Robert Speaight, ‘A Centenary in Sligo’, 28th August 1965, p.8; Brendan Kennelly, ‘Contemporary Irish Poetry’, in The Tablet (15 March 1969), pp.16-18 [see attached]; Basil Payne, ‘Irish Poetry Today’ (17th March 1973), p.17; ‘Continuous Debate’, 21st July 1973, p.10; Sean Lucy, ‘Ulster Voices’, 11th Aug. 1973; Sean MacReamoinn, ‘The Arts in The Eighties’, 15th March 1980, p.12 [All available at The Tablet - online; accessed 28.08.2016]. Note also that Terry Eagleton reviewed Sean Lucy, ed., Irish Poetry [RTE Thomas Davis Lectures], in The Tablet, 21 July 1973, p.10.

Since Yeats, Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh are perhaps the two leading Irish poets. Clarke is essentially a satirist with a strong lyric impulse. His best work is strongly critical of the Irish form of Christianity. He openly denounces all forms of sullen or furtive Jansenistic repression ; he is a sworn enemy of gloom ; he explores and reveals the soul-corroding consequences of inhibition, frustration and fear. Awake or in my sleep I have no peace now, Before the ball has struck, my breath has gone, And yet I tremble lest she may deceive me

And leave me in this land where every mother’s son
Must carry his own coffin and believe,
In dread, all that the clergy teach the young.

 Clarke is keenly aware of the shadier side of Irish Christianity, the hypocrisy and corruption of which we are often guilty. With the ferocious lucidity of Swift, he writes of poverty, prostitution, the treatment of unmarried mothers, corporal punishment in schools, unemployment and emigration. He treats these problems with superb technical assurance. The’ main strength of his work is that it jolts his readers into a shocked moral consciousness of casually accepted atrocities. Its chief weakness lies in the fact that Clarke tends to confuse the sensational with the important, the truly interesting with the flamboyantly topical. It may appear, at first glance, that there is nothing as interesting as today’s news ; but there is nothing as dead as yesterday’s headlines. At his best, Clarke transcends the topical, as for example in Mnemosyne Lay in Dust, one of the most powerful long poems of the century. He is an incessant worker and his output over the past ten years has been little short of prodigious. He improves with age. Like Swedenborg’s angels, he is forever moving towards the dayspring of his youth.

 A Personal Vision Patrick Kavanagh, who died in 1967, is gradually being recognised as a great poet. He moved from early lyricism through the harshly realistic world of The Great Hunger to a purely personal poetry, at once comic and mystical, in which the poet’s duty and privilege is to praise and celebrate the small, negligible things of life no less than the overtly grand and magnificent. Though in quantity Kavanagh’s work is lesser than Clarke’s, its quality is so pure, so profound and sincere and yet so simple, that one never doubts that here, at his best, is a poet who ranks with Blake and Yeats. A few poets and critics recognise this already. Time will confirm the judgment.

 Allowing even for their influence on younger poets, it must be recognised that Clarke and Kavanagh stand apart. Even now, Clarke has about him an aura of the Yeatsian generation which, while it gives him a certain distinctiveness, also tends to sever him from the younger poets. (This is even more true of Padraic Colum who, at eighty-eight, is still hardy and sprightly, in New York. More power to him !) The Younger Poets Younger poets such as Kinsella, Murphy and Montague are more in fluenced by contemporary English and American poetry than by any Irish writers. This is hardly surprising, since Kinsella teaches in America, Montague lives in Paris, and Murphy moves between London and Connemara. These three poets are at the moment experimenting with the long poem. In Kinsella’s most recent book, Nightwalker and Other Poems, the most impressive poems are “Phoenix Park”, “Nightwalker” and “Downstream II” — three fairly long works. At times they are difficult, even obscure. Yet this obscurity in Kinsella seems to be necessary for him to achieve the beautiful clarity of his best work, in which his rhetoric does full justice to his perception.

Below my window the awakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities,
And how should the flesh not quail that span for span
Is mutilated more?
In slow distaste I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young and not renewable, but man.

 The most attractive feature of Kinsella’s work is its brave effort to confront and express the full range of his experience. His poems on love and marriage are especially good. The weakness of his poetry lies in its tendency to be rather heavily adjectival, to substitute grim description for bare presentation.

 Like Kinsella, Montague and Murphy are working hard at the long poem. Montague has recently published The Bread-God, a brief extract from a longer work. Montague lacks Kinsella’s stamina, but he compensates for this with those qualities of concentration and precision which one discovers in his best short lyrics. The Trout is a good example — a delight in accurate observation and concise expression. “A Private Reason” and “Loving Reflections” are also very fine.

 Richard Murphy shows admirable mastery of narrative technique in his long poems “The Last Galway Hooker” and “The Cleggan Disaster”. I have heard Murphy read both these poems and they come across with strong dramatic power. His work has less personal urgency than that of either Kinsella or Montague, but he tells his grim stories of battle, drowning and shipwreck with a fine restraint. Murphy’s work is most rewarding when it is read aloud. Since, on the whole, it lacks symbolic overtones, despite the fact that the resounding sea seems almost to flow through it, its effect comes from its literal dynamism. It appears to me to be verse of one dimension, but within that dimension it is moving and dramatic.

 The same preoccupation with the long poem is obvious in the work of Eavan Boland. Yet like Kinsella and Montague she is essentially a lyric poet. It is as if she needs the expansive structure of the narrative to achieve the resonant concentration of the lyric. In her collection New Territory, there is one long poem, “The Winning of Etain”, a vigorous treatment of an old Irish myth. It is a moving story, well told. Yet it does not approach such shorter poems as “The Poets”, “The Pilgrim”, “New Territory”, “Requiem for a Personal Friend” and the splendid “After the Irish of Egan O’Rahilly”. As with the others, it can be said of Miss Boland that her calculated investment in the long poem is paying off.

 Other interesting poets are Richard Weber, Rivers Carew and Tim Brownlow. In a special position is Pearse Hutchinson, who writes, and publishes, both in Irish and English. I prefer his poetry in Irish, though a couple of poems in “Tongue Without Hands” are attractive. Eugene Watters, too, writes in both languages. Various poets, in fact, use both Irish and English. Both Kinsella and Montague are good translators; so also is Desmond O’Grady, who lives in Rome. Among my favourite contemporary translations are Ulick O’Connor’s translations of Brendan Behan’s poems. They are among Behan’s best work and O’Connor does them justice.

 In the North of Ireland, there are a few fine poets. Louis MacNeice, W. R. Rodgers and John Hewitt are the foundation-stones of that sturdy, witty, sophisticated Northern tradition which is being continued by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and James Simmons. Simmons is editor of The Honest Ulsterman, one of the liveliest and, most outspoken literary magazines in Ireland today. The country is still politically, divided, but these poets offer the possibility of an imaginative unity which may in time help to transform the split political world.

I do not think that contemporary Irish drama is as strongly-placed as contemporary poetry. The source of the weakness is that the Abbey Theatre shows a lack of enterprise and imagination; it puts on adaptations and established masterpieces rather than new plays. The net result is that the best Irish playwrights are writing not for the Abbey but for other theatres in Cork and Dublin, for Irish and English television, and even for the rural amateur drama groups. The most prolific playwright is John B. Keane, who gives his plays to the Southern Theatre Group in Cork. He is an immensely popular dramatist; he never fails to give vivid characterisation and earthy language. Recently, he has turned to comedy, and his Big Maggie has been playing to packed houses in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.

 Other good playwrights are Eugene McCabe, Brian Friel, Christopher O’Flynn, Jack White, Hugh Leonard and M. J. Molloy. Though these writers produce plays constantly, the Irish theatre is still in a relatively uneasy state. But there is hope in the news that the inspired combination or Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards is shortly to give us an experimental and exciting theatre. The writing talent is there, but it needs to be centralised, focused. The new MacLiammoir-Edwards theatre is a step in that direction. Others may follow and so bring Irish drama into the prominent position it held in the time of Synge, Yeats and O’Casey.