This exploration of poetry and place in Northern Ireland is chiefly concerned with the poetry written since the 1960s. Following on from the introductory first chapter which sets the scene, Chapter 2 focuses on precursor poets, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. While this triumvirate seemed a natural starting-point, these poets of course pick up rather than originate the debate about poetry and place which is as old as Irish poetry itself. Kavanagh is included even though he hails from outside Northern Ireland (but from within one of the historic nine counties of Ulster – Co. Monaghan), because of the profound and pervasive influence which he has exerted on the poets from the six-county Northern Ireland who came after him, from Seamus Heaney to Sinéad Morrissey. There is no conventional ‘Conclusion’ to the book, a deliberate decision taken in the hope of keeping the idea of an open-ended process in play.

Two chapters in this book revise and expand three essays which have appeared previously. A version of ‘John Montague: Global Regionalist?’ appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, 35, 1 (2006), and is here expanded to give more detailed discussion of the nature and extent of the American influence on Montague's writing (of) home. Parts of the chapter on Heaney and Muldoon were published earlier in a collection of essays on the work of Paul Muldoon which I edited, Paul Muldoon. Poetry, Prose, Drama.

Padraic Fiacc (real name Patrick Joseph O'Connor) was born in 1924 on the Lower Falls in Belfast. The family moved to East Street in Belfast's Markets area, where he spent his first five years. He grew up in two cities, Belfast and New York. His father was involved in the IRA during the sectarian violence of the late 1920s and had to flee to New York. Reluctantly, his wife, accompanied by her two young sons, joined him a few years later in 1929, at the onset of the Depression. When the father's grocery business went bankrupt, the family had to move to the Hell's Kitchen ghetto, a veritable melting pot of nationalities – Irish, Italians, Latin Americans, Jews, Russians and Germans. Here the sensitive young poet was early introduced to the brutalising urban realities of crime, violence, drug abuse and other social problems. ‘Standing Water (A Rag)’ describes the transatlantic journey:

America stirs none of the usual immigrant feelings of excitement about fresh new starts and hopeful futures, only a deadly sense of oppression (‘A yellow wolf cold/ Sits on the leaden Atlantic’ RP 89), and apprehension (‘The Russian Orthodox priest who/ Has a beard, is the Bogey Man/ Will put me in his bag/ Is “America” the Bury Hole he'll/ Put me in if I cry?’ RP 89).

Heaney and Longley: Nativism and Naturalism

In Heaney's poetry, nature, childhood and the collective past are powerfully fused. His ‘sense of place’ stems from ideas of belonging to and dwelling in ‘one dear perpetual place’. The landscape inspires Heaney, not just because it is natural (in the ecological or universalist sense), but also because it is native. His early readings – and creative misreadings – of Wordsworth serve to clarify his own relationship with place and allow him to claim the English poet as a poetic fosterer. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous passage in The Prelude –

– Heaney elaborates an idea of poetry as archaeology, an exhumation not only of personal but collective memory:

Born in Brooklyn in 1929, shipped back at the age of four to Co. Tyrone where he was raised by his paternal aunts while his elder brothers stayed with their natural mother seven miles away, John Montague from an early age knew all about feelings of dispossession and exile. From his childhood Garvaghey home to boarding-school in Armagh, then to University College Dublin, then Yale, then to various American universities as poet and teacher, then three years in Paris as correspondent for the Irish Times, then back to Dublin in 1967, then sixteen years teaching in University College Cork interspersed with frequent visits to America and France, he continues to lead a mobile life, with bases in France, Cork and New York. Experience and outlook have combined, Montague claims, to make him the quintessentially modern Irish poet:

Reacting against both extremes of a closed regionalism (which he simplistically associates with Frost and Heaney) and a boundless globalism (as exemplified by Pound), Montague insists:

In the course of his essay, ‘Dwelling without Roots’, on the famously homeless and geographically displaced American poet Elizabeth Bishop, Tom Paulin makes clear his deep distrust of those views of place which see it as a constant, the source of authentic value and identity. For Paulin, ideas of home rooted in history, land, language, tribe, ancestry and race memory harbour a dangerous essentialism. Such ideas conjure up for him the figure of Martin Heidegger and Heidegger's image of the peasant cottage in the Black Forest that has long been dwelt in and embodies ‘the forces stemming from earth and blood’. In Paulin's view, Heidegger dwells on the apparently natural and traditional in order to naturalise a violent politics: ‘How easily Romantic ideas of authenticity, rootedness, traditional crafts, folklore, take on the stink of power politics and genocide’. Instead, Paulin feels drawn towards those poets such as Elizabeth Bishop who use their poems to ‘erect a makeshift building nowhere’ (M 191). This ‘rooted’-‘makeshift’ axis is used to structure his long poem ‘The Caravans on Luneberg Heath’. Here, Heidegger's idea of authentic dwelling is summarily dismissed: ‘Go chew acorns/ Mr Heidegger/ you went with the Nazis’.

Mahon's relationship with his home place is profoundly troubled and ambiguous. Uneasy with the Protestant culture from which he sprang, and without access to the racial landscape in which his fellow Northern Catholic poets could situate themselves, he epitomises the displaced Northern Protestant for whom ideas of community are highly problematic. Like MacNeice, he is the existential outsider, more familiar with feelings of alienation than those of belonging. Without a community to which he can feel he belongs, he is drawn to romantic outsiders, bohemians, the forgotten and neglected. Thus, he celebrates De Quincey, Edward Dowson, Marilyn Monroe, the forger, the frightened birds in ‘Four Walks’, the gypsies who are indifferent to national boundaries and the conventional social code. And there are in his own family individuals such as ‘Grandfather’ and ‘My Wicked Uncle’ who represent a kind of outlawry with which he identifies. Rather than taking his bearings from a specifically Irish poetic tradition, he draws from a diffuse array of Irish, British, American and European models. His migrant cosmopolitanism is the antithesis of Heaney's rootedness. Where Heaney's landscapes are lushly rural, Mahon's are bleak, post-apocalyptic wildernesses or frozen Antarctic wastes offering little imaginative nourishment or spiritual solace. The mythic West is unable to provide the spiritual home it does for MacNeice or Longley; the natural world is as likely to confirm his alienation as enchant him with its beauty.

For a number of younger Irish poets, notably Paul Muldoon, Heaney has been the ‘strong precursor’ in whose shadow they have visibly struggled to clear their own poetic space and assert their own sense of autonomy and priority. The ‘belated’ poets' anxiety of influence and determination to define themselves against the example of the father-poet have undeniably led to the opening up of exciting new directions in Irish poetry. For Heaney, embedded in a traditional rural culture and a Catholic nationalist metaphysics, and influenced by the example of fellow Ulster poets, Kavanagh and Hewitt, culture and identity are immanent in place, and dislocation is the source of a profound anxiety. Heaney's poetry is driven by the Romantic search for a culture organically rooted in an authentic landscape. Having learnt from Kavanagh the social and artistic validity of the parochial and the peripheral, Heaney restores to the poetry of place the sense of myth and history, the element of cultural and political celebration and critique that are absent from Kavanagh's work. Stimulated by Hewitt's Protestant Planter version of Ulster rootedness, Heaney develops his own answering Catholic Gaelic myth of continuity grounded in the transcendental reality of place. Recuperating the impulses of the revival, which presupposed some intact inheritance from the past, he strives to affirm continuity and stability against the dominant perceptions of a sceptical, secular modernity.

The ‘Northern Renaissance’ – that journalistically touted efflorescence of creative talent and activity that corresponded more or less with the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969 – began with those poets born in the late 1920s and '30s who came to prominence in the early years of the Troubles (Montague, Heaney, Mahon, Longley). They were succeeded by a second generation born in the 1940s and 1950s who have also secured international reputations (Muldoon, Carson, McGuckian). Now we have a third wave, young poets born in the 1960s and '70s who grew up during the Troubles and who made their mark in the 1990s or early 2000s and are continuing to do so – Peter McDonald, Sinéad Morrissey, Alan Gillis, Leontia Flynn. While these new young poets may not represent anything as clear-cut as a definite break with the older generations, new directions and emphases may nevertheless be discerned in their work. Received identities and concepts of home continue to be interrogated as these new young poets seek out the fault-lines in familiar terrain, question the official maps, cross borders, break up consecrated ground, take roads less travelled by. Frequently, the desire to belong is in open conflict with the urge to flight. Attention is no longer focused on ‘one dear perpetual place’, but on multiple other places. Traversing internal, national and international frontiers, the younger poets are most at home occupying in-between places or inner spaces, zones between dream and reality, this world and the otherworld.

Heaney's statement in his essay ‘The Sense of Place’ that it is to ‘the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity’ suggests a basic opposition: the land as timeless constant, the image of the past, the place of traditional ways, of all that is human and natural, the organic society; and the city as flux and change, the engine of progress and modernisation, the route to the future. Referring to the city, Raymond Williams draws attention to how ‘within the new kind of open, complex and mobile society, small groups in any form of divergence or dissent could find some kind of foothold, in ways that would not have been possible if the artists and thinkers composing them had been scattered in more traditional, closed societies’. City-life complicates traditional monolithic nationalisms, whether Irish or unionist, because it gives a foothold to other forms of struggle – class or gender, for example – which cut across the traditional divisions and oppositions. Drawn to the ‘stable element’, Heaney, we can agree with Eamonn Hughes, has difficulty engaging directly with the metropolis, for what is notable about Heaney's treatment of the city is his tendency to mythologise or allegorise it, as seen from the iconic portraiture of the early ‘Docker’ to the construction of Belfast as the city of plague in ‘A Northern Hoard’ in Wintering Out (1972). Through a series of hallucinatory images, Belfast is pictured as a diseased and blood-soaked city, ‘Out there … / Where the fault is opening again’.

The Postmodern

Medbh McGuckian has devoted her entire career not only to re-imagining women's relation to the female body, to the domestic environment, and to the wider world of society, politics, religion and culture, but to re-constituting the very basis of female subjectivity and self-expression. She explains the demoralising state of affairs that prompts such a revolutionary enterprise:

McGuckian's confession of feelings of comprehensive lack – an ironic revision of the ‘hierarchy of values’ that Hewitt delineated in his attempt at an assertion of confident (male) Protestant identity – may be understood in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms. According to Lacan, and also to psychoanalytic French feminist thought, personal, social and cultural identity is acquired within a network of social and symbolic discourses organised in and through language.

Space and place are crucial regulators of our being in the world. G eographically, place is differentiated from space: space is abstract, featureless, indefinite; place is lived space, and carries connotations of familiarity, stability, attachment, nostalgia and homeliness. Place is, first of all, constructed materially, through processes of interconnection and interdependence. However, the meaning of place is an imaginative project involving the production of images and the creation of identities which epitomise the culture of a particular place. Place has always figured importantly in the work of Irish writers – Yeats's and Lady G regory's Co. Galway, J.M. Synge's Aran Islands, Patrick Kavanagh's Co. Monaghan, John Hewitt's Glens of Antrim, Seamus Heaney's Co. Derry, John Montague's Co. Tyrone, Michael Longley's Co. Mayo – and the writers, in turn, have contributed powerfully to the mystique of particular landscape traditions. In Ireland, place, culture and identity are closely interconnected concepts. Cultural identity has often been interpreted as bound up with place, whether through notions of local culture (the parish or region, for example) or through the more abstract constructions of national identity, which often invoke a supporting imagery drawn from a particular landscape (the west of Ireland as a source of true ‘Irishness’). In the literature of place, then, we might expect to find an account of the individual's relationship with a particular place, its landscape, history, culture and people. We might also expect such literature to provide a communal set of images to help a group towards ideological self-representation and foster a sense of social integration and identity.

John Hewitt seems a natural starting-point in that nearly all subsequent Ulster poets have looked up to him as a moral exemplar and pioneering figure, the ‘daddy of us all’, even if they developed a completely different poetics and aesthetic. Hewitt picks up the perennial debate about poetry and place from a distinctively Protestant, Planter point of view:

In these, the opening sentences of his essay, ‘No Rootless Colonist’ (1972), Hewitt speaks for many Ulster Protestants who, aware of Britain's ambivalence towards Northern Ireland, do not feel securely British, and who, perceiving the Gaelic and Catholic emphasis of cultural nationalism in the South, also feel excluded from dominant images of Irishness. In contrast to the glamour of the romantic nationalist narrative espoused by Northern Catholics, the Ulster Protestant, it is often felt, hasn't much of a story to tell, reflective as it is of an historic siege mentality, and structured largely in negative, defensive terms, in contradistinction to the perceived threat of the Catholic, Gaelic Other, North and South. Given Northern nationalists' rejection of Britishness, and Protestant Unionists' lack of an adequate cultural identity, Hewitt turned to the possibilities of territory and landscape viewed as common ground shared by all sections of the community.

The political novel before 1969

For the Irish novelist, the usual concerns of the English novel - personal morality and relationships - have tended to be subordinated to the more pressing issues of race, religion and nationality. The early Irish novelists, Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), attempted a reconciliation between Ireland's two nations, Edgeworth through social reform and political unionism, Owenson through Ascendancy commitment to a romantic nationalist movement which, in literature, would culminate in the work of W. B. Yeats. The big house theme inaugurated by Edgeworth and Owenson (see chapter 3 above) has continued to fascinate novelists to the present day, as Jennifer Johnston's The Captains and the Kings (1972), The Gates (1973), How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974) and The Old Jest (1979) would indicate. These novels, written at the height of the Northern Troubles, offer an oblique perspective on the conflict, and the setting of the novels in the past, in the south, suggests flight from the intractable reality of contemporary Northern Protestant unionism/loyalism in 1970s Ulster.