Abstract
Reacting against Hewitt’s insistence on the need for the Ulster writer to be ‘a rooted man’ to avoid being merely ‘an airy internationalist, this tledown’, Mahon comments: ‘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’.1 In contrast to Hewitt’s regionalist, or Heaney’s atavistic, sense of belonging, Mahon’s poems assert a poetic freedom by complicating all stereotypes of identity, projecting them into extreme metaphysical realms beyond human history and the human self, in the end, subverting the very idea of belonging anywhere. As expatriate outsider, he is as much ‘a tourist in his own country’ as he said MacNeice was. The phrase, Mahon insisted, need not be regarded as derogatory, but ‘might stand, indeed, as an epitaph for modern man’.2 Mahon accepts deracination as the essential condition of modern life and, taking MacNeice as his example, sees it as importantly creative.
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Notes
Derek Mahon, Journalism (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1996), p. 94.
Derek Mahon, New Collected Poems (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2011), p. 46.
Heaney, ‘Tollund Man’, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), p. 64.
Quoted in Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 193.
Eamonn Hughes, ‘“Weird/Haecceity”: Place in Derek Mahon’s Poetry’, in Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002), p. 98.
Derek Mahon, ‘The Sea in Winter’, version in Selected Poems (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1991), p. 117.
Derek Mahon, ‘A Lighthouse in Maine’, in The Hunt by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 43–4.
Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Faber, 2006), p. 11.
Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984) p. 127.
Derek Mahon, quoted in George Watson, ‘Landscape in Ulster Poetry’, in Gerald Dawe and John Wilson Foster (eds), The Poet’s Place — Ulster Literature and Society: Essays in Honour of John Hewitt, 1907–87 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991), p. 11.
Edna Longley, ‘“Atlantic’s Premises”: American Influences on Northern Irish Poetry in the 1960s’ in Poetry and Posterity (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), pp. 262–3.
Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies 4 (November 1994), 91.
Derek Mahon, ‘My Wicked Uncle’, in Night-Crossing (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 9.
Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 105.
Wallace Stevens, ‘Idea of Order at Key West’, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1976), p. 79.
Hart Crane, ‘Voyages’, II, in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. 107.
Derek Mahon, in John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing, 2002), p. 117.
See Derek Mahon, Adaptations (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2006).
Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1999), p. 144.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), p. 73.
Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, II, lines 1–8, in Selected Poems 1908–1959 (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 98–9.
Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Cities of Modernism’, in Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: 1890–1930 (Pelican Guide to European Literature, 1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 101.
Harry Levin, ‘Literature and Exile’, in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 65.
Derek Mahon, The Hudson Letter (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1995), p. 75.
Quoted in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Decadence and the 1890s (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), p. 26.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 5.
Derek Mahon, ‘Autumn Fields’, in An Autumn Wind (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2010), p. 63.
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© 2014 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
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Kennedy-Andrews, E. (2014). Derek Mahon: ‘Resident Alien’. In: Northern Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330390_4
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