'Altering the past': Northern Irish poetry and modern canons.

This essay is a slightly edited version of an address given at a conference--'Northern Irish Poetry since 1960: The Resilient Voice'--in the Institute of English Studies, University of London (February 2003). The fact that 'Voice' seemed to be a collective noun prompted me to raise two related questions. First, to what extent does criticism, or should criticism, deal with a collectivity of poets from Northern Ireland? Second, if critics were to lay greater stress on a collective poetic phenomenon, what meaning might this have for readings of 'modern poetry'? Would it exceed the impact of what poets have separately achieved? In other words, this essay is about 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' or about tradition and a coincidence of talent. Eliot famously proposed: 'The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted. [...] Whoever has approved this idea of order [...] will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.' (1)

I am not grandly concerned with 'the whole existing order' of European literature but with how canons of modern English-language poetry have been ordered by the academy, and with how the aesthetics of modern poetry are read to justify those canonical orderings: 'relations, proportions, values'. In this sense, has 'Northern Irish Poetry since 1960' altered the past? For some poets and critics, of course, tradition, canons, and aesthetics are now beside the decentred point. Surely poetry, itself once a collective noun, has been virtuously Balkanized into 'poetries'? But the politics of poetics look much the same even if terminologies change. 'Poetries' is itself political. At a 'Language Poetry' conference in London the organizer gave the show away by shouting: 'We are the mainstream.' Further, as Eliot says, 'criticism is as inevitable as breathing'. Criticism has long lurked in the vicinity of 'Northern Irish Poetry since 1960'. Paul Muldoon, through whose poetry runs a steely literary-critical thread, says of the early 1970s: 'There was no sloppiness [...] everyone was quite outspoken.' (2) There is a long-standing joke about the 'Belfast School of Criticism' with its finely nuanced discriminations: 'shite, dog-shite, mad-dog shite'. More politely, a Frank O'Hara poem says of a friend: 'I suspect he is making a distinction | well, who isn't?' (3)

Even if Eliot's 'tradition' can sound like an exclusive gentlemen's club, he leaves matters creatively open by implying that tradition can be read only from the vantage-point of the new work: work that occupies 'the present moment of the past'. But this poses two questions which beg the question of criticism: how do we recognize that elusive temporal whereabouts 'the present moment of the past'? And which contemporary poems have 'altered the past'? It is relevant that Northern Irish poets are themselves critically interested in tradition (see below); but the nature of that interest requires a preliminary comparison between Eliot and W. B. Yeats.

'Tradition and the Individual Talent' conceals debts to, and dialogues with, Yeats. Eliot's readings or misreadings of Yeats (and vice versa) underline the inter-national dynamics that engendered 'modern poetry'. Eliot's simplest definition of tradition, that 'no poet has his complete meaning alone', applies not only to critical retrospect but to creative exchange in 'the present moment of the past'. When he was incubating 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', Eliot reviewed Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature and Yeats's The Cutting of an Agate, putting down both in an anti-Celtic double whammy. Thus, in a review headed 'A Foreign Mind', he judged Yeats's world so different from 'ours' as to make its foreignness not just 'national' but 'physiological'. The Anglo-American first-person universal-plural also kickstarts 'Tradition and the Individual Talent': 'In English writing we seldom speak of tradition'. This was cheeky since Eliot had so recently read Yeats's 1907 essay 'Poetry and Tradition'. (4)

These foundational essays overlap in that both are strikes against Wordsworthian/English subjectivism. If neither poet can escape the paradox that individual talents may subjectively cast tradition in their own current aesthetic image, such positioning itself feeds the dialectics that constitute tradition. Among several verbal overlaps: Yeats praises 'perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender'; Eliot urges 'not the expression of personality, but an extinction of personality'. Yeats recommends 'long frequenting of the great Masters'; Eliot says: 'tradition [...] cannot be inherited [...] you must obtain it by great labour'. The main difference is that Eliot sticks to literature while Yeats, even in an essay that belongs to his gyre of retreat from Irish movements, links and identifies poetic tradition with communal tradition: with nationality, folk-lore, aristocracy. Hence Poetry and Tradition. Yeats pictures tradition as 'an unbroken thread' or 'an old and broken stem' with a newly grafted rose. Ireland's supposed advantage is that it offers poets living 'precedents in the popular memory'. But tradition must be 'shaped' too, by the artist, by society. Yeats's images of shaping are an anvil and 'little walled towns' in Renaissance Tuscany. The two (rather 1890s) adjectives that he plays off one another are 'ancient' and 'deliberate': 'ancient imagination', 'the makers of deliberate literature'. In contrast, Eliot, whose architectural subtext seems more London than Urbino, pictures tradition as a centrally established 'order': 'the existing monuments', 'the main current'. As for people named in the essays: they share Homer and Shakespeare, but Yeats's mentors or co-workers in tradition span politics and more recent poetry: John O'Leary, Henry Grattan, Giuseppe Mazzini, John Mitchel, William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, William Morris, John Ruskin. These names invoke European cultural nationalism, English aestheticism, Irish poetry. Like Eliot, Yeats represents the object of activating 'tradition' as being to make it new: in his case, to give Irish poetry 'a more subtle rhythm, a more organic form'.

This is, admittedly, to compare pre-war and post-war essays and to ignore other writings by both poets. Yet key differences were to continue into the 1930s. Yeats's influence on English and American poetry in that decade, and his aesthetic dialectics with Eliot and Pound, have been neglected by most constructions of 'modernism'. In 'A General Introduction for My Work' Yeats says (more positively than usual) that Pound and Lawrence 'wrote admirable free verse', but he could not. The well-known passage which glosses this inability defines tradition as the mutations of form, persona, and genre:

Because I need a passionate syntax for a passionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. [...] If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion. [...] I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. I commit my emotion to shepherds [...] learned men, Milton's or Shelley's Platonist. [...] I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is best packing. (5)

Here Yeats again attacks subjectivism (perhaps the egotistical indiscretion of Pound's Cantos) and preserves the ratio between 'ancient' and 'deliberate'. He also gives 'altering the past' a fresh nuance: 'even what I alter must seem traditional'. The passage evokes 'the present moment of the past' as what happens when Yeats writes a poem.

For both Yeats and Eliot, poetry does not progress although it is historical. So 'the present moment of the past' is not so much the synchronicity of 'Now' or of post-modernity as the creative moment which, in making it new, excludes resources presently and locally exhausted by the poet or by tradition. Pierre Bourdieu, speaking of French poetry, suggests that the avant-garde never really gets away from the pack, because experiment too is inscribed in the 'original matrix' of any art, in the entire 'space of possibles' which is 'immanent in the field'. (6) Hence the fact that Yeats, Pound, and Eliot are all obsessed with tradition, with getting back behind Victorian clutter to an obscured root, to some version of purity. On this dialectical or radical rather than progressive view of poetry, it would be unwise to pronounce the extinction of any genre or form. Of course, tradition also works through new poets reading old poets anew; or, rather, reading what earlier readers missed (Northern Irish poets have done a good deal of that). For Donald Hall, tradition is 'conversation': 'a history of friendships and rivalries [with] the dead great ones [and] with the living young'. (7) Yeats conspicuously endows his poetry with a series of mixed genealogies, some of which include his juniors. Eliot's greatest tribute to Yeats, and yet another definition of tradition, is the insight that 'after becoming unquestionably a master', Yeats remained 'always a contemporary'. (8)

Neil Corcoran argues that Seamus Heaney 'lies at an oblique angle to the English poetic tradition [...] and he must consequently labour to create in his criticism his own personally sustaining "tradition" of sought-out exemplars'. 9 This may be true, but no less so for Yeats, for Heaney's Northern Irish contemporaries, and up to a point for any poet. There is also a distinction (whose contextual nuances include the Catholic stress on exemplarity) between an exemplar and an influence, and between enshrining exemplars in criticism and implicitly absorbing them in poems. Nor should we slip into regarding 'the English poetic tradition' as perennial, homogeneous, self-contained, and clearly signposted, as if Philip Larkin always knew just where to slot in or Keats had been an A-level text since 1066. We can now see how precarious is any poet in that respect. Incidentally, Medbh McGuckian had a teenage passion for Keats ('totally, totally, in love') and Ciaran Carson recently said: 'I love Keats.' (10) Cairns Craig has warned Scottish critics against internalizing Eliot-derived rhetorics of 'wholeness', arguing that some of the perceived 'fragmentation' of Scottish literary tradition masks asset-stripping by the metropolis. (11) The application of this to Ireland--a country, moreover, not always keen to claim all its literary assets--indicates how the agency of Irish writers (especially of Yeats) in modern literature might be underestimated.

Yet Corcoran's 'oblique angle' suggests one reason why such a range of poets excited Heaney, Mahon, and Longley in the early 1960s. Most first collections bear the traces of 'strong precursors', but aspiring poets from rural Derry in Belfast, or from provincial Belfast in Dublin, poets exposed at university to Eng. Lit., French Lit., or Classical Lit., might indeed take a pick 'n' mix attitude to tradition. However, aspiration itself counts too. Perhaps 'rivalry with the dead great ones' plus competition with contemporaries equals raising the stakes of ambition. And for all the moaning about marginality--an opportunity as much as a problem--oblique angles have been an asset to Irish writers: a special ability to be at once inside and outside Eng. Lit. whereas Eliot and Pound always seem to be knocking anxiously at the door. In any case, Heaney's Death of a Naturalist (1966), Derek Mahon's Night-Crossing (1968), and Michael Longley's No Continuing City (1969) are highly ambitious in their literary reach. If the poetry mentions a few poets (Synge, Villon, MacNeice, Beckett, Dickinson, Clare, Dowson), indirectly it mentions many more: Homer, Wordsworth, Keats, Herbert, Baudelaire, Hopkins, Yeats, Owen, Edward Thomas, Graves, MacNeice, Dylan Thomas (in whom the juvenilia of all three had been saturated), Kavanagh, Montague, Frost, Crane, Stevens, Lowell, Wilbur, Larkin, Hughes, Hill, for example.

There are both overlaps and revealing contrasts as regards these presences, while shared poets, like Larkin, are given different inflections. Where Mahon and Larkin touch is on the fin-de-siecle wavelength of desire and desolation. Where Heaney and Larkin touch is on the formal wavelength of the stanzaic poem clinched by final rhyme and a final perspective. Where Longley and Larkin touch is in poems about graffiti and jazz that explore the nature of art. Overall, as he moves on from juvenilia, each Northern Irish poet seems engaged in a tripartite 'conversation' with Irish, British, and American precursors: with poets from 'the English poetic tradition', pioneers of 'modern poetry', living poets of different generations, poets with Ulster accents. The distinctive sounds and rhythms of each collection owe something to the fresh aesthetic blends that result from these conversations. To quote Pound's comparison between poetic tradition and science, the poets have begun by 'learn[ing] what has been discovered already'. (12)

The young poets' collective leaning towards the Yeatsian rather than vers libre end of the formal spectrum has not always been positively regarded, let alone seen as 'altering the past' vis-a-vis the dialectics of form in modern poetry. In his important essay 'Yeats, Form, and Northern Irish Poetry', Peter McDonald questions the way in which some critical commentary equates form with formalism, and even with Ulster unionism, as if free verse and Irish republicanism (favourite poet: Thomas Davis) were synonymous. After analysing the formal practice of Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and Muldoon, McDonald concludes:

Much of the misunderstanding of Northern Irish poetry sees in a supposed formalism only a set of abstractable assumptions and prejudices. [...] But [...] such approaches ignore [...] the flexibility and the changing nature of poetic form: in Yeats's hands, as much as those of his successors, form and performance are constantly moving, shifting modes that set the authorial will a fresh challenge each time a new poem has to be written. (13)

Are 'those traditional metres that have developed with the language' (to quote Yeats) a strait-jacket? Or are they, rather, a fishing-net, moving and shifting? Certainly, these three first collections appear to exhilarate in the encounter with form, in would-be form's encounter with life. Narratives of this encounter can be read from the diverse portraits of the artist which are such a marked feature, a key signature, of each book: Heaney's 'Diviner' as medium for oxymoronic 'precise convulsions'; Mahon's Van Gogh 'Setting fierce fire to the eyes | Of sunflowers'; Longley's Dickinson 'Dressing with care for the act of poetry'. Such self-portraits also insinuate that the formal adventure ultimately models social meaning. This not only applies to those poems by Heaney which expressly link poetic and extra-poetic tradition. It also applies to Mahon and Longley for whom more depends on a poem's own performance as a fragile stay against modern and human confusions. Yeats's holistic formula 'Poetry and Tradition' holds good. To take a well-known example: 'In Carrowdore Churchyard', Mahon's elegy for MacNeice, celebrates his poetry as 'Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new', and thus perpetually acting on art and life together, reflexively enabling the elegy itself to occupy 'the present moment of the past'. Tradition live. Mahon's poetry particularly reminds us that not only Yeats's Irish context, but his 1890s context, fostered the faith that life imitates art. More recently, Mahon said of a couplet by Robert Lowell: 'Here is a voice that has committed itself to words without hesitation, without irony, without fear. It's a form of giving yourself to life.' (14)

Taking many poems or forms as read, and lacking space to track the later formal gyrations of Heaney, Mahon, and Longley, I would suggest that these 1960s texts are insufficiently visited in intertextual and reflexive ways that might illuminate the subsequent formal history of 'Northern Irish Poetry'. Fran Brearton makes a persuasive case for such revisiting and revision:

Any reading of 1960s poetry in Ireland may succumb to more than one temptation, not least of which is to read the story from a post-1969 perspective, and bring expectations about poetry engendered in part by the Troubles to bear on writing from the early and mid-1960s. [...] Poets from Northern Ireland have been the focus of extensive academic and media attention over the last thirty years, sometimes to the detriment of proper consideration of their work in the island's poetic traditions as a whole, and in the context of British, Irish and American cultural exchange and influence. (15)

Historicization of the 1960s aesthetic matrix is surely crucial to understanding how 'Northern Irish Poetry' itself became a multiplicitous tradition among traditions, and how tradition went on being rewritten by intergenerational dialectics about form: about models, rhyme, line, and language; about stanzaic, syntactical, and symbolic structures. Meanwhile intragenerational dialectics have continued too--within the older group, and in Carson's and McGuckian's receptions of Muldoon. McGuckian's formal radicalism is partly sparked by her intimacy with the forms from which her own forms deviate or dissent: she receives tradition at an oblique angle to an oblique angle. To read this criss-crossed aesthetic field, however large a task, might be to discover how widely the lyric poem's 'space of possibles' has been opened up.

Despite differing emphases, Heaney and Muldoon have both used the Oxford Chair of Poetry to affirm the lyric poem and the web of relations in which it has its being. In 'On Poetry and Professing' Heaney defends tradition: 'Poets are [...] more likely [than academics] to attest without self-consciousness to the living nature of poetic tradition and to the demotic life of "the canon".' Heaney castigates the theoretical suspicion of such ideas as 'lamentably destructive of cultural memory when it is induced in minds without any cultural possessions whatever'. (16) Muldoon's Clarendon Lectures may spoof the idea of authoritative professing and make assonance a finally absurd mechanism of tradition. Yet tradition, figured as a Muldoon poem rather than a Heaney poem, remains tradition. Muldoon says, for instance: 'The extraordinary appetite and aptitude for "intertextuality" among these [Irish] writers goes beyond a mere interest in the allusive, or the parodic.' He speaks of 'concomitancy'--a useful word--between authors, texts, and worlds. He also dissolves the author into this concomitancy: 'Joyce belongs in Bowen, Bowen, Allingham and those anonymous ninth-century Irish poets in Beckett. All, indeed, are anonymous. Their very disregard for their "selves" allows them to mutate and transmogrify themselves, to position themselves, with Amergin, at some notional cutting edge.' (17) This is neither quite the death of the author nor quite the birth of postmodernist synchronicity. It is tradition, greater than the sum of its parts, collectively written by Anonymous. Muldoon approaches Christopher Caudwell's (Marxist) belief in the Communal Ego of art.

Derek Mahon has declared himself 'an-out-and out traditionalist'. So it appears from The Yellow Book (1997), a self-confessed 'forest of intertextuality' which yet resists 'the pastiche paradise of the postmodern'. At one level, these neo-Horatian epistles constitute a back-to-the-future work of criticism that revisits the symbolist and decadent sources of modern poetry, and of Mahon's own poetry, in lament for 'the lyrical madness'. Mahon cryptically glosses tradition as 'doing the thing that poetry does', and the thing itself as 'Soul, Song and Formal Necessity'. (18) Ciaran Carson provides another model of poetic tradition in his implied analogies with the controlled flux of traditional storytelling and music: 'Musicians, borne on a spate of music, take their soundings; hearing something new, they search the memory-bank for parallels and precedents, getting its approximation, its relative shape. A rough internal course is plotted out before embarking; fingers mime the notes. [...] But of course the instinct is instructed by years of listening. We drift on in the wide, swift current of the music, trusting to our memories and to past associations.' (19) Carson might be talking about learning a tune or about writing a poem in 'the present moment of the past'.

Perhaps exegesis of Northern Irish poetry has now reached the kind of critical mass that allows us to look for patterns and for gaps. I have indicated a possible gap where the collective aesthetic meaning of the poetry has been neither calculated nor maximized. Below, I suggest some reasons for this (in addition to the gravitational pull of the Troubles), and consider where such calculation might count. It would, of course, equally distort matters to push a Northern Irish poets' collective at the expense of the individual-talent narrative or other critical narratives in their fertile plurality. One or two intertextual studies are already in play, such as Clair Wills's Improprieties (1993), and it seems a sign of vitality that poems by Northern Irish poets inform so many narratives. First, there are what Michael Allen calls in his Casebook on Heaney the 'challenging range of critical methodologies [that emerged] to compete with [...] Anglo-American "New Criticism"'. (20) Yet that very range underlines gaps or biases where Northern Irish poetry is concerned, with postcolonial theory being a trifle over-subscribed. The poetry also enters more public narratives: stories of Ireland, identity discourse, Cultural Diversity speak, studies of violence, ghost-written political speeches. And it turns up in multifarious generic or quasi-generic slots: elegy, political poetry, war poetry, anti-war poetry, love poetry, pastoral poetry, city poetry, ekphrastic poetry. I have quoted from narratives put about by poets themselves, most subtly in their poems, but also in lectures, articles, interviews, reviews, and talk with user-friendly critics. Then we have translation-studies and the permutations of comparison. The latter might be schematized as: Heaney-and-Wordsworth, Heaney-and-Yeats, Heaney-and-Kavanagh, Heaney-and-Hughes, Heaney-and-Frost, Heaney-and-Muldoon, Heaney-and-Milosz, Heaney-and-Dante, Heaney-and-Virgil. (On the whole, comparative exercises still run along rather well-lit tracks.) Above all, omnipresent, there are the national grand narratives--Irish poetry, English poetry--which also bear on an obvious crux: the intersection of reading Northern Irish poetry with reading Northern Ireland. In Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997) Peter McDonald appealed against Northern Ireland overwhelming poetry, asking how 'a critical language might be found to account for poetry's distinctiveness [...] which is not itself compromised by the insistent demands of its cultural and political context'. (21)

There is no ready answer to that Catch 22, although we might start by recognizing that aesthetic considerations recede in proportion as 'Ireland' invades the foreground. Academics can be interested in Irish poetry without being much interested in poetry. This reprise of critical patterns initiated during the Revival explains why--for partly dissimilar ideological reasons --two places where you would not look for a serious account of contemporary Irish poetry are the two sets of Field Day anthologies. In the first set (1991), Declan Kiberd's footnotes afford some fine examples of criticism as ethnic stereotype (poets from a Protestant background write 'a parsimonious Northern lyric'). In the second, women-centred set (2003), Nuala ni Dhomhnaill's permissive inclusions and headnotes defy every critical rationale: 'Two great collections in recent years have shown X to be a poetic force to be reckoned with'. (22) Poetry also has a minimal or instrumental presence in Kiberd's literary-critical national epics, Inventing Ireland (1995) and Irish Classics (2000), and in those works of cultural studies which currently aim to theorize, decolonize, deconstruct, or reinvent Ireland. Perhaps poetry is being denied its own inventive and deconstructive powers. Some of this is good news. As Northern Ireland, let us hope, moves out of the headlines, poetry criticism may cast off some imperative categories and categorical imperatives. The 2003 Royal Irish Academy conference 'Representing the Troubles' included no paper on poetry. Yet it could be as mistaken to ignore how the North has conditioned poetry as to read those conditions in over-determined ways. Once again, 'poetry and tradition' is a holistic matter.

Of course, the collective meaning of 'Northern Irish Poetry' remains hazy principally because any narrative under this rubric remains problematic. The organizers of 'The Resilient Voice' conference boldly went where others had feared to tread. It is revealing to consider which critics or poets ground the poetry in the North, and the terms in which (or on which) they do so. John Hewitt's phrase 'chosen ground' in his poem 'Sunset over Glenaan' (1951), refracted through Tom Paulin's 'The Caravans at Luneberg Heath' (1987), figures in the title of Neil Corcoran's pioneering edited collection of critical essays: The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (1992). In fact, Hewitt's 'chosen ground' is a small area in the Glens of Antrim transmuted into one of those microcosmic poetic parishes which, in the work of Northern Irish poets, themselves imply the provisionality of contours, the subjectivity of space, the deliberateness of art. Hewitt's literary regionalism of the 1940s and 1950s is insufficiently understood as porous, with conduits to Dublin (The Bell ) and Edinburgh. In the 1940s he was pleased that Northern poets were making a mark 'on the [Irish] national scene'. (23) Hewitt chiefly wanted poets to maximize the cultural resources on their Northern doorstep, to do the show right there. And they eventually did: the impact of Hewitt's regional thinking on Heaney, for instance, is underestimated. Heaney encountered its force when he wrote that 'extended essay' on Ulster literary magazines (see below). Later, the impulse behind Frank Ormsby's anthology Poets from the North of Ireland (1979) was fed by Hewitt's ideas, the advent of regional publishing, and the 1960s which Ormsby calls 'a springboard period for poetry in the north of Ireland'. (24)

There are patterns in the 'Northern Irish Poetry' narrative too. One pattern is for a poet to advance such a narrative and later retreat, whether voluntarily or under pressure or because the poet has literally or metaphorically moved on. Both Heaney and Mahon do this after 1970, although both also vestigially keep the narrative alive depending on context. Thus Mahon, interviewed by William Scammell, says that Thomas Kinsella (who had dismissed such a narrative in his New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986)) is 'right up to a point' but 'there is more to it than that'. (25) In 'The Placeless Heaven' Heaney recalls his extended essay as belonging to a quest 'for faith in the possibility of our cultural existence as northern, Irish and essentially ourselves'. 26 Heaney places a subtle comma between northern, with a lower-case 'n', and 'Irish'. He interestingly reproduces this kind of language in 'Tollund Revisited' and in his post-ceasefire prose. 'Cessation 1994' links hopes for a shared future with 1960s poetry revisited and seen as part of a 'general upswing in intellectual and social activity'. (27) Perhaps 'Northern Irish Poetry' is a narrative whose time has (almost) come; or its time for closer reading. Among critics, Neil Corcoran has been boldest in employing it. Corcoran introduces Poets of Modern Ireland thus: 'Some of these essays [...] refer to an entity I call "the poetry of Northern Ireland", even while discussing the work of some poets--Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon--who have explicitly repudiated the label in the interests of a commitment to an all-Ireland understanding of the island's literary culture' (p. ix). In 1975 Terence Brown had more cautiously introduced Northern Voices: 'Although [poets] contribute not to a separate Ulster poetic tradition but to Anglo-Irish and/or British poetry, an awareness of their Ulster background is nevertheless important if we are to read them aright.' (28)

Not every poetry critic attends as closely to Ulster backgrounds, including regional literary history, as do academics in other disciplines. Nor have they always attended to the vast multi-disciplinary archive on Northern Ireland. Where protocols about 'national literature' inhibit analysis (imagine if social scientists were inhibited by 'national politics') conditions which obtain only in the North may be inadequately factored into readings of poetry. A prime example is the epistemological fallout of a close encounter, as once in the dialectics of the Revival, between different religious and hence metaphysical systems: Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter. If one pole of that encounter is sectarian acculturation, the other is theology. Patrick Grant, a critic unusual in focusing (culturally and comparatively) on religion, says in Breaking Enmities (1999): 'Poets do not effect for themselves a complete emancipation from the negative effects of a cultural allegiance partly shaped by religion and by religious prejudice. But they do let us see some persistent flaws that much other political and religious discourse overlooks or elides.' (29)

Just as the Good Friday Agreement may allow poetry to be read more aesthetically, so its 'strands' focus the finer print of 'Northern Ireland': not as bordered space but as itself internally and externally intertextual. Indeed, the Agreement is a kind of poetry, its complexity ever-misread by blundering critics. Similarly, any collective meaning of 'Northern Irish Poetry' at once includes and manifests shifting semantics. In this sense, Muldoon's poetry seems a meta-poetic commentary on the whole field. In his essay 'Paul Muldoon's Transits: Muddling through after Madoc', John Kerrigan discusses borders that metamorphose into spaces: what Muldoon himself terms 'the fine liminal-narthecal line between continuity and discontinuity, location and dislocation'. Kerrigan suggests that in Muldoon's 'The Mud Room' pararhyme 'maximises the possibilities of movement, increases the numbers of end-of-line options for semantic detours [...] the rhymes are like the bluegreen conjunctions of a border which constitutes a path'. This reading (Kerrigan also notes Muldoon's proclivity for cross-cultural pararhyme) turns inside out the question of 'Form and Northern Irish poetry'. Form itself becomes representation in a poem that perpetually treads 'upon the brink | of meaning', and perhaps thereby positions itself on 'the cutting edge'. (30)

Does 'narthecality' invisibly rhyme with 'northecality'--a coinage less freighted and fraught than 'Northernness'? It also rhymes with whimsicality and musicality. Perhaps the least controversial narrative of 'Northern Irish Poetry' might locate intertextuality, as I have briefly done, aesthetically rather than culturally: that is, in the relations between individual talents: northecality as coterie. Here my main critical model is Geoffrey Ward's Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993).

Because it accelerates tradition by collectively occupying 'the present moment of the past', coterie has long been an engine of poetry. For Ward, Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems 'gives us a more completely rounded evocation of an artist's milieu than any body of verse since Alexander Pope' (p. 61). Northern Irish poetry might make the same claim (including relations with the other arts), if in rather different terms. In the early twentieth century there were continuities between Yeats's coterie-forming activity in London and T. E. Hulme's organizing of the Poets' Club and its successor in the Eiffel Tower cafe. In 1917 there was the ad hoc war poets' 'club' of Craiglockhart Hospital. Another relevant coterie is the 1930s poets: Muldoon's poem '7, Middagh Street' (1987) flags up such parallels. Similarly, and not just satirically, Madoc (1990) implicates the Romantics. Coterie and its dynamics significantly rise to the surface of the poetry that Muldoon wrote just after leaving Belfast in 1986. Northern Irish poets are also keenly conscious of the New York School itself.

By 'coterie', I do not mean the Philip Hobsbaum 'Group' of the mid-1960s, and this seems an appropriate occasion on which to repeat a narrative of my own (from The Living Stream, 1994). First, Mahon and Longley had their formative creative encounter in the literary milieu of Trinity College Dublin (between 1960 and 1963). Secondly, Mahon, then travelling abroad, never belonged to the Belfast Group. Thirdly, Hobsbaum's own practice and theory were largely irrelevant: far stronger precursors lurked in the wings. None the less, Hobsbaum should be credited with bringing some poets together (Heaney, Longley, Simmons), with bringing poetry and criticism together, and with introducing or re-introducing the coterie-habit to Belfast. This promoted further 'concomitancies'. Ciaran Carson says of later years: 'Longley, Ormsby, Muldoon, myself, we all hung around together; but we didn't necessarily talk about poetry. Maybe we did share some notions of what poetry should be--shared concerns about accuracy, precision and craft.' (31)

Just as poets might not want to be labelled 'Northern Irish', so they might not want to be co-opted for a poets' club. Carson, like the other poets, resists being 'grouped'. There are several ways in which individual talents evade co-option for coterie: e.g. Pound's well-known dismissal and engrossment of Imagism as 'a point on the curve of my development', or the formula that goes: 'We were never all together in the same room except for five minutes in a snug in the Crown in April 1974' (I made that up). But no writer can be so easily 'through with [literary] history' (to redirect a phrase in Mahon's poem 'Rage for Order'). Poetic coteries mix three basic ingredients in varying proportions: proximity over time, usually in a city; some 'shared notions of what poetry should be'; a shared historical moment; sometimes, a historical consciousness raised by the extra yeast of crisis. Even if those ingredients change in proportional significance as poets develop and history, too, moves on, formative coterie implants an ineradicable mutual awareness which seems to go deeper than later literary affiliations. For Northern Irish poets, history provided special long-term ligatures in the context of special divisions. So did a sense that the very traditions, forms, and language of poetry were in the narthecal or northecal melting-pot.

Whether explicitly or not, criticism of Northern Irish poetry already talks about coterie. What may be missed is that where coterie is most dynamic, it fosters difference rather than sameness: aesthetic sibling-differentiation across the field. But if coterie intensifies individuality, it also deepens intertextuality. Beyond upfront examples, dialogue is built into the collective script, and conducted on formal, verbal, generic, symbolic, and metaphysical levels. Before Kristeva, John Hewitt coined an Ulster version of intertextuality when he referred to the Rhyming Weavers' names 'caught in the cross-meshes of swapped stanzas'. (32) Of course, coterie also has its downside: Ward says that it involves 'namedropping, backbiting, off-the-cuff criticisms and commendation', just as it involves aesthetic rivalry (p. 61). (Read Madoc for a coded narrative of Northern Irish poetic politics.) Finally, coterie as artistic community accentuates the communal dimension of tradition, genre, and form. Northern Irish poetry follows the Yeatsian model of coterie and tradition by positioning itself in relation to community, including imagined and interpretative communities. Its vocative case is plural, its homes, as in 'The Mud Room', at once precarious and capacious. Muldoon likes to use the word 'society' when recalling the association of poets in Belfast. Mahon says: 'I invoke a circle of friends, a reading society' (33) Poetic 'concomitancy', in such a context of fracture, makes "poetries" look a bit feeble.

Of course, the poets and poems belong to 'Irish poetry' too. But the reflex which says that 'it's all Irish poetry', or that poetry from the Republic has been unfairly sidelined by the Troubles, hardly gets us very far in critical terms. Terence Brown was already wrestling with the problematics of national literature when he spoke of his 'Northern Voices' 'contribut[ing] not to a separate Ulster poetic tradition but to Anglo-Irish and/or British poetry'. Since then, Northern Irish poets have been influentially 'and/or' in every archipelagic direction. Craig Raine, when poetry editor at Faber, said there was a mystical point at which all the manuscripts that came in stopped imitating Seamus Heaney and started imitating Paul Muldoon instead. Douglas Dunn often speaks of feeling closer to the Northern Irish poets than to English poets. Ian Duhig has claimed that most Northern English poets feel this closeness too. (34) Seamus Heaney himself has moved on since his Open Letter (1983) triggered the protocol from Britain and Ireland in anthology-titles. Discussing 'The Irish Poet in Britain', Heaney says of the Heaney-Hughes anthology The School Bag: 'One of the things we had in mind was to insist on the diverse traditions that operate through and sustain for good the poetry written in Ireland, England, Scotland and in Wales' (35)

Indeed, critical publication on Northern Irish poets has probably been most developed in Britain, even if some of it is done by Irish expats. And those who say that 'it's all Irish poetry' should consider whether any critically persuasive narrative of modern Irish poetry actually exists. There is even a history of Irish poets calling for better criticism. In 1951 John Montague complained that 'literary criticism is more by gossip and instinct than rule'. In 1998 Dennis O'Driscoll regretted that poets from the Republic had been less well served by 'articulate' critics than their northern counterparts. (36)

This felt lack stems from the spancelling of Irish criticism to the national question. Hence also the tendency to elide the history of Irish poetry and the story of Ireland, as Robert Garratt does in Modern Irish Poetry (1986), or as perhaps every critic does in small unconscious ways. Eamon Grennan concludes an essay on Irish poetry's American influences: 'The variously inflected American connection [...] is merely a logical part of the continuing (perhaps now completed) effort at achieving the comprehensive autonomy of Irish poetry in the English language.' (37) 'Comprehensive autonomy' is quite a claim in any area of life. Underlying most anxieties of autonomy is the difficulty of accepting Yeats's poetry and criticism as foundational. In 1955 Donald Davie was surprised that 'Irish poets, Irish critics, and Irish readers [had] not yet recognised the logic of Yeats's poetic development, still less worked out the consequences of that in terms of their own aims and procedures'. 38 Of course, Davie's opinion is open to debate. But as part of that debate here are two sweeping propositions. First, after MacNeice, it is 'Northern Irish Poetry since 1960' which--in Ireland--has most deeply absorbed 'the logic of Yeats's poetic development'. This is because it cast off the slack, envious, quasi-sectarian notion of Yeats as a 'shadow', and used him as a source. Secondly, Yeats and MacNeice excepted, Irish poetry criticism began around the time Philip Larkin says sexual intercourse did. The scandal of Muldoon's Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986) was that it read, criticized, and canonized 'Irish poetry' from the perspective of 'Northern Irish Poetry since 1960'.

Irish Poetry since 1950, John Goodby's feat of compendious close reading, underlines the rarity of critical overviews. Goodby seeks to adjust the imbalance whereby Northern Irish poetry has had the 'lion's share' of attention, and to give 'an inclusive account of recent poetry'. (39) Here 'inclusive' implies not a nationalist subtext, but something more like 'social inclusion'. Where I disagree with Goodby is that his inclusiveness is predicated against views which are less consensual than he thinks. He assumes a 'traditional canon' or 'self-selecting mainstream' not really borne out by the lopsided, contested, and terminologically confused field of critical narratives to date. Moreover, Goodby in his own way elides the history of Irish poetry and the story of Ireland. Thus he aligns the 'formal conservatism' of Irish poetry with 'the isolation and conservatism of the two [partitioned] states'. And, in stressing a contrary strain of 'modernist experimentalism', he falls into contradiction. He aims to counter the image of 'Irish poetry [as] conservative (by comparison with US poetry) and anomalous (by comparison with British poetry)'. Yet he adds: 'This is not to say that Irish poetry is not, generally speaking, anomalous or conservative in comparison with Anglo-American or general Western norms' (pp. 1-3). Is there an echo here of Eliot snubbing Yeats's 'foreign mind'? Who determines the norms? Besides deploying 'conservative' in this inexact way, Goodby underestimates Yeats's agency in both archipelagic and American poetics. According to Davie, some Irish poetry was belated not because it imitated Yeats, but because it did not. This also applies to the so-called 'Irish modernist poets'. As Steven Connor says in Theory and Cultural Value: 'Only tradition can beget newness.' (40) Similarly, you can hardly react against Yeats's poetry if you have not reacted to it. Goodby rarely allows 'Irish poetry' to modify the premises he brings to reading it. But this may be partly the historical fault of Irish criticism, with its failure to intervene in narratives of 'modern poetry'.

By giving 'traditional' form more dialectical weight in such narratives, 'Northern Irish Poetry' might collectively alter 'proportions, relations, values'. Modern poetry is often subsumed by 'modernism': an appropriation that derives less from Pound or Eliot than from academic readings of their work. These, in turn, have bred or inbred the conceptual art known as 'Language Poetry': poetry written in reaction against what its proponents caricature as an anti-theoretical 'poetics of the "individual voice" that valorises authenticity and fidelity to its origins in pre-poetic experience or emotion'. (41) Irish poetry rarely registers in this outcrop of the North American university which, when exported, mysteriously becomes 'international'. Perhaps, once again, Irish criticism is to blame for insisting so ferociously on the 'national' that it leaves Irish poetry open to such patronage as an American academic writing (in the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003), no less) an essay absurdly called 'Irish Poets and the World'.

Some assumptions that underpin Language Poetry look dubious in English and American contexts too, but seem especially 'anomalous' when exposed to Northern Irish understandings of tradition and form (understandings that take neither mainstream nor mainland for granted). First, there is the assumption that every lyric poem asserts an 'I did it my way' American individualism rather than subjects itself to the Communal Ego of tradition or the protean discipline of dramatis personae: 'I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing'. Then there is the assumption that 'mainstream' poets and critics are impervious to the post-structuralist paradigm, and incapable of grasping the variability of schools, the politics of anthologies. Finally, there is the assumption that poetry can achieve a valid political presence only by discarding all the deep-laid structures which constituted poetry as communal or communicative in the first place. These assumptions really amount to a continued booting of New Criticism's dead body. For instance, Charles Bernstein has clearly never read Ciaran Carson when he upholds 'group-identified poetries' against 'the neoconventionalist idea of fashioning by masterly artifice a neutral standard English'. Nor has he heard of Northern Irish poetry when he can say, rather pathetically: 'Poets don't have to be read, any more than trees have to be sat under, to transform poisonous societal emissions into something that can be breathed.' (42) This is the puritanism of the poetic cult, remote from history's emissions: a virtual virtue, a merely abstract radicalism that becomes solipsism. Perhaps the contrast is between a complex blossoming with debts to Yeats and a neo-Poundian dead end (not that Pound deserves most Language Poetry).

I suggest, then, that Northern Irish poetry collectively dramatizes the protean nature of form as it remakes tradition, whether form goes with Muldoon's aleatory twists or Mahon's 'hissing chemicals inside the well-wrought urn'. (43) In a worried essay on New Formalism and Language Poetry, Paul Breslin says of Bernstein and Dana Gioia (a leading advocate of New Formalism): 'The middle of the road is a livelier and more dangerous place than the positions occupied by Gioia and Bernstein, who are sitting on the kerb at opposite sides of the street gesturing at the traffic.' (44) Of course, there are other contemporary poets on that lively road. But the collective aesthetic meaning of Northern Irish poetry may prove a notable signpost.

(1) Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 38-39.

(2) See John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Galway: Salmon, 2002), p. 187.

(3) Frank O'Hara, quoted in Geoffrey Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 37.

(4) See W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, ed. by A. N. Jeffares (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 231-32; Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 254-58; and Edna Longley, 'Modernism, Poetry, and Ireland', in Rethinking Modernism, ed. by Marianne Thormahlen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 160-79.

(5) W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 522.

(6) Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), p. 188.

(7) Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-1988 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 12.

(8) Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 249.

(9) Neil Corcoran, Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 99.

(10) Brown, In the Chair, pp. 171, 144.

(11) See Cairns Craig, 'Prologue: Peripheries', Out of History (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), pp. 11-30.

(12) Ezra Pound, 'A few Don'ts By an Imagiste', repr. in Imagist Poetry, ed. by Peter Jones (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 132.

(13) Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 166.

(14) Brown, In the Chair, p. 118.

(15) See Fran Brearton, 'Poetry of the 1960s: The "Northern Ireland Renaissance"', in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. by Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 94-95.

(16) Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 71-72.

(17) Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 24-25.

(18) Brown, In the Chair, p. 117.

(19) Ciaran Carson, Last Night's Fun (London: Cape, 1996), p. 61.

(20) Seamus Heaney, ed. by Michael Allen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 1.

(21) Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 19.

(22) For a discussion of Kiberd, see Edna Longley, 'Ulster Protestants and the Question of "Culture"', in Last before America: Irish and American Writing, ed. by Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), pp. 99-100; for Ni Dhomhnaill, see The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5, ed. by Angela Bourke and others, (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), p. 1312.

(23) See Edna Longley, 'The Whereabouts of Literature', in Beyond Scotland: Scottish Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Gerry Carruthers and David Goldie (forthcoming).

(24) Poets from the North of Ireland, ed. by Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1979), p. 7.

(25) Poetry Review, 81.2 (Summer 1991), 5; and see Brearton, 'Poetry of the 1960s'.

(26) Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), p. 7.

(27) Heaney, Finders Keepers, p. 45.

(28) Terence Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), p. 1.

(29) Patrick Grant, Breaking Enmities: Religion, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland 1967-97 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 71.

(30) John Kerrigan, 'Paul Muldoon's Transits: Muddling through after Madoc', Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, ed. by Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), pp. 125-49.

(31) Brown, In the Chair, p. 144.

(32) Ancestral Voices: Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. by Tom Clyde (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987), p. 67.

(33) Brown, In the Chair, pp. 187, 123.

(34) Duhig said this at a poetry reading in Queen's University Belfast in 2002.

(35) Heaney, Finders Keepers, p. 378.

(36) See Bell, 17.3 ( June 1951), p. 26; Irish Times, 22 January 2000.

(37) Eamon Grennan, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Omaha, NB: Creighton University Press, 1999), p. 397.

(38) Donald Davie, 'Reflections of an English Writer in Ireland', Studies, 44 (1955), p. 181.

(39) John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 1-3.

(40) Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 3

(41) See Alan Golding, 'Recent American Anthologies and the Idea of the "Mainstream"', in Poetry and Contemporary Culture: The Question of Value, ed. by Andrew Michael Roberts and Jonathan Allison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 127.

(42) Charles Bernstein, quoted by Paul Breslin, 'The Sign of Democracy and the Terms of Poetry', in Roberts and Allison, Poetry and Contemporary Culture, pp. 175-76.

(43) Brown, In the Chair, p. 117.

(44) Breslin, 'The Sign of Democracy', p. 177.

EDNA LONGLEY

Queen's University Belfast