Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960

The Answering Voice

Florence Impens

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319682310
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provides the first overview of classical presences in Anglophone Irish poetry after 1960. Featuring detailed studies of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Eavan Boland, including close readings of key poems, it highlights the evolution of Irish poetic engagements with Greece and Rome in the last sixty years. It outlines the contours of a 'movement' which has transformed Irish poetry and accompanied its transition from a postcolonial to a transnational model, from sporadic borrowings of images and myths in the poets' early attempts to define their own voices, to the multiplication of classical adaptations since the late 1980s -- at first at a time of personal and political crises, notably in Northern Ireland, and more recently, as manifestations of the poets' engagements with European and other foreign literatures.

© The Author(s) 2018

Florence ImpensClassical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960The New Antiquityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68231-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Brief Introduction: Rationale and Objectives

Florence Impens¹

(1)

University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

End Abstract

In 1976, W.B. Stanford, Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin, concluded Ireland and the Classical Tradition, his seminal study of classical presences on the island from the fifth to the early twentieth centuries, on the belief that the classics were losing their appeal among artists in the contemporary world, and gradually disappearing from the Irish cultural landscape. With an education increasingly centred on ‘modern’ subjects, ‘in the non-academic world’, he wrote, ‘few poets, novelists or artists now use classical themes or images in their work, and recent styles of art and architecture are unclassical’ (Stanford 1976, p. 246). Looking at the literature published on the island in those years, his comments certainly ring true. Writers such as Austin Clarke and Brian Coffey were still publishing classical poems, respectively Tiresias: A Poem (1971) and Death of Hektor (1979), but these poets were in their seventies, and in all appearance were survivors of a generation who had used classical material in their work, such as William Butler Yeats, Louis MacNeice, and Patrick Kavanagh , and who were, one by one, slowly passing away. In the work of younger poets, by contrast, Greece and Rome seemed to occupy very little space.

Oliver Taplin’s comments in ‘Contemporary Poetry and Classics’ on similar changes in the relationship of English poets with the material resonate in a Northern Irish and Irish context:¹

None of the major English poets born between, say, 1915 and 1935, seems to have shown a strong awareness of any relationship to ‘the classical tradition’. ( … ) This anti-classical or non-classical ‘generation’ (in so far as my periodisation is valid) may be the product of little more than individual coincidence. But these poets were educated in what was to prove the final era in which Classics held an automatic and often obligatory elite status in schools in England. This death-grip produced a revulsion in many of those subjected to it. It may also be relevant that this ‘generation’ was formed at the time when F.R. Leavis was at his most influential in his attempt to clear the pedestal of all idols, including the classical, so that he could place the Great Tradition there in sole majesty.

(Taplin 2002, pp. 9–10)

While the previous generation—poets such as Wynstan Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender—born in England and Ireland at the beginning of the century, had received a classical education in English public schools and at Oxford, and, often, assumed that their readership shared a similar cultural background that would enable them to understand the classical allusions peppering their work, the following generation reacted against the classics and their elitist role in education.² For writers such as Philip Larkin , poetry, if it was to remain relevant in the 1950s and later, needed to get rid of the elitism conveyed by (classical) allusions, and on the contrary, focus on resources available to the majority of readers:

My objection to the use in new poems of properties or personae from older poems is not a moral one, but simply because they do not work, either because I have not read the poems in which they appear, or because I have read them and think of them as part of that poem and not a property to be dragged into a new poem as a substitute for securing the effect that is desired. I admit this argument could be pushed to absurd lengths, when a poet could not refer to anything that his readers may not have seen (such as snow, for instance), but in fact poets write for people with the same background and experiences as themselves, which might be taken as a compelling argument in support of provincialism.

(Larkin 1982, no page number)

Larkin’s argument is not specifically directed at the use of classical material. For the poet, intertextuality and literary allusions of all kinds were to be avoided: not only did they presume that readers would recognise the source, which was unlikely, but they also distracted them from the new text. Larkin’s unequivocal dismissal of the ‘myth kitty’, and his anti-classical attitude certainly resonated with Stanford’s concerns about the decreasing importance of the classics in modern education and in the arts (Larkin 1983, p. 69).³

The classical ‘revival’ in poetry and other art forms that seized the Anglophone world, including Ireland, in the late twentieth century, and continues to be felt in the first decades of the new millennium, might look all the more surprising in this context. In the last sixty years, a plethora of poems, novels, plays, and films (sometimes loosely) based on Greek and Roman material has seen the light of day, and more importantly, has found a significant receptive audience. Stephen Harrison in his introduction to Living Classics (2009) comments on the ‘interesting but comprehensible paradox’ of the popularity of classical re-appropriations in contemporary Anglophone writing, of which he traces the roots back to the mid-twentieth century, when the classics became the object of a ‘vigorous process of outreach’ and democratisation (Harrison 2009, pp. 1–2). To compensate for the decline in the number of people learning the subject at school, proponents of the classics actively sought ways to make the material available to an audience less and less likely to read the texts in their original language, notably with new non-specialist publications. ‘Enterprising publishers [in the postwar world thus] moved into the production of readable and inexpensive versions of classical texts for the general public’ (Harrison 2009, p. 2), giving rise to well-known series such as Penguin Classics and Oxford University Press World’s Classics. Most importantly, those versions ‘had claims to be literary works in their own right rather than mere aids to deciphering the originals’; in brief, they were stand-alone versions destined to be enjoyed by the reader (Harrison 2009, p. 3). One did not need to know Latin nor Greek any longer, nor have much money, to have access to a relatively cheap and readable version of say, Homer or Virgil. Slowly, the classics were being severed from their association with the upper social classes.

While the wide commercialisation of new domesticising versions of the classics was instrumental in making the material more widely available and popular, in the context of the British Isles, changes in the education system, both in England and in Northern Ireland, too played a role in the democratisation of the classics, which Stanford had not foreseen. Those changes introduced a new generation of writers, born between 1935 and 1955, to Greek and Latin literatures in a less elitist context, and indirectly enabled them to dissociate those texts from their social connotations, and to rewrite them more freely later on in their creative careers. If those changes were primarily taking place in the United Kingdom, they would have a ripple effect on Irish poetry too, North and South, under the influence of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. Mentioning Douglas Dunn, David Constantine, Carol Ann Duffy, and Seamus Heaney, Oliver Taplin pointedly remarks that

One thing that most of this ‘generation’ of poets have in common is that they did not go to famous Public Schools. On the other hand most did take Latin, at least as far as O-Level: the difference is that the subject was not imposed with such heavy constraint or expectation as it had been on previous generations. The period between the education reforms of 1944 and the 1960s was a kind of golden age for selective grammar schools and for independent ‘Direct Grant’ schools, during which both catered for the bright and motivated children who had been selected by the reviled ‘11 Plus’ examination. In rivalry with the more privileged Public Schools, and often in superiority to them, Latin and ancient history, and to some extent Greek, were taken seriously. Even though still generally taught by unenlightened traditional methods, they seem to have introduced future poets to a resource which enriched rather than alienated them.

(Taplin 2002, p. 10)

Classics had become a more ‘democratic’ subject, and as such, Greek and Latin literatures became part of the cultural background of one more generation of writers, who would rewrite them without necessarily feeling caught in the tension between modern society and the elitist connotations which these writings had conveyed before.

In many cases, those writers would be at the forefront of the wave of classical rewritings which were to characterise much of literature in English in the late twentieth century. Re-appropriating Greek and Latin texts, they highlighted issues such as class, colonial structures, and gender representations . For Harrison , ‘many of the most striking engagements with classical texts since 1960 in Anglophone poetry have come from writers who are in some sense on the periphery of the “traditional” English metropolitan cultural world’ (Harrison 2009, p. 4). The marginality of those writers is to be understood broadly, and brings together people ‘such as Tony Harrison, from the northern English working class, Margaret Atwood, Canadian feminist, and Derek Walcott, from St Lucia in the Caribbean’, to whom the scholar later adds (among many others) ‘Harrison’s fellow northerner Ted Hughes’ , ‘African writer Wole Soyinka’, ‘working-class Scots poet Liz Lochhead’ , as well as ‘Irish writers [dealing] with the distress and issues of the political Northern Irish “Troubles ”’ (Harrison 2009, pp. 3–5).

This generation of poets will be the starting point, and to some extent, the main focus of The Answering Voice in an Irish context, as it is one whose relationship with the classics has been unique, both unprecedented and never repeated. The last generation to widely learn Classics (at least Latin) at school, it was also the first one to benefit from the democratisation of education in the post-war world.⁴ For the first and last time, many writers from different social backgrounds had direct knowledge of classical texts and narratives, which they could and would rewrite in their work.

If this generational dimension links British, Northern Irish, and Irish poets in their shared use of classical material, the present study also shows that the imaginative return to the classics in Irish poetry, from both North and South, is also in many ways distinctive. While the classics have helped Irish poets address broad themes such as contemporary violence and gender issues, also reflected in adaptations by their contemporaries across the Irish Sea, such Irish rewritings are informed by local circumstances specific to the poets’ home ground. For Eavan Boland, for instance, classical rewritings have long been a means to interrogate and challenge the marginal and passive positions occupied by women in Western art and society in broad terms, as well as very often within a narrower Irish cultural context. Many of her classical poems in the 1990s, focusing on the figure of Ceres , revise the trope of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. A Brief Introduction: Rationale and Objectives
• 2. The Classics in Modern Irish Poetry
• 3. Seamus Heaney: ‘Lethe in Moyola’
• 4. Michael Longley: The ‘Lapsed Classicist’
• 5. Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland: Marginal Perspectives
• 6. A Classical ‘Revival’?
• Back Matter