W. B. Yeats
‘Whenever an Irish writer has strayed away from Irish themes and Irish feelings, in almost all cases he has done no more than make alms for oblivion. There is no great literature without nationality, and no great nationality without literature.’ (from ‘Browning’, Boston Pilot, 22 Feb. 1890, rep. in Letters to the New Island, NY 1934, pp.103-04).
W. H. Auden (on Yeats)
‘You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;/The parish of rich women, physical decay,/Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry./Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,/For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its saying, where executives/Would never want to tamper; it flows south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth.’ (“Homage to W. B. Yeats”)
Lady Gregory
‘We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.’ (Abbey Manifesto, in Our Irish Theatre, 1913.)
J. M. Synge
‘[B]efore verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal’; ‘The strong things of life are needed in poetry, also, to show that what is exalted, or tender, is not made by feeble blood.’ (Skelton, ed., 1962 ed., p.xxxvi; cited in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.169.
Stanislaus Joyce
‘There is properly speaking no national tradition. Nothing is stable in the country; nothing is stable in the minds of the people. When the Irish artist begins to write, he has to create his moral world from chaos by himself, for himself ... [it] proves to be an enormous advantage for men of original genius.’ (My Brother’s Keeper, London 1957, p.187).
Louis MacNeice
‘This attachment—essentially a romantic attachment, of the Ireland that Yeats envisaged is not co-extensive with the real Ireland of small farms and small towns but a doorway on the world of Faery—turned him into a polemicist. [... G]eneralisations was Yeats strongest suit. He was a born argufier, equally about nationality, and ethics, and aesthetics.’ (Louis MacNeice, Poetry of W. B. Yeats, London: Faber & Faber 1941, p.25.)
Daniel Corkery
‘[I]n the case of writers from the Ascendancy their emotional nature differs from that of the Irish people (differs also of course from that of the English people) and such as it is, is also doubtless thrown out of gear by the educational mauling it undergoes. They are therefore doubly disadvantaged. To become natural interpreters of the nation they need to share in the people’s emotional background [...] The ingrained prejudices of the Ascendancy mind are so hard, so self-centred, so alien to the genius of Ireland, that no Ascendancy writer has ever succeeded in handling in literature the raw material of Irish life.’ (Synge and the Anglo-Irish, Mercier 1966, p.38; cited in Robert F. Garratt, Modern Irish Poetry, Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney, 1986.)
Samuel Beckett
[Confessed his] ‘chronic inability to understand ... a phrase like “The Irish People” or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the union or after, or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than rudimentary thoughts and acts delved into by the priests and demagogues in service of the priests. (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 1938; cited in Deirdre Bair,. Samuel Beckett, pp.381-82.)
Sam Hanna Bell
‘It has been concluded that ... the traditions of Ulster can be found only in Catholic homes, because Catholics are more “poetic“, less “materialistic”. I don’t think this is so ... In Ulster, for reasons which you will find in history, the mountainsides are inhabited by Catholics and the valleys by Protestants. Understandably, the old beliefs live longer among the scattered cottages in the hills than in the plump lowland acres tilled to the hedges where the fairy thorns have been torn out and the souterrains filled in for the sake of a few extra buckets of grain’. (From Ulster’s Orange Lily; cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.39.)
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
‘“Did you see an old woman go down the path?” “I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.” This image galvanised a whole population at the beginning of this century and is still shockingly alive in the collective psyche for all that an unholy alliance of Marxist-Freudian reductionist intellects may seek to deny it. Eavan Boland is dead right to engage polemically with this image because, as Marina Warner has shown most comprehensively in her book Monuments and Maidens, there is a psychotic splitting involved where, the more the image of woman comes to stand for abstract concepts like justice, liberty, or national sovereignty, the more real women are denigrated and consigned barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen.’ (‘What Foremothers?’ in Theresa O’Connor, ed., The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, Florida UP 1996, pp.8-20.)
Robert Mc Liam Wilson
‘I learnt of a great many things on my first day at school [...]. I discovered that I lived in Belfast and that Belfast lived in Ireland and that this combination meant that I was Irish. The grim young bint we were loaded with was very fervent on this point. She stressed with some vigour that no matter what anyone else were to call us, our names would be always Irish ... [she] told us that the occasional Misguided Soul would try to call us British but that of all things to call us this was the wrongest. No matter how the Misguided Souls cajoled, insisted or pleaded, our names would remain Irish to the core, whatever that meant ... in the spirit of compromise (ever with me even then), I dubbed myself “Ripley Irish British Bogle”.’ (Ripley Bogle, 1989, pp.13-14; cited in Edna Longley, ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.176.)
Colm Tóibín
‘I have always had a problem with the idea that our state was founded as a result of 1916. The rise of the Catholic middle classes throughout the nineteenth century made the emergence of some sort of state a certainty; and the civil war was fought not about the North but, in many instances, between the settled middle class and the men of no property. To glorify the Rising as a cata[c]lysmic event in Irish history to the detrement [sic] of more abiding forces seemed to me to distort grossly what happened in the past.’ At the time of the 1991 celebrations, Toibin was in Seville, preparing his book on Catholic Europe, and absence which he is willing to regard as an excuse, ‘ducking the grand occasion’. He asperses Deane and Kiberd, ‘The mythic Gaelic past is first of all mythic and then it is past. Declan Kiberd has been reading too much Yeats.’ (Review of Theo Dorgan and Mairí Ní Dhonnchada, eds., Revising the Rising, in Sunday Independent, 8 Dec. 1991.)
Derek Mahon
‘The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life ... and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics - of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have [had] darkness enough, God knows, for a long time.’ (From ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, in Twentieth-Century Studies, No. 4, Nov. 1970. p.93; quoted in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, Macmillan 1996, p.17.)
Hugh Kenner
‘The crucial place of Ireland in the recent history of Western literary art is accounted for in the historical fact that Ireland escaped the humanist dogma. Consequently the great Irish nihilists (for so they appear in a humanisit perspective) have been the persistent reformers of the fictional imagination.’ (Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, London: Calder & Boyer 1961, p.69.)
Terence Brown
‘The revival attempt, therefore, despite its apparent radicalism, can be seem as rather more a reactionary expression of the deep conservatism of mind that governed public attitudes in the period than as a revolutionary movement.’ (A Social History of Ireland, 1922-1972, 1981, p.67.) |