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This chapter compares and contrasts Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger with Austin Clarke’s Night and Morning. It explores the manner in which Kavanagh vandalizes stereotypes of rural Ireland and pastoral poetry, and focuses on central paradoxes of the poem. It argues that The Great Hunger is a savage indictment of a certain form of Romanticism, but is also deeply in thrall to it. It then moves to consider the poem as a highly sophisticated play upon multiple perspectives and tropes, arguing that this ironic sophistication constitutes the crux of its significance. The chapter then discusses the early ‘Irish mode’ of Austin Clarke, and examines Samuel Beckett’s critique of it. Similar to Kavanagh’s, Clarke’s poetry is found to be in thrall to that which it purportedly attacks — in this case, a form of conservative nationalism. A further discussion examines how such figurative similarities between the two poets create sharp differentiations in terms of style and political tenor.

This chapter proposes that one of the ways in which Caribbean Classics has been liberated from the colonial curriculum is through the rejection of the idea of a continuous transmission of empire from Rome's empire to the British Empire. Starting with Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe (2002), the chapter traces variations on this theme in V. S. Naipaul (The Mimic Men (1967), and A Bend in the River (1979) ), and the poetry of Derek Walcott. These writers each play with the misquotation and mistranslation of Latin in modern Caribbean literature in order to expose gaps and elisions in British colonial appropriations of Classics. It transpires that the misquotation of Latin in these texts is not a simple matter. Particularly in Clarke and Naipaul, misquotation shows up a miscarriage in the process of translation and, correspondingly, a miscarriage in the succession of empire. If the classical texts quoted in colonial contexts mean something else, or are misquoted, then the narrative of imperial continuity (the translatio studii et imperii) loses cogency.

This chapter looks at the group of authors and artists that contributed to and worked for The Bell. It exposes the relationships between O’Faoláin and O’Donnell to Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Austin Clarke. It also accounts for the bizarre ménage that existed between the Poetry Editor of The Bell, his wife, the painter Nora McGuinness and the established author Robert Graves and his mistress, the poet, Laura Riding. This scandal rocked literary England and had reverberations in Ireland and for The Bell. This chapter also discusses censorship in Ireland and places it in its proper international context; it does so by addressing O’Faoláin’s attitude to censorship and by complicating the traditional picture of him as a leading voice of secular liberalism against and oppressive state censorship.

This chapter turns to Canada – long an important migration destination from the Caribbean–as an overlooked site of postwar literary production. Employing the example of the Barbadian-born Austin Clarke, an author firmly canonized and even celebrated in Canada, it explores the generative links Clarke’s own career exemplifies between the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Britain–a multifaceted transnationalism in conversation with his Windrush peers but equally influenced by the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and racial politics in Canada. Employing theories of the Black Atlantic and diaspora, the chapter holds Clarke up as an exemplar of literary and political processes that resist containment within an anti-colonial national frame by gesturing outwards, toward a differentially rooted (and routed), insistently global politics of blackness.

This chapter refers to the archived correspondence between Austin Clarke and Sam Selvon in order to consider how the private and public relationships maintained by writers of the Caribbean diaspora complicate the paradigms that typically organize the production and reception of their work. Using a Bourdieusian methodology that takes into account the power relations within which archived documents operate, this chapter reads these letters as offering insight into the habitus of Clarke and Selvon as well as the different types of capital available to them. These authors strategically respond to factors like the mediating role of institutional or state sponsorship in defining themselves and their writing within the field of cultural production. The social, commercial, and epistemological relationships traced suggest the need to be wary of arranging Caribbean immigrant writers’ subjectivities in ways that ignore the complexities of their transnational positioning.

Hewitt’s interest in regionalism as a possible solution to Ulster’s internal and external problems is explored. The influence of Estyn Evans, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford is assessed. Varieties of religious curiosity brought the poet and his wife occasionally to Catholic Mass in Cushendall and to Unitarian services in Belfast. Scottish influences (notably Hugh MacDiarmid) also affect him. Roberta Hewitt’s capabilities and her unsteady self-confidence are examined in some detail. Hewitt attended the re-interment of W. B. Yeats in Sligo, where he once again met Austin Clarke. Back in Belfast, the attentions of a young woman flatter him, and exasperate Roberta. Through Chapter 5, the ardours and pleasures of weekend rural living intertwine with the development of regionalist ideas and numerous poems.