John Hewitt, (‘"Bitter Gourd": Some Problems for the Ulster Writer’ (1945): We must have ancestors. Not just of the blood, but of the emotions, of the quality and slant of mind [...]’ ‘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.’ (‘"Bitter Gourd": Some Problems for the Ulster Writer’, in Lagan, No. 3 (1945), pp.93-105; rep. in Selected Prose, 1987, p.115; cited [in part] in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, Macmillan 1996; Introduction, p.13; also in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.50).

Derek Mahon, ‘An Honest Ulsterman’, quotes Hewitt, with comments [as infra]: ‘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?’, with 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.]’ (Review of Tom Clyde, Ancestral Voices: Selected Prose of John Hewitt [The Irish Times, 1988], rep. in Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Dublin: Gallery Press 1996, pp.92-94; p.94.)

Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’ [1977], Preoccupations (London: Faber 1980), pp.131-49 [brief extracts]: ‘We have to retrieve the underlay of Gaelic legend in order to read the full meaning of the name and to flesh out the topographical record with its human accretions. The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague’s words, is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read. (p.132.)

‘It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation’ (p.132.).

‘The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities. Only thirties years ago, and thirty miles from Belfast, I think I experienced this kind of world vestigially and as a result may have retained some vestigial sense of place as it was experience in the older dispensation.’ (‘A Sense of Place’ [1977], in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1980, pp.131-49; p.132; cited in Stan Smith, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Distance Between’, in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, 1992, p.39).

‘[E]mpowered within its own horizons, it looks out but does not necessarily look up to the metropolitan centres. Its impulses and possibilities abound within its boundaries but are not limited by them. It is self-sufficient but not self-absorbed, capable of thought, undaunted, pristine, spontaneous, a corrective to the inflations of nationalism, and the cringe of provincialism.’ (Preoccupations, 1980, pp.131-149). [See further in RICORSO > LIbrary > Heaney - as attached.]

Seamus Heaney, ‘The Frontiers of Writing’ [Oxford Poetry Lecture]: ‘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 the Catholics. The poet was personally a man of the deepest tolerance and sympathy, principled in his sense of diversity, passionate for social justive, 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 Frontiers of Writing’, Bullan, vol. 1, Issue I, Spring 1994, pp. 1-16.