthetic compels him to be always at the centre of the poem’s action, determined not to fall apart. […] Beckett and Kavanagh, in their different ways, reject the inflated feelings consequent on dramatic mythologising, Kavanagh especially denouncing Yeats’s “myth of Ireland as a spiritual entity” (”From Monaghan to the Grand Canal”, in Coll. Pruse , p.228) and proceeding in a defiant and convincing manner to write about the most ordinary situations, events, people: the life of a street, the “undying difference in the corner of a field” (Why Sorrow?”, The Complete Poems , ed. Peter Kavanagh, p.180), cubicles and wash-basins in a chest hospital, the canal in Dublin, bogs and small “incurious” (”Shancoduff”, ibid., p.13) hills in Monaghan, pubs, coffee-shops, mundane aspects of life as he saw it about him. All this, however, was coloured by an intense inner life, a religious conviction that “God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday”. (”The Great Hunger”, ibid., p.88), The result is a delightful body of poetry in which the mundane is transfigured by the mystical, and the mystical is earthed in the mundane.
This religious streak in Irish poetry goes back to older poetry in the Irish language and is present, in muted and varied ways, in contemporary poetry. Denis Devlin, deeply influenced by the work of European writers (he translated a considerable amount of French poetry), produced a body of religious verse which grows more fascinating the more one reads it. Compare his poem “Lough Derg” with poems by Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney on the same topic, and it becomes possible to appreciate the varied effects of his deliberate, resonant syntax, his long, evocative lines, his meditative rhythms, his ability to think things through. There is in DevIin a readiness to experiment with language and rhythm that is not very common in Irish poetry which, if I may generalise, tends to be [57] formally conservative and rather cautious in its choices of themes. For such a rebel race, eloquently so, Irish poets can be comically, sadly conservative. Poetry should be adventurous and daring, even offensive at times. It has to be, if it is serious in its self-scrutiny and in its response to the abundant casual corruptions and abuses in society, not forgetting the wriggling evils in oneself. The exploration of a deep religious impulse goes hand in hand with the compulsion to satirise its abuses and abusers. This is true of Kavanagh; it is also true of Austin Clarke whose work, helpfully edited by Hugh Maxton in a recent Penguin edition, satirises the hypocrisies and abuses that abound in Irish life even as churches on Sundays bulge with the faithful. Clarke had a lot of courage, and in his satire one can see the outrage suffered by a person who knows what a genuine religious impulse is, and how such an impulse is so often flouted and maimed in a “religious” society. So Clarke wrote himself into a corner of articulate indignation and rage until, towards the end of his life, he began to write a more “cheerful” verse. In a note on the Tiresias myth he mentions Tennyson’s Victorian respectability and T.S. Eliot’s puritan gloom in their treatment of this figure; he then stresses his own “cheerful” view of the Tiresias drama, and goes on to offer us a sparkling poem. (“Tiresias”, Selected Poems, ed. McCormack, Penguin, 1991, pp.168-88 [sic]; first printed in 1971). Like Yeats and Kavanagh, like O’Casey in drama, like Joyce in the novel, Clarke’s work slowly and tortuously approaches a climax of joy and celebration. I find it honest and convincing because he has brooded on the injustices, abuses, forms of ignorance and prejudice (can they be separated?) inherent in Irish life and yet, in the end, he flies in the face of squalor with poetry that is playful, amusing and sexually exuberant. I find a similar exuberance in the work of Medbh McGuckian. I’m not saying that she has been directly influenced by Clarke; but influence in poetry is a strangely arbitrary, insidious, floating affair; Clarke helped to create a climate of spontaneity and freedom; poets all through the island have breathed that air. McGuckian is a complex writer, her language has a kind of wild freedom in it that suggests she has coped firmly with conflicts in herself. The writing of poetry is a lifelong bid for freedom from many forces, people, ideas and influences that the poet must be concerned with until, by sheer constant grappling with these forces, people, ideas and influences, he/she liberates himself/herself from their intimidating pressure. Sustained imaginative, sexual sympathy has, in Irish poetry, proved crucial in this liberation. Crazy Jane helps to deliver Yeats. I suspect Molly Bloom did much the same thing for James Joyce. Austin Clarke’s lifelong preoccupation with [57] women in his work helped to create that late, cheerful poetry. In the imagination, there’s a deep connection between feminisation and fredom. It took Clarke a lifetime to achieve this. Medbh McGuckian, a young woman, electrifies her poetry with this freedom. So, in a different way, does Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill whose writing has an added comic-mythologial dimension which, allied to her sexual realism, makes her poetry both colourful and penetrating. Some of these young Irish women poets ar more relaxed and free, though no less disciplined in their approach to writing, than most of their male equivalents manage to be after sixty or seventy years on this earth that somehow tolerate every conceivable kind of poetry.
Why is poetry so often considered high-falutin’ by “ordinary”, intelligent people? I think it has to do, to a considerable extent, with a certain male pomposity and self-regard which exudes an almost incredible sense of the incomparable value of the poet himself, created and sustained by himself, the great untouchable, the victim who also happens to be an unquestionable master. This attitude of severed élitism has gone unchallenged for too long. It is the stance of men who love looking uptight and “serious”[...]