Belfast as a literary subject is absent from the key texts of Irish modernism written in the early twentieth century, when Belfast was a major industrial city renowned for its shipbuilding. This chapter examines works by the few writers who wrote of the industrial city with its numerous working class that had built the Titanic: Richard Rowley, Sean O’Faolain, and Louis MacNeice, the latter two of whom excoriated the city. Even Joyce, who understood that Dublin was a quintessential modern city in Ulysses, ignored the city to its north, while Samuel Beckett in his novel Murphy, a work focused on London (that sought to do for London what Joyce had done for Dublin), chose to deal with industrial modernity only in a satiric and dismissive fashion.

In 1979, ten years after the modern Irish ‘troubles’ broke out, Seamus Heaney included in his volume Field Work a poem entitled ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’. In so doing he was invoking an iconic figure, almost the only Irish poet who might be included among the soldier poets who died in the First World War and who made that conflict seem in cultural memory, a poet's war. In his poem Heaney ponders how it can seem an enigma in the late twentieth century, in the midst of a conflict between loyalism and Irish republicanism, that a nationalist Irishman should have been among the British soldiery who perished in the Great War, among whom, we remember, were such renowned war poets as Julian Grenfell, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. Heaney designates Ledwidge ‘our dead enigma’ and recalls his County Meath origins, the tender Georgian pastoralism of his verses, and quotes from a letter written by Ledwidge shortly before his death in action in France at the Battle of Passchendale, on 31 July 1917. In that letter the poet, serving in the King's uniform in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, had regretted that ‘party politics should ever divide our tents’ and hoped for a time when a new Ireland would ‘arise from her ashes in the ruins of Dublin, like the Phoenix, with one purpose, one aim and one ambition.

The annus mirabilis of literary Modernism was 1922, when Ulysses and The Waste Land were first published in two metropolitan centres, Paris and London. In Ireland, the year 1922 saw the founding of the Free State, a coincidence of chronology that ought to have stimulated more reflection than it has. For that moment when a national revolution achieved even a partial success represented an experiment in social and cultural expression just as the publication of those two works represented experiment in the artistic sphere. Each event, the founding of a post-imperial state, the publication of a novel which set in question the adequacy of realist fiction to the present moment and the issuing of the poem which sought to exploit a ‘mythical method’ the better to comprehend the ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy’ of ‘contemporary history’ were symptomatic occasions, signs of the times, manifestions of, and reactions to, the general crisis of post-war Europe.

Ulysses and The Waste Land are of course customarily entered in the roll-call of Modernist masterpieces even by those who suspect that Modernism is so capacious a term, so ‘completely lacking in positive content’, that it is ‘the emptiest of all cultural categories’. The Irish revolution and the foundation of the Free State have not, by contrast, been considered in the context of the international Modernism of the period, however accommodatingly conceived.

In ‘The Dead’, James Joyce's wonderfully composed short story, the musical world of turn-of-the-century Dublin is evoked with the author's characteristically exacting sense of social and cultural detail. Music is a principal topic of conversation at the Misses Morkans' annual Christmas soirée for their friends and pupils at the music school they run together, and it plays a crucial part in the meaning of the tale itself. As well it might in Edwardian Dublin, where a musical career was one of the few open to a respectable unmarried woman.

Gabriel Conroy, the Misses Morkans' nephew, is to give the after-­dinner speech at this culinary and musical feast at his aunts' rented home in Usher's Island. He judges that his audience would respond most enthusiastically not to a quotation from the ‘difficult’ Victorian poet Robert Browning, but to something they would recognise, ‘some quotation from Shakespeare or from the Melodies’. As a soi-disant intellectual, he fears that the culture of his aunts and their friends and pupils is essentially middle-brow and conventional. He knows that the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore are wholly familiar to them and vested with the same unexceptionable respectability that the Victorian and Edwardian middle classes, even in Ireland, curiously allowed the Bard of Avon.

Jorge Luis Borges in his remarkable meditation on Shakespeare's career entitled ‘Everything and Nothing’ strikingly begins: ‘There was no one in him.’ For the South American fabulist, Shakespeare was a man who from boyhood sensed an ‘emptiness’ that made his life a quest for a cure from the ‘ill’ of non-identity which so terribly afflicted him. For Borges, the bard's career as actor and playwright was a long demonstration ‘of simulating that he was someone’. Borges eloquently contends:

Borges has Shakespeare retire from the theatre to play a final role as a litigious, wealthy Stratford burgher, until, at the last, he stands before God. Shakespeare asks his creator, as one who has been so many men, to be allowed to be himself.

BECKETT AND STORY

The English writer E. M. Forster admitted of the novel as a form: ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ It is difficult to imagine many Irish novelists so regretting story as the basis of their craft. Indeed, the novelist and playwright Thomas Kilroy has perceptively observed that that chromosome of story, the anecdote, is in the DNA of the Irish fictional tradition from at least the end of the eighteenth century. He advises, with reference to Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800):

This is certainly a voice the reader can hear loud and clear in the novels of Samuel Beckett (1906–89), though subjected there to the kind of satiric deconstruction that the weight of so settled a tradition might require.

It is a commonplace of literary history to observe that what came to be known as the literary Modernism of the second two decades of the ­twentieth century was a reactive response to the disturbed, war-torn and revolutionary conditions of modernity itself. A familiar text can be cited to indicate how this association between a troubled period and radical aesthetic experiment was established even as the texts of high Modernism were appearing and receiving their earliest assessments. In T. S. Eliot's famous 1923 Dial review of Joyce's Ulysses, which had appeared in 1922, the same year that Eliot himself had published The Waste Land, the poet/critic argued that Joyce had employed a mythical method in his epic novel ‘as a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contem­porary civilization’. He had assumed, wrongly to my mind, that Joyce was reacting to the same conditions of post-war, post-revolutionary ennui and angst that he himself had so hauntingly evoked in The Waste Land in such sections as ‘The Burial of the Dead’, with its montage of déraciné central Europeans in the Hofgarten, or going south in the winter, its desolating love affair conducted to the strains of Wagnerian commentary and its underlying mythic allusiveness. Interestingly, for my purposes in this essay, Eliot in that review also suggests that this mythic method had been first employed by W. B. Yeats, thereby drawing the Irish poet for his own critical purposes (the justification of his own work) within the circle of literary experimentalists who were presumably reacting to the general crisis.

In 1935 MacNeice, in his essay ‘Poetry Today’, declared that ‘Whatever the “true function” of poetry is, there is something idolatrous or fetishistic about our pleasure in it.’ It was a daring admission in a decade when poetry was widely reckoned only admissible if it served some obviously ethical function. In contrast to the prevailing political puritanism of the period, MacNeice was unwilling to deny that poetry gives pleasure, and he knew that this fact to the puritan mind must seem a kind of idolatry, a worshipping of a false god, the making of a fetish of something insignificant and unworthy. However, for MacNeice the matter is, in the end, quite simple: ‘poetry qua poetry is an end and not a means; its relations to “life” are impossible to define; even when it is professedly “didactic”, “propagandist” or “satirical” the external purport is, ultimately, only a conventional property, a kind of perspective which many poets like to think of as essential’.

MacNeice in his twenties and early thirties, when he wrote his most searching essays on the role of poetry in such articles as the one quoted above, ‘Subject in Modern Poetry’ and in his book Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938) was well-equipped to resist all those who would have made poetry subject to ethics or even to political necessity. For as an Ulsterman, he well understood that the impulse of the puritan sensibility is to suspect art and the pleasure it affords.

Light plays a crucial part in the imaginative world of Derek Mahon's poetry. He is in fact a markedly visual poet, one who attends patiently, even contemplatively, to the look of things and especially to the way light falls on them. The opening stanza of ‘A Postcard from Berlin’ is entirely typical of a poet whose impressions of the world are refracted through an eye caught by the glimmer of light on water, the flash of sunlight through cloud, the bright glitter of the sea, the glistening of moonlight on rainwater:

Mahon seems fascinated by the idea of a landscape lit as if by some creative light that purifies everyday experience. So Aran in ‘Thinking of Inis Oir in Cambridge, Mass.’ is for him

And in ‘Aran’ the island is ‘unearthly still in its white weather’ (p. 31). He is moved too by the moment when light breaks in darkness, when shadow suddenly releases its hold on the mind.

Part of the legacy of James Joyce to subsequent Irish writers is the inexorable realism of his vision. In Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, there are passages of exacting social and psychological observation – Lenehan and Corley on the streets of Dublin seeking their human prey, Stephen appalled at adult passions released at a family Christmas meal, Bloom cooking kidneys at 7 Eccles Street – which supply object lessons for subsequent Irish writers as to the revelatory powers of fictional realism, its capacity to suggest the density and complexity of human consciousness in its material contexts. Joyce's realism, it is important to stress, is more than a matter of technique (his own work goes well beyond the limits of realist art); it is a matter of world-view. A materialism of a fundamental and unshakeable kind allows him to submit human subjectivity throughout his oeuvre to a searching but almost always compassionate inspection: nineteenth-century conceptions of character no longer obtrude their moral and complacently humanistic perspectives.

It was not until the 1960s that Irish writers began to lay full claim to the inheritance of Joycean realism. Until then the harsh facts of Irish censorship had deformed the development of modern Irish fiction. This meant that even those writers like Seán O'Faoláin, Frank O'Connor, Kate O'Brien and Mary Lavin, who had sought to chronicle in their work the emergence of the new social order in a fiction which drew on the realist tradition, found themselves inhibited by the prevailing puritanical ethos or cut off from their natural audience by legal interdiction.

Pope Leo XIII published his poem Ars Photographica in 1867, recognising a new era when the light of the sun would allow marvels of realistic representation far beyond anything the pencil had hitherto achieved. Ironically, the future Holy Father chose to celebrate this augury of a new age in one of the languages of the ancients. But in English his poem might run:

It was Apelles, the fourth-century Greek painter, whose artful grapes were so realistic that the birds are reputed to have pecked them. Photography, it is implied, will perform even greater mimetic miracles in the future. And the light of the sun is the source of this new art.

This poem is the only item of ecclesiastical history which the mock-synod conducted around a Mr Kernan's bed in Joyce's ‘Grace’ in Dubliners in fact manages to get right. All other matter in this catechetic class conducted for the benefit of the unfortunate Mr Kernan is a litany of what Hugh Kenner has been pleased to identify as Irish fact, in which prejudice and half-remembered detail achieve the condition of myth­ology. Why Joyce should have allowed Martin Cunningham in the story to remember the detail of the Papal poem aright is something scholarship has ignored.

For Louis MacNeice, as for so many, 1939 was a year of journeyings. Hitler's invasion of the Sudetenland and the feeble response of the international community, as well as the involvement of the great powers in the Spanish Civil War and the horrors of Kristalnacht, had alerted the world to the imminence of a major conflagration in Europe. So last holidays abroad were enjoyed before once again the lights would go out all over the Con­tinent, and hurried exiles were arranged as individuals and families sought sanctuary in regions and countries which might escape the nightmare to come. Urgent messages were carried from country to country in the hope that the disaster might be averted. It was, in Cyril Connolly's words, ‘Closing time in the gardens of the west’. For many writers, accustomed to easy travel in a decade in which air as well as railway transport had made the crossing of international borders a natural thing, the prospect of being unable to enjoy such freedom was a fact which began to concentrate their minds in precise ways. Ezra Pound travelled in 1939 to his native United States in a vain attempt to influence governmental economic policy but chose to return to Italy to the tragic fate which awaited him there. Francis Stuart would wait a year before, in 1940, his dark angel would take him to Berlin and a complicity with the regime there that none of his subsequent writings nor the special pleadings of his apologists have quite been able to expunge.

Michael Longley's forty-year career as a poet has represented a complex engagement (in which his awareness of English poetic modes has played a vital part) with the Irish poetic tradition. His work has in fact illuminated, extended and in crucial respects helped to redefine that tradition in quiet, subtle, unforced but intriguing ways.

To begin with, in his oeuvre lines of association with other Irish poets can be detected that have made his writing life a distinctive yet deeply rooted contribution to late twentieth-century Irish poetry. This essay will initially seek to trace those threads as they wind through Longley's poetry, his prose writings and the interviews he has given over the course of the years. It will then reflect on the way Longley has made English modes amenable to Irish experience in ways that extend the possibilities of the Irish poetic tradition.

A feature of Longley's earliest enthusiasms as a poet was an exuberant eclecticism. As he emerged as promising poet at Trinity College, Dublin, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after a period of literary inhibition at his Belfast grammar school (Royal Belfast Academical Institution) valued Rugby and getting-on in the Belfast way of the period), he read voraciously. He took the English tradition and contemporary verse as a whole as his proper field of engagement. In this he was aided and abetted by a well-informed companion who took him ‘with joy’ on an exciting voyage of discovery, a wide-ranging, engagingly unscheduled, poetic grand tour.

In the second volume of The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), edited by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary, the critic Colin Graham wrote as follows of a study of the poet Louis MacNeice that I published in Dublin in the mid-1970s: