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Patrick Kavanagh and Austin Clarke In a Metaphysical Land

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

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 ... More

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.Less

Sensational Stalwarts: Irish Victorian Novelists in Mid‐Century

James H. Murphy

in Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age

J. S. LeFanu was a leading member of the novelists of sensation in the 1860s, who included Charlotte Riddell and Frances Browne. Irish writers wrote other sorts of novels, too, sometimes in ... More

J. S. LeFanu was a leading member of the novelists of sensation in the 1860s, who included Charlotte Riddell and Frances Browne. Irish writers wrote other sorts of novels, too, sometimes in derivative relationship with English writers: Julia Kavanagh's work both influenced and was influenced by that of Charlotte Brontë . Many Irish novelists proved themselves to be prolific stalwarts of the British publishing market in the mid- and late Victorian periods. Among them were Annie French (Mrs Alexander), Mrs Cashel Hoey, May Crommelin, and Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. These Irish writers rarely wrote about Ireland. Ironically, the Irish were appearing in major English novels at the time in the form of immigrants in Britain, particularly in the condition-of-England or industrial novels of Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Gaskell, where they feature as the feared other. With the possible exception of Mary Anne Sadlier, Irish American novelists, who mostly had their own agenda for Irish Catholic immigrants into the United States, made little impact on Ireland.Less

Sex and the country: the rural Bildungsromane of Maura Laverty and Patrick Kavanagh

Michael G. Cronin

in Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland

This chapter focuses on the works of Maura Laverty and Patrick Kavanagh. It first analyses Kavanagh' two versions of the Bildungsroman: his autobiography The Green Fool (1938) and his novel Tarry ... More

This chapter focuses on the works of Maura Laverty and Patrick Kavanagh. It first analyses Kavanagh' two versions of the Bildungsroman: his autobiography The Green Fool (1938) and his novel Tarry Flynn (1948). It then compares his works with Maura Laverty, whose works depict sexuality, rural life and Irish underdevelopment. The chapter argues that Laverty's and Kavanagh's youth narratives and their visions of rural Ireland were important innovations in the history of the Irish Bildungsroman.Less

The mart of ideas: O’Faoláin and literature

Niall Carson

in Rebel by vocation: Seán O'Faoláin and the generation of The Bell

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 ... More

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.Less

Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation

Frank Shovlin

in Touchstones: John Mcgahern's Classical Style

This chapter examines McGahern’s interest in, and sometimes reverence for, Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry. It shows how the two writers briefly overlapped in the Dublin literary pub scene of the late ... More

This chapter examines McGahern’s interest in, and sometimes reverence for, Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry. It shows how the two writers briefly overlapped in the Dublin literary pub scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s and how this scene was not to McGahern’s taste. That bohemianism was transferred to London via the literary journal X and its editors Patrick Swift and David Wright from 1959-61 – a quarterly that was the first to publish McGahern. It then goes on to show how poems like ‘The Great Hunger’, ‘Kerr’s Ass’ and ‘Innocence’ are used by McGahern as touchstones in writing books such as The Dark and Memoir.Less

Longfellow and the Volume of the World

Leslie Elizabeth Eckel

in Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World

Accused of parading as ‘a Dandy in the clean and elegantly ornamented streets and trim gardens of his verse,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew the ire of literary nationalist peers who insisted that ... More

Accused of parading as ‘a Dandy in the clean and elegantly ornamented streets and trim gardens of his verse,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew the ire of literary nationalist peers who insisted that his reverence for Old World tradition stifled American creativity. As a professor of European languages and literatures, however, a surprisingly radical Longfellow fought to give Americans access to a cosmopolitan education in open lectures, anthologies, and translations. In his reading of Dante and Goethe, he searched for universal elements of literature, which he invoked to counteract nativist claims made by the Young Americans, whom he satirized as jingoists in his novel Kavanagh (1849). In his narrative poem Evangeline (1847), Longfellow puts his theory of literary universalism into practice as he shapes an American landscape ruled by emotion, not territorial conquest.Less

Ersatz Exiles

in London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity

This chapter focuses on the predominantly male world of the Irish literati in London. It argues that Irish writers, having not found quite what they had expected in the city, created an exilic and ... More

This chapter focuses on the predominantly male world of the Irish literati in London. It argues that Irish writers, having not found quite what they had expected in the city, created an exilic and satirical London Irish version of the bohemian lifestyle they had left behind in Dublin. By way of contextualization, the chapter begins by examining how this particular form of narrative diaspora space can be traced to two iconic members of this literary circle – Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh – both of whom spent considerable periods of time in London. First, it explains how both Behan and Kavanagh exploited a long-established trope of the stage Irishman to further their careers. The chapter then goes on to discuss how ‘the exiled Irish writer in London’ is satirized in two novels: The Life of Riley (1964) by Anthony Cronin and Schnitzer O'Shea (1985) by Donall Mac Amhlaigh. By creating mock-autobiographical subjects in their novels, Cronin and Mac Amhlaigh display a shrewd awareness of the porous borders between fact and fiction in the construction of literary identities, exacting considerable comic purchase in the process.Less

Fuzzy Connections: Classical Texts and Modern Poetry in English

Lorna Hardwick

in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern

This chapter explores the question of how the modern poet comes to connect with the ancient text or image in the first place, how he or she perceives its potential and what are the poetic ... More

This chapter explores the question of how the modern poet comes to connect with the ancient text or image in the first place, how he or she perceives its potential and what are the poetic circumstances in which new meaning accrues to it. It also looks at how the modern poet communicates these processes to the reader, who is also only rarely a classical philologist or an expert in reception. It examines the works of modern Irish poets: Patrick Kavanagh, whose poems demonstrate the way in which he seized on classical images and texts as part of his struggle to emancipate himself from the patronizing stereotype of the self-educated peasant farmer; and Michael Longley, a confidently and unashamedly learned poet who places himself on an equal footing with the Roman writers.Less

Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics

Cillian O’Hogan

in Virgil and his Translators

Irish versions of the Eclogues and Georgics serve as another salient example of how culture and nationhood define themselves through Virgil. This chapter explores how Virgil has provided a way of ... More

Irish versions of the Eclogues and Georgics serve as another salient example of how culture and nationhood define themselves through Virgil. This chapter explores how Virgil has provided a way of navigating Irish identity and looks at the language choices in Irish translations that lead away from British classically infused literature and towards an alternative classical tradition. In particular, by examining Seamus Heaney’s translation of Eclogue 9 and Peter Fallon’s translation of the Georgics, O’Hogan argues that both provide two aspects of Virgilian ‘repossession’: poets relocate Virgilian poems into familiar Irish landscapes replete with grim realities of rural life; and they make use of Hiberno-English, the everyday version of English used in Ireland.Less

Heaney and Hesiod

Rowena Fowler

in Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses

Heaney acknowledges an affinity with the farmer-poet, the source of a literary tradition which is inspired but rooted: rural and provincial rather than courtly, urban, or cosmopolitan. Distinguishing ... More

Heaney acknowledges an affinity with the farmer-poet, the source of a literary tradition which is inspired but rooted: rural and provincial rather than courtly, urban, or cosmopolitan. Distinguishing between ‘rural’ and ‘pastoral’, he draws connections between Hesiod and Kavanagh, Burns and Clare, poets who influenced and authenticated his own style. I explore the relation of poetic vocation to agricultural labour, discussing the encounter with the Muses in the Theogony and the Works and Days and its resonances in Heaney’s writing from the early ‘Personal Helicon’ to Human Chain. Heaney (like Hesiod) returns most often to the ‘expert’ art of the ploughman; I show how the shape and achievement of the ploughed field mirror those of the poem. I conclude with Heaney’s recognition of Hesiod in the ‘Sonnets from Hellas’.Less