Abstract
Previous chapters have endeavoured to demonstrate the American connection through close scrutiny of major poets’ entire oeuvres. By way of contrast and conclusion, this chapter sweeps across a range of other poets’ work to indicate something of the pervasiveness and variousness of the transatlantic influence in Northern Irish poetry, beginning with two poets — John Hewitt and Louis MacNeice — who belong to an earlier generation than those considered in previous chapters. Hewitt (1907–87) demonstrates that even those writers most strongly associated with parochialism, localism or regionalism cannot be considered exclusively in those nativist terms, divorced from international contexts. When Hewitt came to formulate his version of a regionalist Ulster poetics in the 1940s, he also turned to America, though in his case it was to New England. In his seminal essay, ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’ (1945), he proposes for the Ulster writer a tradition modelled on that of New England, from Emerson and Thoreau to Frost, whose poem ‘The Gift Outright’ he quotes at the end of the essay as having ‘an uncanny application for us here’:
The puritanism of the American colonists was not widely different from the type of nonconformity which is a notable feature of this province, democratic in its organisation and protestant in its theology. And with this puritanism, its logical political aspect republicanism soon emerged, until by the end of the eighteenth century we find in Ulster and in North America the same passionate austere democratic attitude …. The careful rejection of the rhetorical and flamboyant, the stubborn concreteness of imagery, the conscientious cleaving to the objects of sense which, not at all paradoxically, provides the best basis and launching ground for the lonely ascents of practical mysticism lie close to the heart of Ulster’s best intellectual activity, and make us bold enough to claim Concord as a townland of our own.1
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Notes
Tom Clyde (ed.), Ancestral Voices: the Selected Prose of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1987), p. 111.
Edna Longley, ‘The Poetics of Celt and Saxon,’ in Poetry and Posterity (Newcastle upon Tyne: Carcanet, 2000), p. 65.
Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False (London: Faber, 1965), p. 17.
Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1979), p. 168.
Gerald Dawe and Aodán MacPóilin (eds), Ruined Pages: Selected Poems Padraic Fiacc (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1994), p. 89.
Quoted in Michael McKernon (ed.), Padraic Fiacc, Sea: Sixty Years of Poetry (Belfast: Multimedia Heritage Press, 2006), p. 12.
Padraic Fiacc, My Twentieth-Century Night-Life: a Padraic Fiacc Miscellany (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2009), p. 117.
See Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Reflections on Some Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland’, in Elmer Andrews (ed.), Contemporary Irish Poetry: a Collection of Critical Essays (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), p. 129.
Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), p. 165.
Philip Rahv, ‘Paleface and Redskin’, Kenyon Review 1:3 (1939), 261–6.
Seamus Heaney in an interview with John Brown, In the Chair (Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing, 2002), p. 80
Gearóid MacLochlainn, ‘Crazy Horse Dancing’, in Stream of Tongues/Sruth Teangacha (Indreabhán: Conamara, 2002), p. 171.
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Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 7.
Edna Longley, ‘“Atlantic’s Premises”: American Influences on Northern Irish Poetry in the 1960s’, in Poetry and Posterity (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), p. 275.
Quoted in A. Poulin, Jr. (ed.), Contemporary American Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p. 730.
Richard Wilbur, ‘Love Calls us to the Things of This World’, in A. Poulin, Jr. (ed.), Contemporary American Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p. 605.
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Maria Johnston, ‘“Words for Jazz Perhaps”, Michael Longley’, Irish University Review 39:2 (Autumn/Winter 2009), 202.
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Michael Longley, ‘A Perpetual One-Night Stand: Some Thoughts on Jazz and Poetry’, Writing Ulster 5 (1998), 97.
Frank Ormsby, ‘Home’, in A Northern Spring (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), p. 54.
Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, in Poems of the Great War 1914–1918 (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 17.
Wilfred Owen, Preface, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 192.
Frank Ormsby (ed.), The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001).
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Frank Ormsby, Fireflies (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2009), p. 13.
Charles Wright, ‘After Reading Tu Fu I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard’, in Chickamauga (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).
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Medbh McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 36.
Shane Murphy, ‘Sonnets, Centos and Long Lines’, in Matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 199–203.
The term is Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak’s, in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985), 235–61.
Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘“My Cleverly Dead and Vertical Audience”: Medbh McGuckian’s “Difficult” Poetry’, New Hibernia Review 16:3 (Fómhar/Autumn, 2012), 67–82.
Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 72.
Medbh McGuckian, Marconi’s Cottage (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1991), p. 38.
Peggy O’Brien, ‘Reading Medbh McGuckian: Admiring What We Cannot Understand’, Colby Quarterly 28:4 (1992), 239–50.
Susan Porter, ‘The “Imaginative Space” of Medbh McGuckian’, in Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Goozé (eds), International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 86–101
Medbh McGuckian, interview with Catherine Byron, ‘A House of One’s Own: Three Contemporary Women Poets’, Women’s Review 19 (May 1987), 33.
Thomas Docherty, ‘Postmodern McGuckian’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992), p. 192.
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© 2014 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
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Kennedy-Andrews, E. (2014). Conclusion: a Widening Circle. In: Northern Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330390_7
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