Cathal O'Byrne and the northern revival in Ireland, 1890-1960 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley’s two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley’s agonized positioning as Ireland’s ‘guest/foreigner/son’ was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with ‘the Ireland within’ or without. The paper suggests that the poet’s slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the for...
The thesis analyses two poetic works in English by Irish authors, published respectively in 1968 and 1972, The Battle of Aughrim by Richard Murphy and The Rough Field by John Montague. Both published in their definitive form after long years of gestation, the works in question present in narrative poetic form two intersecting visions of Irish history. These visions are steeped in two different and complementary perspectives. On the one hand, Richard Murphy belonged to a family of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, and he lived and published in the Republic of Ireland. On the other, John Montague had Northern Irish Catholic origins; born in Brooklyn to parents who emigrated from Ulster after the political division of 1922, he returned to County Tyrone at the age of four and, after his years of education in Ulster and Dublin, led a cosmopolitan life between Ireland, France and the United States. Both poets represent, in these works, a journey within themselves, to define or rediscover their own identity; at the same time, they investigate, in a journey through history, the roots of the division of Ireland, each poet going back to a symbolic moment. This moment, for Murphy, is the Battle of Aughrim in 1691, which marks the definitive affirmation of English rule, the beginning of the era of the Penal Laws and of the golden age of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Montague, instead, takes as a point of reference the defeat of Hugh O'Neill at Kinsale in 1601, a moment in which the logic of the English colonization of the island, with the definitive reconquest by the Tudors, caused the fall of the old Gaelic order. A comparative approach is adopted between the two works, aiming at underlining their differences and similarities. A particular focus is reserved to the modes of remembrance in the two communities, and to the ways in which the two poets deal with the same historical and cultural issues, from religious divisions to the aspects of modernity erasing old lifestyles. In both cases, the analysis highlights how a form of exile is evident in the poets’ stance, deriving mainly from the severed ties with family origins and backgrounds and from the poets’ new position in the society of 1960s Ireland. It is not perhaps by chance that two historical exiles, the Flight of the Earls and that of the Wild Geese, play such an important role in the poems. The insistence on historical matter, and the position of outsiders in relation to their own social groups account for the several points of contact between the two works as analysed in the fifth chapter: from the impact of modernity on old, ritualized ways of living, to the presence of the past in today’s reality, both in the minds and in a sort of archaeological quest for remains; from the portraits of rebels and planters, to the subsistence of old symbols, such as the severed head, and the prehistorical references to hillforts defaced by new roads; and finally, the question of the land, of its ownership, and of its narrowness, both in its physical reality and as a mental effect on the narrowing of thought on successive generations. The result is a picture of Ireland made from complementary points of views, starting from the poets’ backgrounds, memories and experienced realities to give shape, in the end, to very different poetical expressions of their journeys, after having followed similar paths and having encountered the same problems.
'You're Not in Ireland Now': Landscape and Loss in Irish Women's Poetry.pdf
This is a chapter in the book, Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life, ed. by C. Berberich, N. Campbell, and R. Hudson. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 30 - 52. This chapter explores the theme of loss, specifically as related to the Irish landscape, in the work of three female poets of the Irish diaspora: Eavan Boland, Catherine Byron and Maura Dooley. I make explicit these three poets’ links with Irish folklore. I delineate their connections with traditional Gaelic-language narratives such as those of Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Crohan, and with notable works produced by W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and James Joyce, all of whom helped lay the foundations of Irish diasporic literature.
Poetry in Modern Ireland: Where Postcolonial and Postmodern Part Ways
The Comparatist, 1996
This paper is not about the Uterary burden of the past, but rather about four middle-aged male, canonical poets writing in Ireland today and the poems they have written occasioned by the death of their (biological) fathers. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Thomas KinseUa and Paul Durcan were aU born between 1927 and 1944, and thus are no longer young men. Each of them has been composing elegiac poems for his father which have become more complex with the aging perspective of their authors, and are weighted even more heavüy by the association of the death of the father with the death of tradition in Ireland.
The Parish and the World in Irish Poetry
University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2020
Starting with Patrick Kavanagh's distinction between the parish and the province as source and audience for poetry, the essay goes on to Seamus Heaney's essay 'The Sense of Place', to revisit his question of how particular to Irish writing these concerns are. It looks at Irish placenames for their familiarity or obscurity, and the extent to which they can be accounted for by origins in the Irish language or the historical experience of Ireland. It argues that the same questions of fidelity to origin or unfamiliarity arise in the famously successful twentieth-century Irish short story as in poetry, as well as in drama, concluding that this well-worked seam remains strikingly productive. Even if this is true for ‘the great society of mankind’ as Smith says, it remains tempting to say that there does seem to be a particular readiness in Irish poetry to introduce local, parochial reference, especially place names (and therefore places – though this is not exactly the sam...