The global reputation of the Irish poetry world can be attributed to many things including, at the risk of sounding too uncritical, its great variety and quality. The sociology and politics of the reception of Irish poetry, particularly in the United States, has been the subject of various levels of critical speculation. Critics have mapped the influences of the literatures of many nations on a range of contemporary Irish poets. This chapter will explore the ways some contemporary Irish poets have reached beyond Ireland to imagine and define their poetic practice. Irish poets have been greatly interested in the achievements of American, Eastern European, French and Greek poets, from Dickinson, Whitman, Williams, Frost and Lowell to Herbert, Milosz and Mandelstam, to Nerval, Cavafy and Seferis. The hold these writers and others have for a number of contemporary Irish poets - Boland, Heaney, Mahon, Kinsella, Muldoon - springs from a desire to establish human identity out of the tensions, debates and violence about national traditions and national identity.

Introduction: the position of Irish in contemporary Irish poetry

Irish literature has historically possessed what Thomas Kinsella calls a 'dual tradition', and continues to be written in the country's majority and minority languages, English and Irish, respectively. As the two languages keep up what Kinsella terms their 'dynamic interaction', many Irish readers have increasingly turned at least one of their two ears to Irish language literature, in the original, in translation, and via critiques that take into account both languages for a more comprehensive representation and understanding of Ireland's art and eras. Therefore, whereas in some quarters a narrow, monoglot view of Ireland's poetry still exists, recent critical studies of contemporary work recognise the need to account for the polyphony of voices which make up what Sean O Riordain called the 'fuaim na habhann' / riversound of the living stream of Irish writing.

Derek Mahon and Michael Longley have been publishing verse since the mid- 1960s. Both born in Belfast (Longley in 1939, Mahon in 1941), educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (or 'Inst', as it is known) and at Trinity College, Dublin (where Longley read classics and Mahon French, English and philosophy), they emerged as poets in a period marked both by a remarkable growth in artistic and literary activity in a province long regarded as inimical to the arts, and by the stirring of political energies in Northern Ireland that inaugurated decades of violence and radical change. Their careers as poets display similarities and differences as they have responded to lives lived in a period when the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom has been in constant question. Michael Longley has lived in Belfast since the 1960s, spending summers in Co Mayo. In the same period Mahon has lived in London, Dublin and New York with sojourns in France and Italy, having spent only a brief period in Belfast after graduation. The historical and personal experience with which their work engages, however, is certainly related (whatever their differing career trajectories) to the political crisis of a period in which the relationship between Britain and Ireland has been profoundly affected by the Northern Irish problem. How they both relate imaginatively to the North, to Ireland and the rest of the world in such a period, when violence was endemic, takes the critic to central aspects of their work.

In an Irish context it may not be possible to imagine poetry in relation to the 'body' of the 'nation' without evoking the still-existent border to which Medbh McGuckian starkly alludes, a political and historical fact that divides 'Ireland' into two states and at least two bodies politic. Neither is it possible, despite the growing popularity of these three women poets, to imagine the term 'Irish poet' without picturing the foregrounded and masculine body emerging from the landscape which Eilean Ni Chuilleanain challenges. Bringing together both implications, the phrase 'body of the nation' implicitly recalls the nationalist literary text to which Eavan Boland, probably Ireland's most influential feminist, alludes in her essay 'Subject Matters', The Spirit of the Nation.Concerning these 'sixpenny booklet' anthologies of nationalist ballads compiled by The Nation newspaper from 1843, Boland writes: 'in its pages the public poem and the political poem were confused at the very moment when the national tradition was making a claim on Irish poetry which would colour its themes and purposes for a century'.

The poetry of dissent, indeed the dissenting position in literature as a whole, has a long and distinguished tradition in Ireland. For reasons of political and personal sensitivity, writers have found themselves in, and often cultivated, a marginalised, observing status. The presence of aesthetic and political tensions can be linked closely to Ireland's continuing absorption of differing influences and experiences: these can both conflict with and build upon existing ideas of tradition and continuity. The adversarial position adopted by Irish writers earlier in this century focused on oppositional relations such as those between Ireland and England or between individual freedoms and the Catholic norms of the evolving state. Now violence, materialism and social exclusion have become the focus of attention and with these forms comes a complex matrix of affects neither easy to define nor to address. The poets dealt with in this chapter - Brendan Kennelly, Paul Durcan, Rita Ann Higgins and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill - are aware of the tensions inherent in these issues and of the fact that they are never fully subject to artistic or personal control. Indeed it is this lack of control that heightens the risks taken by these poets to allow their voices to be heard. All four poets are widely read, in a culture where the critical attention to poetry still far exceeds popular readership, and all the poets use vibrant humorous language and frequent public performance to maintain the dissenting voice within contemporary Irish poetry.

According to Paul Muldoon, Irish writers experience an often disabling tension between the urge to express private concerns in their work and the compulsion to address identity politics, inherited atavisms and the legacy of sectarian strife. His comments restate the competing definitions of what Seamus Heaney terms 'the government of the tongue'. This is an obligation to 'concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality'. Yet it is also a liberating manifesto, allowing the poet to submit to 'the jurisdiction of achieved form', with poetry 'as its own vindicating force'. Heaney has consistently attempted to address these apparently conflictual imperatives. In Wintering Outand North,he engaged with what are euphemistically termed 'the Troubles' by advancing images of bodies drawn from the bogs at Tollund, Grauballe and Windeby as archaeological emblems of victimhood. This poetic reflex, whilst deep-felt and instinctive, was interpreted as providing decontextualised analogies (if not unintentional justifications) for the killings in Northern Ireland. Heaney had become, according to his fellow-poet Ciaran Carson, 'the laureate of violence - a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for “the situation”, in the last resort, a mystifier'.

In an uncollected poem of 1995, ʿMacNeiceʾs Londonʾ, Derek Mahon imagines Louis MacNeice in wartime, in ʿA bunker of civilised sound, / A BBC studioʾ:

These lines capture, in a brilliant miniature, much of the complexity of Louis MacNeiceʾs cultural and historical situations. While the adjectives here - ʿmeditativeʾ, ʿclassicʾ, ʿaloneʾ, ʿwell-bredʾ, ʿdryʾ - seem to map out the distinctive qualities of the poetʾs voice, that voice is also working as ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ while it speaks from the wartime BBC to the world. Mahonʾs final line-break allows the reader to sense the distance between the intimacy and solitude of the poet and the prepared voice of the public writer: as ʿthe voiceʾ turns into ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ, we feel a mild and complicating shock of something ʿoutside time and spaceʾ that suddenly locates itself in a specific moment and situation.

Defining postmodernism

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the concept of postmodernism, and the associated notion of postmodernity, became a principal focus of discussion in philosophy, cultural analysis, and social and political theory. The notion of ‘postmodernism’ had originally emerged in an aesthetic context, at least as long ago as the 1930s, but the term was only used sporadically until the boom in its scope and currency from the mid-1970s onwards. This popularisation began in the domain of architecture, where the adjective ‘postmodern’ was employed to characterise the rebellion against the technocratic functionalism of the ‘international style’ which was then under way (Jencks 1991 [1978]). But from here its use spread rapidly, first to describe new developments in literature, painting and other artistic media, and then to characterise a whole range of social and cultural developments which were assumed to represent a break with the defining practices and styles of thought of the modern era. Indeed, for some of its more enthusiastic proponents, the emergence of postmodernism signalled nothing less than the transition to a new historical epoch, beyond modernity.

This epochal significance of the postmodern was given an influential pioneering formulation by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his book, La condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition), first published in 1979. Part of the success of this work, which presented a series of provocative and fertile ideas rather than a carefully constructed argument, was due to the compactness with which Lyotard defined his key term. For Lyotard, the postmodern condition was characterised by the delegitimation of ‘grand narratives’, or ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’ (Lyotard 1984, pp. 37–41, xxiv). On his account, the grand schemata of historical progress and social development stemming from the Enlightenment, whether liberal or Marxist in inspiration, had finally lost all credibility.

There is a widely shared albeit arguably mistaken view that ‘ecological’ or ‘green’ political thought is of relatively recent vintage, being a product of the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s which saw the emergence of die Grünen in Germany and green parties in Britain and France, the publication of important environmental exposés and warnings, and symbolised by the first Earth Day in 1970. But modern green thought is older still, representing a confluence of several different streams of thought and sensibility. Some have detected the first stirrings of environmental concerns as early as the sixteenth century (Thomas 1984). Others trace the first glimmerings of a green sensibility to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic movement, with their acute appreciation of mountains, dark forests and wild nature. Others find the first stirrings of an ‘ecological’ perspective in the writings of the young Marx, with his vision of the symbiotic interdependence of man and nature (Parsons 1977). Or, more broadly, one might take note of the ecological emphases of German thinkers since the time of Goethe who, with his holistic, anti-reductionist view of nature, so greatly influenced not only German Romanticism but the biological sciences, as well as later German greens such as Rudolf Bahro and Petra Kelly. British environmental thinking was spurred by reactions to the industrial revolution, with its ‘dark satanic mills’ threatening to overtake the green countryside, and has also been greatly influenced by such Romantic nature-poets as William Wordsworth and by the naturalist Charles Darwin, amongst others whose thinking has influenced modern British greens.

Four points of clarification are needed about the theme of this chapter and the title itself. First, from a non-Western perspective the twentieth century could be said to begin in 1905 when Japan defeated Russia, an event that destroyed the widespread myth of European invincibility and was celebrated by millions from China to Peru, or in 1918 when the savagery of the First World War, or what non-Europeans call a European civil war, shook their lingering belief in the cultural superiority of Europe. From a non-Western perspective, the twentieth century has not yet ended and would only do so when their agenda of cultural and economic decolonisation is completed and full equality with the West is attained. Since the beginning and the end of the twentieth century are matters of historical judgement and hence contestable, I have taken the safer route of defining it in strictly chronological terms.

Second, the lives of non-Western political thinkers do not all fall neatly within the twentieth century. Some of them continued to live well into the twentieth century but published nothing or little of substance after 1900. I ignore such writers and concentrate on those who published most or at least some of their major works in the twentieth century and participated in its intellectual life.

The twentieth century witnessed the birth of the first global order the world has known. Few would dispute that the forces of imperialism and nationalism have played a major part in bringing this world into existence. The role played by political ideas about these concepts is more contentious, if only because there has seldom been agreement about what they mean, let alone their practical importance. It is the purpose of this chapter to suggest some of the ways in which ideas and events have interacted in the making and breaking of modern empires and nation states.

In outline, the story is quickly told. At the end of the nineteenth century the world was dominated by a few major powers, whose governments were engaged in territorial, economic and ideological expansion. In the United States and Russia, expansion involved consolidating their control of the North American and Eurasian continents respectively, without significant opposition, at least until the Russians were stopped in their tracks by Japan in 1904. Elsewhere, imperial competition brought the great powers to the verge of war, although in the end they drew back from the brink, most famously in the case of Africa, where the continent was divided at the 1884 Congress of Berlin, in the interests of preserving the balance of power and European peace. This phase of international history ended with the First World War. For the previous century, however, European energies were engaged in every corner of the globe, with little regard for the interests or cultural sensitivities of the local inhabitants.

In this concluding chapter I ask what story can be told about the overall framework of political thought across the twentieth century. I shall explore Hobsbawm’s suggestion, cited in the epigraph above, by applying it to politics and asking how political issues and conflicts over them were thought about in the course of the century. In particular, I shall focus on the idea, or metaphor, of political space as divided between left and right, examine its formal features, trace its history over the span of the last century and ask whether, and if so when and why, the old left–right maps and charts have lost their applicability.

A preliminary word should be said about Hobsbawm’s cartographic analogy. ‘Maps and charts’ do not, of course, relate to our singular and collective lives as geographical maps and nautical charts relate to landscapes and seas. They enter and partly shape such lives.We live and act by them: they partly constitute what they map and chart. Furthermore, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are classifications that are both cognitive and symbolic: they promise understanding by interpreting and simplifying the complexities of political life and they stimulate emotions, awaken collective memories and induce loyalties and enmities.

Throughout the twentieth century, the feminist movement has been made up of shifting and more or less closely connected groups, united by the conviction that women are unfairly disadvantaged by comparison with men. While this minimal consensus contributes to an understanding of feminism as an enduring position, it exists alongside great internal diversity. The normative conception of disadvantage around which consensus revolves stands in need of analysis and has in fact been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways, giving rise to a variety of feminisms, some of them with conflicting goals and theoretical commitments. Feminism is therefore internally complex, but the divisions within it can be traced to enduring disputes and differences.

One of these sources of conflict concerns the relation between theory and practice. During the first quarter of the century, feminism gained much of its identity from a series of political campaigns aimed at improving the lives of at least some women, and in many quarters it has continued to represent itself as a practical programme striving for social and political reform. Like any movement which challenges the status quo, it depends on a critical kind of theorising – on an ability to expose the limitations or inconsistencies of established principles in order to undermine the practices that flow from them. Within feminism, however, critical theorising of this sort has sometimes developed a degree of autonomy that has separated it from practical politics, and this in turn has led to divisions between feminists concerned with immediate political change, and those with more abstract philosophical interests (Barrett 1980, pp. 201–19; hooks 1984, pp. 17–31; Yeatman 1994, pp. 42–53). But although the balance between these two preoccupations varies, they are rarely completely disjoined.

The analysis of fascist political thought is a difficult task for several reasons. The political genus of fascism is itself poorly defined, and the conclusion has sometimes been advanced that fascism primarily represented a form of praxis, inherently non-ideological and without formal thought or programme. Moreover, as early as 1923 there developed a growing tendency to generalise beyond the initial Italian example and apply the term ‘fascism’ or ‘fascist’ to any form of rightwing authoritarian movement or system. More broadly yet, Soviet Stalinists began to apply the term, usually hyphenated with some additional adjective, to any and all rivals. By the 1930s fascist had sometimes become little more than a term of denigration applied to political foes, and this usage as a very broad and vague pejorative has continued to the present day.

A limited consensus has nonetheless emerged among some of the leading scholars in the study of fascism, who use the term to refer to a group of revolutionary nationalist movements in Europe between the two world wars, first in the cases of the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist parties and then in the cases of their clearest counterparts in other European countries. This limited consensus tends to agree that specific movements bearing all or nearly all of the same common characteristics did not exist prior to 1919 and have not appeared in significant form in areas outside Europe or in the period after 1945 (Griffin 1998, pp. 1–16).

New ways to comprehend and control politics have been prophesied for the last half-millennium. Machiavelli blazed a ‘new route’ to traverse Renaissance statecraft. Hobbes constructed a new ‘civil science’ to pacify the revolutionary 1640s. Hume anticipated the novelty of the Enlightenment enterprise ‘to reduce politics to a science’. Adams conjured a ‘divine science of politics’ to consecrate a constitutional order without precedent. Hamilton heralded the ‘vast improvements’ and ‘wholly new discoveries’ in ‘the science of politics’ for post-revolutionary republics. Tocqueville foresaw ‘a new political science … for a world itself quite new’. The pattern continues into the third millennium, marking more than a century since the academic discipline of political science emerged in the 1880s. A ‘new science of politics’ was anticipated in the 1920s and 1930s, and was followed by a ‘behavioural revolution’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The conceptions of science backing these anticipatory ‘new’ schemes varied considerably, as did the political contexts within which they developed and the political projects to which they contributed.

The twentieth-century chapter in the venerable new science of politics is best understood, in its political dimensions, as a species of democratic theory, marked by increasingly technical methods and a healthy dose of realism about power, propaganda and public opinion. It is less famous than those grand ‘isms’ that have dominated twentieth-century political thought. But it intersects them, especially modernism, positivism, liberalism, socialism and fascism.

The gradual extension of the suffrage to all adult men and ultimately women too during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the politics of Western Europe and North America. Many contemporary theorists attributed these reforms not to any improvement in ordinary people’s political judgement because of better education and higher living standards, nor to a progressive appreciation of the right of all adults to be considered full citizens, but to a new social and economic reality having made such measures unavoidable. Quite simply, within a mass society political power could only be exercised with mass support. In spite of the inevitability of a widened franchise, many theorists believed deep tensions existed between the concepts of the ‘mass’ and ‘democracy’, rendering a ‘mass democracy’ almost a contradiction in terms. For the ideas of the ‘masses’ and ‘mass society’ were embedded within accounts of social organisation and behaviour that challenged the models of individual agency and rationality traditionally associated with democratic decision-making. Consequently, even democratically minded thinkers found that a coherent conception of mass democracy required a radical rethinking of the norms and forms of the democratic process (Femia 2001). This chapter traces the development of the new sociological and psychological languages of mass politics and their deployment in the construction of a modern theory of democracy. As we shall see, though still widely accepted, this theory incorporates empirical and normative assumptions arising from contentious and anachronistic views of human nature and society few would wish to espouse today.

Although conservatism in the twentieth century has yielded a diverse body of literature, it is unified by a common object of hostility: namely, the progressive view of humankind and society. The main conservative objection to this view is that it vastly exaggerates the directive power of human reason, on the one hand, and the creative power of human will, on the other. Reason, as the British conservative Michael Oakeshott maintained, is always parasitic on tradition, which it can only ever ‘abridge’ (Oakeshott 1991 [1962]). So far as the relative impotence of human will is concerned, the American thinker John P. East strikes a characteristically conservative note when he writes (in the course of a sympathetic exposition of the thought of Leo Strauss) that: ‘man is not the Creator, he is the creature; he is not the potter, he is the clay. It is then man who adapts to creation, not creation to man – to propose the latter is to propose perverting the natural order of things’ (East 1988, p. 265).

This critique of rationalism and voluntarism is supported by the conviction that twentieth-century politics is dominated by a conception of human nature which mistakenly implies that humans are malleable and perhaps perfectible creatures of infinite possibilities. Such a view permits any existing social order to be portrayed as a system of oppression, regardless of the fact that a majority of its members may support it. If conservatives generally agree on what they reject, they are less united on what they support. Traditionally, they have favoured an organic theory of society, in which individual reason and will do not construct but are produced by the social order.