The Ulster renaissance: poetry in Belfast, 1962-1972 [Repr ed.] 9780199287314, 0199287317

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THE ULSTER RENAISSANCE

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The Ulster Renaissance Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 HEATHER CL ARK

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Heather Clark 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Clark, Heather L. The Ulster renaissance : poetry in Belfast, 1962–1972 / Heather L. Clark. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–928731–4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–928731–7 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. English poetry— Northern Ireland—Belfast—History and criticism. 3. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Belfast (Northern Ireland)—Intellectual life—20th century. 5. Ulster (Northern Ireland and Ireland)—In literature. 6. Belfast (Northern Ireland)—In literature. I. Title. PR8761C53 2006 821⬘.9140994167—dc22 2005036615 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–928731–7

978–0–19–928731–4

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For my parents, Mark and Cheryl Clark, with love

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Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank Professor Jon Stallworthy, Wolfson College, Oxford, who oversaw this project in its dissertation form. If this study is at all valuable, it is due in no small measure to Professor Stallworthy’s wise guidance and unfailing support. One could not ask for a more generous or conscientious supervisor. I would also like to thank Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, and Janice Simmons for answering my questions and for kindly allowing me to quote from unpublished letters and manuscripts held at the Special Collections Archive at Emory University, where Stephen Ennis, Kathy Shoemaker, Teresa Burk, and Gavin Drummond offered invaluable help. Others to whom I am grateful for assistance include Terence Brown, George Watson, Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Deane, Hugh Haughton, Tom Paulin, Louis Asekoff, Frank Ormsby, and, in particular, the late Philip Hobsbaum. In addition, I wish to thank Oxford University and Emory University for scholarships which allowed me to pursue research in Dublin and Atlanta; the Harvard Club of the United Kingdom for financial assistance while at Oxford; Lincoln College, Oxford, for providing an idyllic environment in which to live and work; my OUP readers for their helpful suggestions; Paul Gregg for opening his home to me in Dublin; my colleagues at Marlboro College, especially Laura D’Angelo, for their support; the librarians at Rice Library, Marlboro College, for research assistance; and Gavin and Kate Drummond for their hospitality in Atlanta. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my husband Nathan for editing several drafts of this book, as well as for his continual encouragement and love. I would like to thank The Random House Group Ltd. for permission to quote ‘Birthmarks’ from Poems 1963–1983 by Michael Longley, published by Secker & Warburg, 1991, and ‘To Derek Mahon’ and ‘No Continuing City’ from Selected Poems, by Michael Longley, published by Jonathan Cape, 1998. I am grateful to Faber and Faber Ltd. for permission to quote the following poems by Seamus Heaney: ‘The Ministry of Fear’ (North, 1975); ‘The Peninsula’ (Door into the Dark, 1969); ‘Lovers on Aran’ (Death of a Naturalist, 1966); and ‘Bye-Child’ (Wintering Out, 1972). Thanks also to Roisin McAuley and Zinzan Productions for

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allowing me to quote from ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, 31: 1 (Mar. 2002) and Eire-Ireland, 38: 1–2 (Summer 2003). H.C. Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2005

Contents List of Illustrations

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Introduction

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1. Beginnings

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2. The Belfast Group

43

3. Renaissance

72

4. ‘Genuine Accents’

104

5. ‘MacSimmittoon’

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6. Separate Selves

173

Bibliography Index

208 233

List of Illustrations 1. Derek Mahon in the 1960s. Courtesy of Special Collections Archive, Emory University. 2. 1965 Eric Gregory Award publicity photograph of Derek Mahon (left) and Michael Longley, Northern Review, 1965. 3. Advertisement for the ‘New Irish Poetry’, Northern Review, 1965. 4. Cover of the Room to Rhyme Programme, 1968. Courtesy of Special Collections Archive, Emory University. 5. Promotional photo for the Room to Rhyme Poetry Tour, 1968. From left to right, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and David Hammond. Courtesy of Special Collections Archive, Emory University. 6. Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley. Courtesy of Claire McNamee. 7. James Simmons at the Robert Frost Museum, Franconia, New Hampshire, 1984. Courtesy of Vincent McGroary. 8. Edna Longley in Belfast. Courtesy of Special Collections Archive, Emory University.

30 78 79 82

83 157 193 199

Introduction In July 1962, the English poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast to take up a position as a lecturer in English at Queen’s University. During the next four years, he sought out local writers whom he felt possessed literary promise and invited them to weekly writing workshops which he conducted in his home. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and James Simmons attended regularly during the first three years; Derek Mahon came once.¹ At the time of the first workshop, none of these men had published a book. By the end of the decade, they were among the foremost Irish poets of their generation. The various phrases critics and readers use to denote these poets—the Ulster Movement, the Honest Ulsterman School, the Belfast Group, the Mutual Admiration Society of Northern Poets—reflect the vague but underlying sense that they constitute a school. Yet the poets themselves have resisted allegations of collaboration, just as they have expressed unease with the phrases used to describe the period of intense poetic activity in Belfast—the Ulster Renaissance, the Northern Ireland Literary Revival—that occurred between Philip Hobsbaum’s arrival in 1962 and Seamus Heaney’s departure ten years later.² Though repeatedly dismissed and repudiated by the poets, these terms continue to cling tenaciously, pressing critics to wonder not only if a ‘Belfast Group’ ever existed, but what it stood for and why it has become such a matter of contention. Dillon Johnston has written, ‘It may be that without Hobsbaum’s Monday evenings, Death of a Naturalist (1966) would not have appeared so early or so impressively as it did. Yet, who can believe that Heaney would have remained a mute, inglorious Milton without the Group’s supporting criticism?’³ This question raises a host of others. How much did Hobsbaum’s writing workshop contribute to these poets’ discovery of ¹ Michael Longley joined Hobsbaum’s group in 1964. ² Mahon, for example, when asked whether there was a ‘Northern Irish Renascence’, replied, ‘No. You can’t renasce something that was never nasce [sic].’ James J. Murphy, Lucy McDiarmid, and Michael J. Durkan, ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, Irish Literary Supplement, 10: 2 (1991), 28. ³ Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 52.

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their individual voices? Was their success inevitable, or did peer ratification make that success possible? Was the Ulster Renaissance simply, in Longley’s words, a ‘coincidence of talent’?⁴ To what extent did friendship and rivalry propel these poets’ work? Poets and critics alike have generally assumed that, to borrow Longley’s phrase, ‘The poetry would have happened anyway’—that is, without the impetus of Hobsbaum’s workshop.⁵ Yet many fail to realize that Heaney was, at this time, an insecure, inexperienced poet who by his own admission ‘had absolutely no confidence as a writer’.⁶ Longley, Simmons, and Mahon, though more sure of themselves, were several years away from finding a publisher. And all felt isolated in a city where there were few opportunities for literary exchange. Hobsbaum’s workshop gave several of these writers a sense of community and a crucial connection to the prestigious London publishers with whom they would eventually make their reputations. It was also one of the few Belfast forums that discriminated not on the basis of religion but on the basis of aesthetics. Catholics and Protestants, segregated since childhood in different neighbourhoods and schools, befriended one another here for the first time and worked cooperatively as critics. They began to organize poetry readings and literary festivals, to produce a local poetry magazine, and to attract media attention. It was not long before they were invited to read their work on the BBC and to publish their poems in national English and Irish newspapers. Soon, journalists and critics began to speak of an ‘Ulster Renaissance’. Hobsbaum’s role as poetic mentor and facilitator has received much attention, but less has been said about these poets’ influences on each other. This book contributes to the current debate by addressing not only the importance of Hobsbaum’s workshop, but the coterie that workshop brought into being. Thus it is a book about the social dynamics of creativity, and the ways in which literary friendships and rivalries engender poetic selfhood. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom wrote of the living writer’s struggle to usurp positions of authority held by past masters; however, in the case of Hobsbaum’s workshop and the Belfast poetry coterie, such ‘struggles’ occurred among living writers within a shared geographical and, to some extent, cultural space. Although Bloom does not attribute influence and its adherent anxieties to the social circumstances of which writers find themselves part, his model ⁴ Robert Johnstone, ‘The Longley Tapes’, Honest Ulsterman, 78 (1983), 22. ⁵ Norman Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group: A Symposium’, Honest Ulsterman, 53 (1976), 57. ⁶ Frank Kinahan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8: 3 (1982), 407.

Introduction

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is nevertheless useful, for it suggests that literary groups might themselves be a way for writers to resist, or even overcome, the anxieties of influence through strength in numbers. As Donald Hall writes in Poetry and Ambition: It is no accident that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were friends when they were young; if Pound, H. D., and William Carlos Williams had not known each other when young, would they have become William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Pound? There have been lone wolves but not many. The history of poetry is a history of friendships and rivalries, not only with the dead great ones but with the living young.⁷

Apart from Edna Longley and Neil Corcoran, most Irish Studies critics have been reluctant to address issues of friendship and rivalry among contemporary Northern Irish poets, and generally unwilling to challenge the poets’ denial of group identity.⁸ For example, Dillon Johnston has asserted, ‘Serious critics make no claims for the superiority, or even existence, of a Northern Irish school.’⁹ ‘Serious critics’ have taken their cue from the poets, who since the 1980s have uniformly rejected the idea of a Northern school. Longley began dismantling the myth of the Belfast Group in the Honest Ulsterman Group Symposium of 1976, in which he said Hobsbaum’s role was merely that of a convener, and downplayed the idea of an Ulster coterie: Some people like to think that Derek Mahon, James Simmons, Seamus Heaney and myself were the discoveries of Philip Hobsbaum and that we served our apprenticeships together at the sessions of The Group. I never saw Simmons at a Group meeting, and Mahon was present only once as an outside observer when he happened to be back in Belfast and staying with me. Initially I had no desire to attend, but Hobsbaum, who was a colleague of my fiancée’s, invited us both along.¹⁰

Nearly thirty years later, Longley again insisted to Jody Allen Randolph, ‘not for one moment did we think in terms of school or coterie’.¹¹ ⁷ Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 12. ⁸ See, for example, Edna Longley, ‘Irish Bards and American Audiences’, Southern Review, 31: 3 (1995), 757–71, Edna Longley, ‘ “Altering the past”: Northern Irish Poetry and Modern Canons’, Yearbook of English Studies, 35 (2005), 1–17, and Neil Corcoran, ‘ “A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59: 3 (1998), 559–80, for a discussion of coterie in Northern Ireland. ⁹ Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce, 49–50. ¹⁰ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 56. Longley also questioned Hobsbaum’s importance in an e-mail to the author, 12 Jan. 2002. ¹¹ Jody Allen Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003), 299.

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Mahon—always quick to denounce the Belfast Group—rejected the term ‘Ulster poet’ in the mid-eighties,¹² and wrote in his 1990 introduction to the Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, ‘There was never, contrary to received opinion, a Northern “School” in any real sense, merely a number of individual talents. Too much has been made of the so-called Belfast “Group”.’¹³ A year later, his disdain for the Group reached fever pitch: I was not a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s fucking Belfast Group. I was in a different city. I was a member of my own group in Dublin. I went once to Philip’s group, and never again—mind you, Philip was good fun, sure enough—but in a pub. He was no fun in his group, which was dogmatic and Leavisite to a nauseating degree. . . . So let’s get that clear once and for all: Philip’s group didn’t do anybody any good. Except perhaps Philip and Seamus.¹⁴

Mahon recently reiterated his position, calling the Belfast Group ‘a load of hooey cooked up by some journalists at the time’.¹⁵ Heaney also began to deny the existence of a Northern configuration during the early eighties; when asked in 1982 if he had ‘a sense of having been a member of a school’, he replied, ‘We certainly don’t see ourselves as a school.’¹⁶ In the same interview he said of Hobsbaum, ‘He made the Belfast Telegraph believe that they had a literary movement on their hands. Well, those things generate their own power. And then we all got books published here and there; and there was your movement.’¹⁷ Around the same time, Paul Muldoon voiced his uneasiness with the Group label, telling John Haffenden, ‘It’s scarcely a group at all, even though it’s become a critical convenience to see them as presenting a united front to the world: you only have to read them to be aware of the variety. They’re not united by any kind of manifesto.’¹⁸ Muldoon likely spoke for his fellow Northern poets when he told an interviewer in 1994, ‘It seems to ¹² Edna Longley, ‘Viewpoint: Criticism Wanted’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 Nov. 1985, 1233. See William Scammell, ‘Derek Mahon Interviewed’, Poetry Review, 81: 2 (1991), 6, for Mahon’s use of the phrase ‘Ulster poet’ in reference to himself and his peers, despite his earlier rejection of the term. Mahon also dismisses Hobsbaum and the Belfast Group in this interview. ¹³ Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon (eds.), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Penguin, 1990), p. xx. ¹⁴ Murphy et al., ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, 28. ¹⁵ Nicholas Wroe, ‘Middle Man’, Guardian, 21 Aug. 2004, Review, 15. The article is a profile of Michael Longley. ¹⁶ Kinahan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 407. ¹⁷ Ibid. 408. ¹⁸ John Haffenden, ‘Paul Muldoon’, Viewpoints (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 133. Tim Kendall has noted Muldoon’s revealing use of the present tense (‘It’s scarcely a group at all’) in Paul Muldoon (Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1996), 16.

Introduction

5

me that any decent writer eschews labels. I don’t want to belong to any group.’¹⁹ Some of this hostility to group identity may be attributable to a history of prejudice against literary ‘schools’ in Northern Ireland, where they have been seen as pretentious. For example, in a 1953 issue of Rann, the writer and BBC producer John Boyd wrote: there is certainly no definite ‘Ulster’ school: our writers are by nature too independent, too individualistic. They don’t form literary cliques; indeed they don’t seek one another out at all but prefer to go their own way, to write as they please, to solve their own problems, and, incidentally, to mind their own business.²⁰

In an earlier article, Boyd commended the Belfast writer Forrest Reid for forging a solitary literary path: ‘Rooted to Ulster in body and mind, Reid had too much independence of character to belong to a “school” of writers’.²¹ The notion of a ‘school’, with its exclusive connotations, was perhaps too English or American a concept for Boyd and other Northern writers of his generation; to self-consciously form a group would be to place oneself above the kind of ‘Honest-to-God Ulster down-to-earthness’ that characterized Ulster literary life.²² Yet, regardless of nation or generation, members of a tight-knit literary group typically pursue greater artistic autonomy after achieving individual success. This was the case with the Movement writers, for example. As Blake Morrison has written, ‘The impugning of the Movement label is an understandable development, but not to be too readily trusted.’²³ One can make a similar case for Heaney, Longley, and Mahon, who embraced the identity of the ‘Ulster poet’ during the sixties and early seventies, a time when, according to Heaney, they began to think of themselves as ‘ “The Group”, a single, even singular phenomenon’.²⁴ Although critics ¹⁹ Lynn Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, Contemporary Literature, 35: 1 (1994), 22. ²⁰ John Boyd, ‘The Ulster Novel’, Rann, 20 (1953), 35. ²¹ John Boyd, ‘Ulster Prose’, in Sam Hanna Bell, Necca A. Robb, and John Hewitt (eds.), The Arts in Ulster (London: George Harrap, 1951), 116. ²² Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 58. Heaney gave a good example of this Ulster contempt for pretension in a Fortnight tribute to Belfast’s Botanic Avenue, declaring, ‘It was almost self-consciously déclassé, although too self-consciously Belfast to admit a word like déclassé into its vocabulary. It was more a place for catching yourself on than for being carried away, where it was all right to carry the New Statesman but a bit risky to be caught with the New Yorker.’ Seamus Heaney, ‘The Beauty of Belfast: The Boule Miche of the North’, Fortnight, 207 (Sep. 1984), 19. ²³ Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5. ²⁴ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 63. Heaney’s essay on the Group is reprinted in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 28–30.

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rightly see Heaney as the Group’s most ardent spokesman, the intimation that Longley and Mahon kept a more respectable distance from the idea of a Belfast coterie needs to be qualified. These two were not immune to myth-making in the early seventies: Longley went so far as to suggest that he and his peers ‘might almost be termed the Honest Ulsterman School of Poets’,²⁵ while Mahon promoted the ‘new Northern Irish group of poets’ and urged the recognition of a distinct Ulster poetic tradition.²⁶ Muldoon too has spoken more generally of literary production as a social act, claiming that ‘works of art do not spring fully formed from anybody’s brow. . . . They come from social, cultural, historical contexts. . . . what Bloom said about the anxiety of influence makes sense.’²⁷ Such statements—along with the plethora of documentary and epistolary evidence from the sixties and seventies supporting the theory of a cohesive coterie—suggest that the Ulster Renaissance was not, as Thomas Kinsella dismissively claimed, ‘a journalistic entity’.²⁸ As Mahon said, ‘there is more to it than that’.²⁹ Indeed, the poets themselves must take at least part of the responsibility for promoting and sustaining the ‘myth’ of an Ulster school. Yet the various uses of the term ‘Belfast Group’ indicate the difficulties inherent in defining a group of writers under a single label. Should ‘Belfast Group’ refer to Hobsbaum’s writing workshop, to all of those who attended that workshop, or only to the select few who went on to achieve fame? Or should it refer more generally to a looser group of Northern poets who may or may not have been connected to Hobsbaum? Does Derek Mahon, who only attended one of Hobsbaum’s workshops, qualify as a member? Clearly, the label is not determinate, and has been used loosely by the poets themselves to denote both the writing workshop run by Hobsbaum and a coterie whose members were directly or indirectly connected to that writing group, notably, Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Simmons, Muldoon, and, to a lesser extent, critics such as Seamus Deane and Edna Longley—all writers who helped put Belfast on the literary map during the sixties and seventies. But I am less concerned with labels than I am with demonstrating how these writers worked together to ²⁵ Michael Longley (ed.), Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 96. ²⁶ Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (1970), 89. ²⁷ Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, 16. ²⁸ Thomas Kinsella (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. xxx. ²⁹ Scammell, ‘Derek Mahon Interviewed’, 5. Mahon was responding to Kinsella’s claim.

Introduction

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transform Belfast into a literary centre, and with how the poets tuned their voices in relation to one another. I hope to prove that the cooperative and collaborative processes that Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Simmons, and Muldoon engaged in during the sixties and early seventies were essential to their autonomous development, and to demonstrate that it is reductive to consider the Belfast Group—both the workshop and the coterie—as, in Longley’s words, a ‘coincidence of talent’.³⁰ Instead, it was an essential forum for critical approbation, appropriation, and dissent. Blake Morrison, in his study of the Movement, sets out certain criteria for judging whether or not a circle of writers should be regarded as a literary group: Did the writers know each other? Is there any evidence of mutual admiration, mutual influence, or collaboration? Did the writers come from the same social background? Did they have similar political beliefs? Did they intend to write for the same kind of audience? Was there a common belief about the direction which contemporary literature should take?³¹

The answer to most of these questions, in the case of the Belfast writers, is yes. Heaney and Deane, for example, had known each other since adolescence, as had Mahon and Longley. And though the writers came from different religious and social backgrounds, Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Simmons, and Deane all attended prestigious secondary schools, and then went on to university where they studied English or Classics.³² Despite the religious differences, then, there was common ground that prepared the way for friendship. The poets also shared mutual influences. Heaney, Longley, Mahon, and Muldoon were, in their different ways, inspired by Louis MacNeice, while Yeats, Frost, Kavanagh, Hewitt, Hopkins, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Auden, Hughes, Larkin, and Lowell served as additional poetic models. The poets were, furthermore, involved in a constant process of poetic exchange that often amounted to a collaborative effort.³³ As Jack Stillinger ³⁰ Johnstone, ‘The Longley Tapes’, 22. ³¹ Morrison, The Movement, 5. ³² Mahon also studied Philosophy and French. Such impressive educational trajectories were partly made possible by the 1947 Northern Irish application of Britain’s 1944 Butler Education Act, which increased access to UK universities. ³³ By ‘collaboration’, I do not necessarily mean the self-conscious attempt by a group of individuals to create a single piece of work; rather, I use the term more generally to acknowledge the many instances of interaction and critical exchange that affect the final outcome. See M. Thomas Inge, ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA, 116: 3 (2001), 623–30, and Jeanette Harris, ‘Toward a Working Definition of Collaborative Writing’, in James S. Leonard et al. (eds.), Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1994), 77–84.

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argues in his study Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, such ‘collaboration’ is typical of most writers. By examining extensive textual and documentary evidence in the work of Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Pound, Eliot, and others, he found: when the circumstances of composition are investigated in detail, the identifiable authorship turns out to be a plurality of authors. . . . multiple authorship—the collaborative authorship of writings that we routinely consider the work of a single author—is quite common, and that instances . . . can be found virtually anywhere we care to look in English and American literature of the last two centuries.³⁴

To a certain extent, this was true of the Belfast poets, who worked closely in ways that have been underacknowledged. Formal exchange took place in writing workshops run first by Hobsbaum and, later, Heaney, while informal exchange occurred at pubs, flats, readings, radio programmes, Arts Council tours, and in the pages of local literary magazines. Even when a poet left Belfast, he often continued to exchange poetry with his friends by post. Muldoon went so far as to say ‘there are poems lurking around you wouldn’t be sure who wrote them’.³⁵ Heaney too has admitted the extent and value of collaborative exchange during his time in Belfast, writing, ‘we almost did committee work on each other’s poems; they were circulated in manuscript form and sat upon, and before you had a book out your poems had been graduated and the canon was settled’.³⁶ These statements contradict Muldoon’s feeling, also articulated by Heaney, Mahon, and Longley, that the poets were ‘scarcely a group at all’. Obviously the poets are uncomfortable with the idea of collaboration, which implies a conformity of vision and intention that is difficult to reconcile with autonomy, and even evokes the stigma of corruption (as did the word itself during the Second World War).³⁷ As Stillinger puts it, ‘critical appreciation of a masterwork requires it to be the product of a single organizing mind’.³⁸ Yet such ‘committee work’, as Heaney called the collaborative process in Belfast, need not embarrass the committee. ³⁴ Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 22. ³⁵ Niall McGrath, interview with Paul Muldoon at the John Hewitt International Festival, Co. Antrim, 29 July 1994, typed MS, Box 34, PMP. ³⁶ Haffenden, ‘Meeting Seamus Heaney’, 28. ³⁷ See Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, ‘(Co)Labored Li(v)es; or, Love’s Labors Queered’, PMLA, 116: 3 (2001), 631–7. Leonardi and Pope allude to the word’s sinister associations, as in ‘Nazi collaborator’. Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford make a similar point in ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA 116: 2 (2001), 354–69. ³⁸ Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, 138.

Introduction

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Collaboration does not have to undermine a work’s ‘purity’ or an author’s intent. T. S. Eliot considered an author’s willingness to collaborate with other writers, both living and dead, a hallmark of genius. He praised Dante for his ability ‘to pillage left and right’, and honoured the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton because he ‘collaborated shamelessly’ with his contemporaries.³⁹ As he famously claimed, ‘I can see no reason for believing that either Dante or Shakespeare did any thinking on his own.’⁴⁰ Eliot, of course, engaged in collaboration himself, turning to Ezra Pound for editorial advice while writing ‘The Waste Land’. Pound cut over 300 lines of the poem, a fact that has led scholars such as Stillinger to argue that both men should be regarded as co-authors. While such a step seems overly generous—Pound, after all, did not compose, but rather edited—knowledge of how he helped shape the poem’s final composition enriches our understanding of ‘The Waste Land’. As Linda and Michael Hutcheon have written, collaboration can often help writers find their own voices. Describing a collaborative writing project involving weekly seminars with research assistants, they wrote: In the seminars, roles changed constantly as team members questioned, debated, and challenged one another, thereby contesting the familiar view that collaborative work minimizes contention in the name of cohesion. . . . If anything, the group developed a collective respect for personal and disciplinary differences and evolved a kind of ‘rhetoric of dissensus’ that permitted, indeed demanded, discussion.⁴¹

In this description of collaborative exchange—akin, I believe, to that which occurred in the formal meetings of Hobsbaum’s workshop and the informal meetings that took place in pubs and flats—collective dialogue spurs rather than stifles debate and dissent. If we regard collaboration as a practice that is artistically enabling rather than disabling, we may interpret the early poetic exchanges between the Belfast poets as beneficial— and indeed necessary—to the development of the poets’ autonomous voices. In other words, the coterie served as a space within which the poets could define themselves against each other. It is no accident that the ³⁹ T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York: Knopf, 1921), 63; Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 161. Quoted in Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘Common Ground and Collaboration in T. S. Eliot’, in Leonard et al. (eds.), Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing, 69. ⁴⁰ Eliot, Selected Essays, 136. Quoted in Brooker, ‘Common Ground and Collaboration in T. S. Eliot’, 69. ⁴¹ Linda and Michael Hutcheon, ‘A Convenience of Marriage: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity’, PMLA, 116: 5 (2001), 1371.

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Introduction

Belfast poetry scene was most cohesive during the early sixties, when the young poets were just beginning to find their voices, and that it broke apart as their fame grew: they were pushed by conformity to autonomy. The Troubles, of course, also played a role in this process. It would be more difficult, by the 1970s, for Heaney to maintain his close friendship with the Longleys. Heaney’s and Mahon’s residence abroad during this time also posed an obstacle to collaboration. Yet such breaks had as much to do with rivalry as they did with politics. When an interviewer questioned Heaney about his departure from Belfast to the Republic in 1972, he acknowledged that the move was partly provoked by his desire to cut ties with his fellow Northern poets: ‘I finally, I think, wanted to escape . . . partly because I wanted to get to a situation where I was thinking for myself about my own poems. It’s partly a matter of development within the group too.’⁴² Longley has spoken of the intense rivalries among the circle in similar terms: ‘We supported each other but only up to a point. We competed with each other more ferociously than perhaps we now remember.’⁴³ Collaboration provides a particularly relevant model of poetic exchange when we consider that the Belfast poets were united by their non-violent, non-sectarian political stance. They hoped that a renewed commitment to art would foster a more tolerant society; it was the artist’s duty, Longley wrote, ‘to celebrate life in all its aspects, to commemorate normal human activities. Art is in itself a normal human activity. The more normal it appears in the eyes of the artist and his audience, the more potent a force it becomes.’⁴⁴ Longley’s statement clarifies the ways in which, after 1969, the Belfast poets increasingly saw art as an inclusive and cooperative venture, an alternative to sectarianism with the potential to circumvent politics while educating the public. The poets believed that literature, while functioning autonomously, could serve a social purpose by encouraging and upholding humanist values, or, as Said has suggested, could engender a ‘transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness’.⁴⁵ It was not the politicians who would bring about peace, but the artists, the Arts Council, the museums, and the universities working together. As Longley said, ‘I think that the artists of Belfast have imagined an ideal Belfast. Art does cross all the barriers and the frontiers, and it doesn’t admit of borders.’⁴⁶ Yet it is important to remember that the ⁴² ⁴³ ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶

Haffenden, ‘Meeting Seamus Heaney’, 28. Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 297. Longley, Causeway, 90. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 278. Dillon Johnston, ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, Irish Literary Supplement, 5: 2 (1986), 21.

Introduction

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poets continually expressed unease with the idea that they were duty bound to speak out or write about the Troubles. According to Longley, ‘we never discussed these dilemmas. We had no plans to face up to the crisis as a group, or to speak to the outside world about it. It was crucial to remain true to ourselves.’⁴⁷ The poets did, however, look to each other during this time for answers to questions concerning the moral and aesthetic functions of art. As Edna Longley suggests, ‘Even if an actual community is divided, even to the murderous pitch of family feud, it enables poetry to imagine communal meanings. . . . And, probably, more for good than ill, the individual poet cannot avoid affiliation to a community of poets in time and space (call it tradition), any more than poems can avoid intertextual relations.’⁴⁸ The Belfast poets relied on each other not only for critical advice, but for reassurance about the direction their art was to take as the political situation worsened. Longley in particular relied on his friendship with Heaney, Simmons, and Mahon in order to make sense of his own attitude towards the violence. When, in 1969, he was asked to define the Northern situation in Hibernia, he deflected the question by suggesting the best way inside the Ulster psyche was through the poetry of Mahon and Heaney: When I am asked to write or talk about myself I quite naturally mention Mahon and Heaney, not because they are colleagues and close friends, but because, as Ulstermen, we share a complex and confusing culture: they help me to define myself . . . .⁴⁹

Longley’s testimony shows how, early on, he used his friendships to reflect upon his own identity. Yet, as the crisis worsened, that identity may have been based more upon difference than similarity. As the years passed, the poets would feel increasingly confined in the cocoon of group identity they had created and would eventually distance themselves from each other to embrace autonomy. It is a common misconception that the surge of creativity in Belfast coincided with the advent of the Troubles. In fact it began much earlier: the apparent goodwill exhibited by Terence O’Neill in the mid-sixties and the latent expectation of a more liberal era had much to do with the emerging literary renaissance. The beginning of violence, on the other hand, marked a setback: in 1972, the year of the Bloody Sunday ⁴⁷ Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 303. ⁴⁸ Edna Longley, ‘An ABC of Reading Contemporary Irish Poetry’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59: 3 (1998), 535–6. ⁴⁹ Michael Longley, ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’, Hibernia, 7 Nov. 1969, 11.

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Introduction

shootings, Heaney’s (formerly Hobsbaum’s) writing group dissolved and Heaney moved to the Republic. For this reason, I have chosen to focus on matters that have less to do with the descent from peace into violence and more to do with the formation of a Belfast literati, for it is my contention that the rise and fall of the Belfast coterie had as much to do with friendship and rivalry as it did with the political situation in Northern Ireland. Of course, the formation of a distinct cultural identity also played a part in this trajectory, for, imagined or otherwise, there was a sense of community among Belfast’s poets during the sixties and early seventies, a time when it seemed important to emphasize similarities, and to seize upon the idea of a distinct Ulster poetry. This was a reactionary response to the cultural hegemonies of England and Ireland; an attempt, Said might say, to decolonize the imagination.⁵⁰ By recuperating a Northern poetic tradition—particularly through the work of MacNeice and Hewitt—Northern writers were able to legitimate the hybrid or, in Longley’s words, ‘schizoid’ Irish/English identity with which they grappled, and to clear a space for their own work as something forged by but independent of both traditions.⁵¹ I begin my study with a discussion of the early friendships between Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, as well as Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. These relationships, I contend, offered early opportunities for ratification and collaboration, and were crucial to the writers’ intellectual and artistic development. I then assess the impact of Philip Hobsbaum and his writing workshop upon the young Ulster poets and analyse Hobsbaum’s complicated legacy and influence. I move on to describe the dizzying pace of literary life in Belfast during the sixties, highlighting the many readings, festival appearances, and radio programmes in which the poets appeared—acts of unity that cemented the public’s perception of them as a group. I then offer a detailed account of the early days of the Honest Ulsterman, highlighting James Simmons’s neglected contributions to literary life in Belfast. I continue with an exploration of how the Belfast poets have been shaped by, and, in turn, have helped to shape, the legacies of John Hewitt and Louis MacNeice. Turning to the idea of a Northern aesthetic, I then examine the ways in which the poets promoted the Belfast coterie in the early seventies, and ⁵⁰ As Said has written, ‘In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or state.’ Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii. ⁵¹ Siobhan McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, typed MS, 1981, Box 43, MLP. Short excerpts of this interview are published in Siobhan McSweeney, ‘The Poets’ Picture of Education’, Crane Bag, 7: 2 (1983), 134–42.

Introduction

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how they defined themselves in opposition to the Dublin literati; I also briefly probe their influence on each other during these years. Finally, I discuss the discord within the literary community during the North controversy and the Field Day debate. Because I am interested in the social dynamics of creativity, I have chosen to examine the history of the Belfast coterie in more detail than its poetry; the subject of mutual influence, which comprises an entire monograph in itself, awaits further study. I focus upon Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Simmons, and, to a lesser extent, Muldoon, since these writers participated most fully in the poetic renewal of the sixties and early seventies. Though John Montague, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Tom Paulin have made great contributions to contemporary Northern Irish poetry, they were not as closely involved in the local renaissance as those who met under Hobsbaum’s roof.⁵² Although I find it most useful to focus on the years which spanned Hobsbaum’s arrival and Heaney’s departure, I understand that this demarcation may appear too neatly packaged, and that the decade I have chosen to label ‘renaissance’, 1962 to 1972, does not stand alone in the literary history of Northern Ireland. For this was a renewal that began in the 1940s, well before Hobsbaum came to town, and still reverberates today. Derek Mahon put this nicely when he stated, ‘In Ireland people are always writing poetry and everything else: fiction, plays. It’s always going on. There’s a continuing nascence, with every generation.’⁵³ While acknowledging that both history and literature will always shift and subvert any perimeters we place around them, I want to challenge the notion that the terms ‘Belfast Group’ and ‘Ulster Renaissance’ are a kind of reductive shorthand made up by critics and journalists to fabricate a common goal or voice. On the contrary, this notion is the myth that needs revising. Studying these poets’ (and their poems’) relationships with one another complicates rather than limits our understanding of their individual achievements, and raises provocative questions about the social nature of literary production. As Longley put it, ‘Moving forward with coevals and potential rivals has a key role and it’s very seldom that ⁵² Although Mahon included John Montague in his ‘new Northern Irish group of poets’ in ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’ (1970), he remarked, ‘Montague, a county Tyrone man, was not clearly identifiable as a “Northern” poet (as opposed as an Irish poet in the general sense) until later, and his Dublin base and French domicile removed him from the beginnings of the Northern noise’, 89. In ‘Flight of the Earls Now Leaving’, published in the Irish Times on 4 June 1974, James Simmons also addressed Montague’s disputed position within the Northern circle: ‘John Montague has been away so long | we hardly miss him. Did he, once, belong?’ ⁵³ Murphy et al., ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, 28.

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Introduction

someone flowers on their own.’⁵⁴ Longley hints at precisely the claim I make in this study: that during the sixties and early seventies, these poets honed their craft both in accordance with and in opposition to each other—a poetic practice which Bloom, referring to the relationship between dead and living writers, calls ‘creative correction’ or ‘willful revisionism’.⁵⁵ It was in part such revisionism that drove the Ulster Renaissance, inspiring a long-running poetic dialogue which has produced some of the finest poems of the twentieth century, and making Belfast, says Edna Longley, ‘Irish poetry’s strangest port of call’.⁵⁶ To learn from this dialogue, we must explore the intimate, interpersonal relationships that propelled these poets’ work, along with the events which helped Belfast—once characterized by Louis MacNeice as a city of ‘hard cold fire’—to become, in Ciaran Carson’s words, the ‘mouth of the poem’.⁵⁷ ⁵⁴ Wroe, ‘Middle Man’, 15. ⁵⁵ Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 30. ⁵⁶ Longley, ‘An ABC of Reading Contemporary Irish Poetry’, 519. ⁵⁷ Louis MacNeice, ‘Belfast’, Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. E. R. Dodds (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 19; Ciaran Carson, ‘Farset’, Belfast Confetti (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1989), 49.

1 Beginnings The Belfast poets shared more than camaraderie—they were each other’s first audience. During the 1950s, the friendship that developed between Derek Mahon and Michael Longley at Trinity College Dublin was neatly paralleled by that between Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane at Queen’s University Belfast. When these two pairs first met they were adolescents, reading everything for the first time and beginning to grapple with the nuances and complexities of literature; as their friendships evolved, they discovered their identities as writers. Perhaps it is a coincidence that these men became four of contemporary Ireland’s most influential poets and intellectuals, but it seems likelier that their friendships reinforced the young writers’ drive, ambition, their will to succeed, and, ultimately, the aesthetic directions they followed. Michael Longley was born, like Seamus Heaney, in 1939, the year Yeats died. He was raised by English parents who moved from London to Belfast in 1927 and settled in Bristol Park, a lower-middle-class, Protestant neighbourhood off the Upper Malone Road. Longley’s father, a Great War veteran, was head of the Northern Ireland division of a large furniture company called Harris Lebus—a job that provided a comfortable living until 1939, when he resigned to join the British Army. As a result of this decision, the family’s income dwindled, and Michael and his twin brother Peter were sent to the Malone Primary School on Balmoral Avenue, which enrolled mainly Protestant working-class students.¹ It was around this time that Longley began to develop a ‘schizoid’ personality to please both his parents and his friends: In order to survive in the street, I had to develop a Belfast accent, a rather severe one. When I went home this would be modified for my parents who retained ¹ Siobhan McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, typed MS, 1981, Box 43, MLP, 1. Longley’s first exposure to his friends’ poverty provided a useful lesson in tolerance which would later sow the seeds of his socialism.

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their English accents and didn’t find the Belfast accent very attractive. So from quite an early age I was recreating myself twice a day or more.²

Significantly, he was recreating himself through language, already aware that the currents and cadences of his speech deeply influenced his relationships with others. He later stressed feeling in-between cultures in an interview with Jody Allen Randolph, saying, ‘From an early age I drifted between Englishness and Irishness, between town and country, between the Lisburn Road with its shops and cinemas and the River Lagan with its beech woods where I fell in love with wild birds and wild flowers. I am still drifting. Perhaps a certain indeterminacy keeps me impressionable.’³ Because Longley came from a family of half-hearted Anglicans who entered their church only for christenings, weddings, and funerals, he was not exposed to sectarianism at home.⁴ It was not until he entered primary school that he encountered the virulent prejudice that, as he grew older, would weave itself into the fabric of his daily life. As he recalled, ‘one was encouraged by one’s classmates to distrust and be frightened of Catholics’.⁵ Fortunately, the school’s teachers did not propagate such ideas; it was important to Longley that those in positions of authority, such as his parents and teachers, looked upon sectarianism with disdain. Their enlightened attitude led him early on to think of himself as a United Irishman in the tradition of Wolfe Tone. Longley’s teachers also encouraged his writing talent; he remembers being ‘at the top of the class right the way through’.⁶ His parents, too, encouraged him to read, though they lacked higher education and did not read much themselves. Overall, said Longley, ‘it was not a cultural household . . . not a household in which books were bought and read’, though there were Shakespeare plays on the bookshelves.⁷ The family listened to middlebrow radio programmes like the Tommy Handley Show and Take It From Here, and read the Daily Mail. When Longley was 16, he began to read the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the New Statesman. His father, a Tory, expressed concern over his son’s political views, ² Dillon Johnston, unedited interview with Michael Longley, typed MS, n.d., Box 43, MLP. Excerpt not included in published version, ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, Irish Literary Supplement, 5: 2 (1986), 20–2. ³ Jody Allen Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003), 294. ⁴ The family were members of St John’s Church of Ireland on the Malone Road. ⁵ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 2. Excerpt not included in published version. ⁶ Ibid. 3. ⁷ Ibid.

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and would later feel threatened and confused by Longley’s left-wing leanings.⁸ Longley’s father, who died in 1960, is a significant presence in his poetry. Two of his best-known poems—‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Wounds’— observe his father as he slowly dies, a serene calm in the centre of a storm of wartime memories. ‘Wounds’ has received much attention over the years on account of the startling way it juxtaposes innocence and patriotism—that of the Ulster Division at the Somme on the one hand, and of Belfast paramilitary organizations on the other—in order to endow the victims and the killers with equal vulnerability. The poem places blame on collective authority rather than individual motive, an accusation couched in the father’s words, ‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’⁹ It is a Protestant poem of martyrdom, one which intentionally confuses sanctioned and unsanctioned murder to reveal how each sprouts from the other. By the poem’s end, the killers, in the form of British soldiers, merge with the victim, a Protestant bus conductor. The poem shows how the weight of history bears on the contemporary struggle, for clearly the shouts of the Ulster Division—‘Fuck the Pope!’—as they ascend the trenches are linked in a causal chain to the IRA boy’s final mutter of apology to the wife of the man he has just killed. The fact that he shivers while he speaks exposes his vulnerability; it also suggests he is horrified by his action, and that perhaps the ultimate blame rests on the shoulders of a metaphorical ‘King and Country’—the higher powers of authority manipulating the idealism of young men to perpetuate war. The poem reveals that Longley was acutely aware of the fact that it was not so much the perpetrators of war who were to blame for the killing, but the momentum of the war itself. His father’s experience at the Somme would continue to haunt him through the years, providing a painful example of the futility of blind patriotism. Longley entered the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, or ‘Inst’, in 1951, a school he has described as one of the most important in Northern Ireland. Founded in 1810 by a group of wealthy Belfast merchants and former United Irishmen, Inst continued to uphold a tradition of dissent that manifested itself in the enrolment and employment of Catholics and Jews. Yet this dissent was tempered by the fact that the school maintained the Unionist status quo in its curriculum; indeed, the belief that Ulster was British to the core was taken for granted. As a result, Longley had ⁸ Ibid. See Michael Longley, Tupenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1994) for more biographical information about Longley’s youth and family history. ⁹ Michael Longley, An Exploded View (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 40.

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little formal exposure to Irish literature, and no opportunity to study Irish history, language, or music. Instead, he turned his attention to the Classics, concentrating his efforts on translating Greek and Latin texts— a rigorous intellectual exercise which taught him the complexities of syntax. This early exposure to grammatical structures contributed to his later preference for formalism; in an interview with Dillon Johnston, Longley described how the study of Greek and Latin provided him with a more sophisticated grasp of poetry’s syntactical scaffolds: From reading the Latin poets I was alerted to the possibilities of syntax, which is the muscle of poetry. I get bored by so much poetry which is written in short jerky sentences. I love stretching out over a stanza, a sentence, and playing the pauses of meaning against the line endings and trying to make the sentence, the grammatical unit, coincide with the stanzaic unit.¹⁰

But it was Longley’s English teacher, Joe Cowan, who first inspired his interest in poetry. Cowan, an English Catholic with Irish sympathies, furtively passed out poems by MacNeice, W. R. Rodgers, and Kavanagh to his students—a subversive act that challenged the Unionist dismissal of Irish literature. After reading these poets, Longley was gripped by an exciting new awareness of a local poetic tradition: ‘here was poetry written by somebody who lived actually down the road. It helped to make it seem living and much less remote.’¹¹ Because the Inst curriculum, set by the Northern Ireland Ministry of Education, favoured English classics, he did not have much exposure to Yeats or to American poetry. In his Sixth Form year, for example, he read King Lear, The Tempest, The Rape of the Lock, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, and the letters and poems of William Cowper. As he said, ‘There was very little on the curriculum to remind one that one was living in Belfast, which was part of Ireland.’¹² Yet he was grateful for the school’s tolerance of both its teachers’ and its students’ eccentricities; this tolerance of others helped shape his own personality from an early age: I remember I used to be friendly with two groups of boys, the scholarly artistic set— the aesthetes—and the rugby playing hearties and some evenings I’d be off with the aesthetes, discussing books and listening to gramophone records and then on Fridays and Saturdays I’d be off with the rugby players drinking illegally and smoking and going out to dances and flirting with girls . . . I was quite schizoid I think at Inst., appearing to be a model pupil but underneath exploring more dangerous areas.¹³ ¹⁰ Johnston, ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, 22. ¹¹ McSweeney, ‘The Poets’ Picture of Education’, 139. ¹² McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 4. Excerpt not included in published version. ¹³ Ibid. 5.

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These comments bring to mind Longley’s description of himself as a boy who put on different accents to please both his schoolfellows and parents. It was obviously a practice which continued into his adolescence: by leaving himself open to choose between different identities, he avoided classification and labels. Years later he would similarly deflect attempts to pigeonhole his poetic identity as an ‘Ulster poet’, a term he came to dismiss. Yet he was careful not to distance himself from this label completely, nor from the media attention that came with it, especially after he was appointed to the Northern Ireland Arts Council in 1970. He was, after all, adept at keeping a foot in both camps. It was at Inst that Longley first met Derek Mahon (b. 1941), who came from a working-class Protestant family. Mahon was raised in Glengormley, a Belfast suburb; his father was the inspector of engines at the Harland & Wolff shipyard, while his mother, before marriage, had worked at the York Street flax-spinning company. Thus his parents, as he was quick to note, had worked in Northern Ireland’s two main industries: shipbuilding and linen. Mahon’s parents, like Longley’s, were not enthusiastic readers, but they were deeply interested in politics: Mahon’s father, unlike Longley’s, was left-wing, and the rest of the men in his family were socialists. ‘That doesn’t mean they weren’t sectarian’, Mahon has said. ‘They were. Everybody’s sectarian in Northern Ireland. But they were anti-Unionist inasmuch as Unionism was Conservatism, Toryism.’¹⁴ As for religion, the family had tenuous links to the Church of Ireland, though Mahon insisted they were ‘serious about being respectable’.¹⁵ On account of his parents’ propriety, the local minister at St Peter’s Church on the Antrim Road invited Mahon to join the church choir. This experience was to have a great influence on his aesthetic sensibility; as he told Eamon Grennan in 2000, ‘As far as my commitment, as a poet, to form is concerned, I think that there might be a link to the church hymnal used by the Church of Ireland when I was growing up and sang in the church choir. Those hymns were the only poetry in most people’s lives.’¹⁶ While Longley befriended some of the poorer students in his primary school, Mahon struck friendships with Catholic children who lived nearby. Like many youngsters, he could not comprehend the divisions ¹⁴ James J. Murphy et al., ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, Irish Literary Supplement, 10: 2 (1991), 27. Mahon’s father and uncles all voted Labour, which was unusual in Protestant Northern Ireland. ¹⁵ Eamon Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, Paris Review, 154 (2000), 156. ¹⁶ Eamon Grennan, transcript of ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’ with edits by Derek Mahon, typed MS, Box 34, DMP, 39. This excerpt does not appear in the published interview.

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between the two faiths, and recounted his innocence the first time he heard a Catholic friend talk about confession: I said, ‘Can I come too?’ And they said, ‘No, it’s only for Catholics.’ I said, ‘What are Catholics? What do you mean?’ And they wouldn’t tell me. It was a long time before I understood. I understood the difference between Christians and Jews. . . . But the Protestant-Catholic thing I didn’t understand at all.¹⁷

It was partly the friendship with this family that led him to realize, at the age of 14, that his society was deeply troubled. It was then, he said, I looked around me. I knew there was something very wrong with the environment in which I had grown up. It may have had to do with relations, or lack of, with the Matthews family. I didn’t formulate it to myself: ‘I can’t stand this political system, I hate Lord Brookeborough, Stormont, and the Unionists.’ But I thought, this place is sick.¹⁸

Mahon’s experience at Inst, which he entered in 1953, solidified his commitment to religious tolerance and, perhaps equally important, acquainted him with English and Irish poetry. Though he recalled a school anthology entitled A Pageant of English Verse—the book, he said, ‘that did it for me’—his first real literary frisson (‘aside from the hymns’) came with reading Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’.¹⁹ Mahon recalled that Yeats’s Sligo brought to mind the Glens of Antrim, where his family sometimes vacationed. Indeed, it must have come as an affirmation to learn that the arch-poet had considered an Irish rural backwater worthy of such praise. Just as Kavanagh and MacNeice had excited Longley, Yeats was an early source of literary kinship for Mahon. Mahon’s most inspirational teacher was John Boyle, a Dubliner and Trinity graduate who came to Inst to teach English, French, and History in the tradition of the United Irishmen.²⁰ Boyle—who counted writers such as Denis Johnston and Frank O’Connor among his friends—was intensely interested in Irish labour history and was rumoured to have written an unpublished biography of James Connolly. In Belfast, he became one of the directors of Mary O’Malley’s Lyric Theatre, joined the Republican Labour Party, and became involved in, as Mahon put it, ‘leftwing, anti-Unionist politics’.²¹ Mahon was particularly grateful to him for teaching Irish history, although he emphasized that the history textbook Boyle chose was ‘Unionistic, very conventional’.²² He also ¹⁷ Murphy et al., ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, 27. ¹⁸ Ibid. 28. ¹⁹ Ibid. 27. He also remembers being inspired by Dylan Thomas from a young age. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid. ²² Ibid.

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remembered that Boyle ‘taught Yeats as if Yeats were an historian of the time: Yeats as documentary’.²³ The young poet was particularly impressed by the fact that Boyle had once heard Maud Gonne speak at a Trinity College debate; it was the kind of experience, Mahon said, which gave him the power to make Irish history ‘real to us’.²⁴ Ultimately, he called Boyle ‘a tremendously impressive man’ who gave him ‘a new perspective on things’—one which likely helped him to begin to reconcile his identity as a Protestant and an Irishman.²⁵ Indeed, both Mahon and Longley were well served by teachers who subtly challenged the Unionist status quo. At this stage, Mahon was writing poetry regularly, though he felt his poems were unremarkable. He claimed, for example, that he won the Forrest Reid Prize at Inst for an ‘unabashed’ Dylan Thomas pastiche when he was 17 only because the judge did not recognize the influence.²⁶ The next year he saw a newspaper advertisement for the May Morton Poetry Prize, worth £100, and decided to enter with yet another homage to Dylan Thomas. He was defeated, however, by John Montague, whose ‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood’ won the prize. Longley remembers a more confident side of Mahon. Though his junior by two years at Inst, Mahon had already published several skilfully wrought poems in the School News. Longley, on the other hand, had published nothing, and was intimidated by poetry and poetic ambition—‘a kind of courage’ he felt he lacked.²⁷ At 13, he had been excited by Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’, but feigned indifference to his peers.²⁸ Three years later he fell in love with a Catholic girl who inspired him to write his first poems, but the ethos of the school encouraged scholarship rather than creativity; consequently, he allowed his interest to wane. Though he won an English Prize at Inst in the Third Form—for which he chose Yeats’s Collected Poems—he was more inspired by music than poetry. Every Thursday, from the time he was 14 until he turned 17, he and a group of friends attended concerts performed by the Belfast Symphony Orchestra at Ulster Hall. After hearing Sibelius’s second symphony, he broke out ‘into an almost sexual sweat’, and for the next few years spent all his pocket money on recordings by Tchaikovsky, ²³ Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, 159. ²⁴ Ibid. ²⁵ Murphy et al., ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, 27. ²⁶ Ibid. ²⁷ Michael Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring: Some Reminiscences of Trinity & Two Poems Addressed to Derek Mahon’, Irish University Review, 24: 1 (1994), 51. ²⁸ See Michael Longley, ‘An Inner Adventure’, Phoenix, 5 (1969), 54–5.

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Rachmaninov, Sibelius, and others.²⁹ Although he managed to publish some essays in the School News, he still preferred hearing music to writing poetry. Perhaps Mahon’s reputation as a poseur put him off: ‘Thinks he’s a poet’, the schoolboys would say derisively after encountering the young Mahon in the hall, already playing the role of poète maudit.³⁰ Mahon admitted to cultivating such a stance in opposition to the popular rugby and cricket athletes. He sought out other boys like him—‘oddities, weirdos’—and spent time discussing literature in coffee shops after school.³¹ Although he mocked this small circle, calling it a ‘pretentious coterie’, he admitted it offered him ‘an identity . . . that stays with me to this day. It was the beginning, I suppose, of my life as (God spare us!) an “intellectual”.’³² Even as adolescents, Longley and Mahon knew they had to experience life outside Belfast if they were to develop a real sense of what it meant to be Protestant and Irish. Thus, Longley’s decision to attend Trinity College Dublin in 1958 was not simply based upon the fact that its Classics department was superior to Queen’s. As he explained, ‘I think, too, I was already beginning to tire of the rather comfortable certainties which hung in the air in the Belfast circles I moved in. I sensed, I think, that it was important to get away from Belfast and to go to a residential university.’³³ Yet Trinity was hardly a typical Irish university; on the contrary, it was one of the last vestiges of the Protestant Ascendancy. Almost 40 per cent of its student body came from England—those who could not get into Oxford or Cambridge, according to common lore.³⁴ Both Mahon and Longley remembered the English students as spectacles of debauchery and dalliance, men and women who greeted one another with swift kisses and roared off in trendy sports cars. Their presence, along with the garden parties and cricket matches, lent an allure of privilege to Trinity, but they were also embodiments of imperialist condescension. For them, Trinity, like Ireland itself, was second-best; their cavalier attitudes amused and annoyed the young poets, who sympathized with the Dublin Irish rather ²⁹ Robert Johnstone, ‘The Longley Tapes’, Honest Ulsterman, 78 (1983), 17. ³⁰ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 51. ³¹ Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, 158. ³² Ibid. ³³ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 8. This excerpt does not appear in the published article. ³⁴ Lionel Fleming, ‘The English Element at Trinity’, Hibernia, Dec. 1967, 7. During the academic year 1958–9, according to Fleming, 39.1 per cent of Trinity students came from Britain. He writes, ‘It is held that hardly any of these students can have chosen Trinity and that most of them are somewhat discontented Oxbridge rejects who know little about their present Irish environment and care less.’

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than with these ‘upper-class twits’.³⁵ This brand of Englishness was at least one reason why Trinity must have instilled in the reticent Northerners a greater fondness for, and awareness of, their identities as Irishmen. It was Longley who pointed out that although the university was socially and politically removed from the rest of the city, its central location ensured it could never wholly retreat into its own privileged world: no matter how Anglo-Irish it may have been in the past, no matter how Protestant, it just cannot avoid being part of Dublin. I regard that as an important part of my subliminal education—walking in and out of the Front Gate and being aware of the tensions in myself and within the university.³⁶

Mahon echoed Longley when he spoke of how (at that time) Trinity’s attempt to maintain its connection with Britain via the North meant, ironically, that Northern Protestants were educated in ‘an all-Ireland perspective’—one he considered ‘invaluable’.³⁷ As Protestants living in the heart of Catholic Dublin, the poets must have gained a greater understanding of their affinities to those around them. At Trinity, Longley read for a degree in Classics, but, from the start, was more absorbed in poetry, calling himself ‘an idle scholar’.³⁸ As an undergraduate, he began writing in earnest, jotting down at least ten poems a day: it took me a year or two, I suppose, getting all the romantic, bohemian nonsense out of my system. And then, I remember . . . I decided one evening I would convert a big splurge of words into sonnets and I worked very hard until about seven o’clock in the morning, and that was a kind of break-through. It’s just discovering the actual act of writing is an act of exploration and that if you’re moving into uncharted territories inside your own head, the form of a poem is like a map and compass showing you the way and these are quite important revelations, I think.³⁹

Longley soon began publishing in Icarus, the college literary magazine. He was becoming more secure both with his poetry and with his position as a campus poet, experimenting with formal and free verse, ‘combining the tweeness of E.E. Cummings [sic] . . . with the portentousness of ³⁵ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 9. This excerpt does not appear in the published article. ³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ Derek Mahon, ‘Our Proper Dark’, review of We Irish, by Denis Donoghue, Irish Times 31 Jan. 1987, Weekend, 5. ³⁸ Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 296. Longley entered Trinity in 1958. ³⁹ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 7–8. Parts of this excerpt appear in the published version.

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Wallace Stevens’.⁴⁰ But he was still looking over his shoulder at Mahon back in Belfast, ‘keeping an eye on his appearances in School News . . . halfhoping that he would not be coming to Trinity’.⁴¹ His hopes were dashed when they met in Michaelmas Term of 1960 in the Front Square of the College. ‘Perhaps I was expecting salutations from a fellow Instonian, even a hint of literary deference’, Longley recalled. But instead Mahon said, ‘Are you Longley?’ and asked to borrow his typewriter.⁴² By this time, Longley was on the editorial board of Icarus and was recognized as a notable college poet—a position for which he had sacrificed his Classics studies. Yet Mahon’s sudden presence upset his sense of achievement: during a discussion of Mahon’s ‘Subsidy Bungalows’ at an Icarus editorial meeting, he listened jealously to the enthusiasms of his peers and conceded to himself that his rival had made ‘a brilliant debut’.⁴³ Mahon’s poems seemed effortless, authoritative, and sophisticated; Longley’s lines, in comparison, sounded ‘wan and effete’.⁴⁴ Later, when Mahon’s ‘Love Poem’ appeared alongside a poem of his in Icarus, he was again forced to admit that his friend’s work was superior: I felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance. But poets, because they should never completely grow up, must continually come of age. I began to come of age—or came of age for the first time—when I decided to embrace the pain of friendship with a younger poet who seemed already to have arrived while I was just setting out.⁴⁵

Heaney has often acknowledged that he felt intimidated by both Longley’s and Mahon’s worldliness; yet it appears Longley felt equally intimidated by Mahon. There were benefits of this ‘painful’ friendship, however, for Mahon provided introductions to several English, French, and German poets. Together they read ‘MacNeice, Crane, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Larkin, Lawrence, Graves, Hughes, Stevens, Cummings [sic], Richard Wilbur, Lowell, as well as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Brecht, Rilke’.⁴⁶ It was Mahon who brought Longley’s attention to George Herbert, as well as to Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings—a consequential introduction, given that The Less Deceived would eventually become one of Longley’s favourite collections. Overall, Longley wrote, ‘It was a joy to go on a guided tour of poetry with a well-informed companion.’⁴⁷ They met in Longley’s college rooms, O’Neill’s Bar on Suffolk Street, and other local pubs and cafés where they drank, smoked, and listened to music. They talked of home and mocked the proprieties of the Northern ⁴⁰ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 52. ⁴³ Ibid. 52. ⁴⁴ Ibid. ⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid. 51. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 53.

⁴² Ibid. ⁴⁷ Ibid.

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Irish Protestant community from which they came; somehow this seemed important to their burgeoning sense of identity.⁴⁸ They were learning to regard their home as a foreigner might, to find comedy, even, in the small-mindedness and tribalism that infected their society. They spent long hours discussing aesthetics, critiquing each other’s poems, and simply boozing. Trinity’s proximity to Grafton Street provided them with an abundance of watering-holes and the occasional brush with legend: Longley once spent an afternoon in McDaid’s accepting pints from Kavanagh, whom he described as ‘wonderful, preternaturally sensitive beneath the boorish exterior, foul mouthed and beatific’.⁴⁹ Longley also had the opportunity to meet MacNeice in McDaid’s, but, despite Mahon’s pleas, was too intimidated to introduce himself (a decision he later regretted).⁵⁰ Inspiration also came from more accessible sources. Mahon cited Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, who taught French at Trinity and was particularly interested in Gide and Camus, writers he presented as part of a Protestant, Existentialist tradition (a lesson which could not have failed to move Mahon).⁵¹ There was also Alec Reid, Trinity English lecturer and founder of Icarus, whom Longley referred to as the ‘literary genius loci’.⁵² Longley remembers that both he and Mahon ‘craved the approval which he meted out sparingly’ and insists that Reid was a much more important figure in their poetic development than Hobsbaum.⁵³ (In fact, it was on account of Reid’s passion for MacNeice and Edward Thomas that the Longleys were later inspired to write their own studies of these poets.⁵⁴) The Homeric scholar W. B. Stanford and Professor of Latin Donald Wormell also encouraged Longley’s creative efforts— Wormell by bringing to life verse by Propertius and Catullus, and Stanford by refusing to fail the aspiring poet: He summoned me to his rooms for missing lectures (which were compulsory in those days). He could have failed me my year. I was terrified. He scolded me, then smiled: ‘I suppose you think that because you’re a poet I’m going to let you off?’ ‘Of course not, sir.’ ‘Well, I am. I very much liked those recent poems in the magazine.’⁵⁵ ⁴⁸ Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, 160; Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 54. ⁴⁹ Michael Longley, ‘A Boat on the River’, in Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (eds.), Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), 140. ⁵⁰ Ibid. ⁵¹ Murphy et al., ‘Q and A with Derek Mahon’, 28. Mahon noted that even though Camus was Catholic, Sheehy-Skeffington explored his ‘Protestant’ sensibility. ⁵² Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 296. ⁵³ E-mail to author, 12 Jan. 2002. ⁵⁴ Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 296. ⁵⁵ Ibid.

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The support of sympathetic academic mentors like Reid, Wormell, and Stanford encouraged the students to keep writing, even at the expense of their studies. As Mahon remembers, it was at Trinity that he ‘had the notion that “this poetry nonsense you’ve been tinkering at for the past couple of years at school, if you’re going to take it seriously, you can do it here, and people will pay attention.” It was a very fertile environment, very supportive.’⁵⁶ Longley guessed he spent 75 per cent of his time writing, reading, and discussing poetry—mainly with Mahon.⁵⁷ The two exchanged volumes by Richard Murphy, Kinsella, Montague, Kennelly, and Pearse Hutchinson, and aspired to be published by the Dolmen Press. This was their real education: Studying our elders with a real sense of involvement, we were impressed by Clarke’s burden of ‘golden chains’ but anxious that he might collapse under their weight; we were relieved that after the middle-aged doldrums of Autumn Sequel and Ten Burnt Offerings MacNeice’s sails were billowing again; we felt confused by the mixture of the casual and the exquisite in Kavanagh’s Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. We read aloud to each other Montague’s ‘The Trout’ and ‘All Legendary Obstacles’. We had by heart Kinsella’s lilting lines, ‘Soft, to your place, animal, | Your legendary duty calls.’ We theorised about the syllabic patterning of Murphy’s ‘Sailing to an Island’ and ‘The Cleggan Disaster’. Anthologies such as Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry, The New Poetry edited by A. Alvarez and Michael Roberts’s The Faber Book of Modern Verse were a further education and primed us for Larkin and Hughes, Lowell and Wilbur. We collected for a few shillings each that inspired paperback series, the Penguin Modern European Poets: Akhmatova, Rilke, Enzensberger, Montale. We were appraising our roots and at the same time scanning the horizon.⁵⁸

Their knowledge of contemporary Irish poetry, as well as their contributions to Icarus, made a favourable impression on Brendan Kennelly, then editor of the magazine. Longley remembered that Kennelly accepted some of his poems ‘at just the right time’ and noted that he was extremely generous in his praise and encouragement.⁵⁹ It was Kennelly, in fact, who facilitated Longley and Mahon’s first encounter with a live audience during his own joint reading with Rudi Holzapfel in 1961. After he had ⁵⁶ Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, 161. ⁵⁷ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 8. This excerpt does not appear in the published version. ⁵⁸Longley, ‘A Boat on the River’, 140–1. ⁵⁹ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 54.

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finished reading his selection, he cheekily summoned the two poets up to the podium. Longley remembers: I rushed back to my rooms and grabbed my folder. I was too overwhelmed to register Mahon’s performance, but I remember my heart thumping as I read my own words aloud to an audience for the first time . . . We stagger through such occasions without realising their significance.⁶⁰

Kennelly would remain a valuable ally, promoting Longley and Mahon in Dublin literary circles and inviting them to readings. His enthusiasm served as confirmation for the young poets, and may also have given them the confidence necessary to dismiss Hobsbaum’s criticisms in the Belfast Group workshop. In 1962, the two friends moved into a dismal flat in Merrion Square and began publishing poems in the Irish Times. Longley was studying for a second attempt at moderatorship, supporting himself by teaching Latin at a Blackrock school, while Mahon was in his final year at Trinity. Living together provoked a literary confrontation, as Longley remembered: All the while I was responding to Mahon’s poetic challenge. I returned to our shadowy basement after the Easter break to find the fireplace behind the electric fire stuffed with screwed-up balls of paper, the draughts of his translation of Villon’s ‘Shorter Testament’. This inspired me to concentrate my dwindling energies on a version of Propertius’s great ‘Cornelia’ elegy in rhymed ten-line stanzas. Mahon’s verve and edginess helped to keep me sane.⁶¹

Yet Longley also wrote that ‘these were fulfilling rather than happy times. Our friendship and our abilities were often stretched as far as they could go. I admired Mahon’s disenchanted vision, but was less attracted than he to the role of poète maudit.’⁶² (Mahon, for his part, described himself at this time as ‘a surly étranger in a donkey jacket, with literary pretensions’.⁶³) Later Longley was more frank in his appraisal of the Trinity years, stating, ‘Exciting times, but I felt edgy and inadequate and not particularly happy.’⁶⁴ He was also more forthcoming about his rivalry with Mahon, admitting, ‘We kept an eye on each other like sprinters at the start of a race.’⁶⁵ Yet it may be that Longley felt the rivalry more strongly than Mahon, who described his Trinity days as idyllic: ‘Beautiful college, beautiful trees, beautiful girls: wherever you fell there was something to please. At the same time, it was a place apart—golden days, golden ⁶⁰ ⁶³ ⁶⁴ ⁶⁵

Ibid. ⁶¹ Ibid. 55. ⁶² Ibid. 54. Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, 161. Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 295. Ibid.

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moments.’⁶⁶ Still, the friendship superseded the rivalry: when Longley walked out of his final exams, it was Mahon who tracked him down to Amiens Street station and offered ‘avuncular’ consolation.⁶⁷ During this time, Longley was becoming more serious about his relationship with Edna Broderick (‘unlike me, a real scholar’), whom he had been dating for two years.⁶⁸ Her father, a mathematics professor at Trinity, was a Cork Catholic; her mother, a Dublin Presbyterian. Her parents compromised by baptizing their children Catholic but raising them as Anglicans; Edna, however, found the stuffy, self-important world of Protestant Dublin confining.⁶⁹ This was one reason, Longley guessed, that she was attracted to the company of the two Northerners: ‘She had contributed to Icarus essays on E.E. Cummings [sic] and Richard Wilbur, and had reviewed our own efforts favourably in Trinity News—which at the very least would make her our friend for life!’⁷⁰ The two eventually married the day before New Year’s Eve in 1964, with Mahon as best man. Although neither could have known it at the time, the Longleys would have a deep and lasting impact on the course of Northern Irish poetry— partly because they chose to stay in Belfast at a time when many members of the poetic community sought professional opportunities elsewhere. In their work for the Northern Ireland Arts Council and Queen’s University, they worked hard to foster cultural life in the province and to restore the reputations of writers such as Louis MacNeice and John Hewitt. Mahon’s main female friend at this time was Eavan Boland, who recalled meeting him when she was 19 and he 22. Like Longley, she immediately felt daunted by his talent: I was taken aback by the sheer verve of his idiom, the attack of his syntax, his bratpack stance as poète maudit from an unassimilated capital city. When I first heard his lyrics, they were seamless, flawless, not a growing pain in sight. My own were different. Glumly I showed him draft upon draft of huge and sprawling poems, stocked with swans and kings and clotted allegories. He would chuckle and criticise, criticise and chuckle.⁷¹ ⁶⁶ Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, 161. ⁶⁷ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 54. Longley notes there was no exchange between Trinity and UCD poets during this time, and that Michael Hartnett, Paul Durcan, and Eamon Grennan inhabited a ‘parallel universe’ in Earlsfort Terrace. ‘A Boat on the River’, 137. ⁶⁸ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 55. ⁶⁹ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, 9. This excerpt does not appear in the published interview. ⁷⁰ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 55. ⁷¹ Eavan Boland, ‘Compact and Compromise: Derek Mahon as a Young Poet’, Irish University Review, 24: 1 (1994), 62.

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To Boland, Mahon was not only the senior poet, but someone who possessed the assurance and authority of the male poetic tradition. Thus her perceived position of inferiority was complicated by gender. She has written extensively about her role within the Dublin poetic community at this time, when she nearly became ‘a sort of honorary male poet’ by writing ‘genderless’ poems in order to gain acceptance.⁷² Recalling her relationship with Mahon, she tempered her gratitude with a subtle rebuke meant to reveal the depth of the sexism she had fought against. ‘Indeed,’ she remembered, ‘when I was starting out, over coffee in Roberts’, he told me approvingly that one of the real strengths of my poetry was that you could hardly tell it had been written by a woman’.⁷³ But she admitted that her early conversations with Mahon were ‘truly sustaining’, citing talks about Yeats and heroism, MacNeice and Auden, Camus and Beckett, the weight of Irish history, and the North.⁷⁴ When they were not discussing individual poems or authors, they turned to technique: ‘We would take three lines, or a stanza, or even a phrase. A morning, an afternoon, an evening would go by in a blaze of talk.’⁷⁵ But Mahon barely recalled talking at all: I am sure Eavan too has little recollection of what we actually talked about during this time, aside from the possibility of talk itself—talks about talks, you might say. This is an unfortunate and embarrassing admission, and one for which historians of Irish poetry will rightly give me a hard time; yet what was I to do— take notes? We were friends, still are I hope, and much of our talk was inconsequential.⁷⁶

Obviously these discussions made a greater impression on Boland than they did on Mahon, a fact that is unsurprising when one considers the socio-sexual climate of the times, coupled with Boland’s need to seek favour within the male literary clique. Gaining acceptance, she felt, often meant subjugating her own opinions to those of the men around her. She remembers feeling as though she were ‘travelling with forged papers’ within the Dublin poetic community—a crisis of identity which would eventually lead her to break ranks with her male peers altogether.⁷⁷ Yet she may also have wanted to distance herself from Mahon for personal ⁷² Jody Allen Randolph, ‘An Interview with Eavan Boland’, Irish University Review, 23: 1 (1993), 118. See also Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (New York: Norton, 1996). ⁷³ Boland, ‘Compact and Compromise’, 65. ⁷⁴ Randolph, ‘An Interview with Eavan Boland’, 118. See also Boland, ‘Compact and Compromise’, 61–2. ⁷⁵ Boland, ‘Compact and Compromise’, 64. ⁷⁶ Derek Mahon, ‘Young Eavan and Early Boland’, Irish University Review, 23: 1 (1993), 24. ⁷⁷ Randolph, ‘An Interview with Eavan Boland’, 118.

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Plate 1. Derek Mahon in the 1960s

reasons: there is evidence in Mahon’s letters to Longley that the two were romantically involved in the mid-sixties, and that Mahon broke off the relationship.⁷⁸ Though Mahon enjoyed the company of Longley, Boland, and Kennelly, he yearned to leave Dublin and broaden his literary horizons. Following in the footsteps of Stephen Dedalus, he travelled to Paris in the autumn of 1964, where he stayed at a hotel in the Latin Quarter. He said he made ‘half-hearted attempts to enrol in the Sorbonne’ as an auditeur libre, but was put off by a barrage of red tape and hour-long lecture queues; he apparently spent more time reading and writing in a café on the Boulevard St Michel than he did in class.⁷⁹ In his first letter from Paris, he made a point to tell Longley he had read Sartre’s Baudelaire and Camus’s Mythe de Sisyphe (‘in French!’) and that he had heard ‘a pistol shot in the jazz-club down the street’ the night before.⁸⁰ The letter, ⁷⁸ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (1966) from Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘I was, frankly, annoyed . . .’; Mahon to Longley, n.d. (1966) from Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘And a slap-happy New Year to you.’ ⁷⁹ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (autumn 1964), from rue Serpente, Paris, Box 13, MLP. ‘Just to confirm your worst fears . . .’ ⁸⁰ Ibid.

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though self-mocking, shows Mahon cutting loose from his provincial background and cultivating a romantic image as a sophisticate, more at home on the Left Bank than in Belfast. After several months in Paris he returned to Dublin, and, in the summer of 1965, graduated from Trinity with a degree in English, Philosophy, and French. That autumn, he left Ireland for London, Ontario, where he had been accepted as a graduate student (and hired as a teaching fellow) at the University of Western Ontario. Mahon was not overly impressed with the city, telling Longley, ‘Dublin, even Belfast, is ten times the place.’⁸¹ Yet after a few weeks, he settled in and told Longley, ‘I think I’m going to like it here.’⁸² That autumn, he taught Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton to a class of friendly but uninspired students and attended postgraduate seminars on tragedy and the Elizabethan lyric; he also visited Massachusetts with his American friend Louis Asekoff.⁸³ (The two had gotten to know each other at Trinity, where Asekoff had been an M. Litt. student.) Although he considered writing a thesis on George Herbert or Jonathan Swift,⁸⁴ he spent more time working on a novel, and, as he said, ‘letting the graduate work slide’.⁸⁵ It took him only one semester to realize he was unsuited for academic work: ‘I know I could never be an academic, so why try?’⁸⁶ He told Longley he would probably fare better as a schoolteacher, and to let him know if any positions came up in Belfast.⁸⁷ Meanwhile, Longley kept him abreast of developments in Belfast, telling Mahon in late 1965 that he intended to leave Hobsbaum’s Group. Mahon assured him this was the only course: ‘you’re right to withdraw from that circus—it’s beneath you.’⁸⁸ With considerable relief, he decided not to return to the University of Western Ontario at the end of the fall semester and, after a stint in New York city with Asekoff in late 1965, he landed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he stayed with Eamon Grennan, an Irish poet then ⁸¹ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (autumn 1965) from Canadian Pacific Hotel, London, Canada, Box 1, MLP. ‘I got here . . .’ ⁸² Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Sept.–Oct. 1965) from 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘Just moved into the above . . .’ ⁸³ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Nov. 1965), from 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘God damn you, man . . .’ ⁸⁴ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Sept.–Oct. 1965) from 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘Just moved into the above . . .’ ⁸⁵ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Nov. 1965), from 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘God damn you, man . . .’ ⁸⁶ Ibid. ⁸⁷ Ibid. ⁸⁸ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (1965), 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘I’m delighted you’re so pleased with the poems.’

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teaching at Harvard and, at the time, romantically involved with Eavan Boland; he also spent much of his time with Asekoff, who lived in Cambridge (on the same street, in fact, as Grennan) while pursuing a Ph.D. at Brandeis.⁸⁹ After several uneventful months in Canada (where the nearest pub, Mahon dourly noted, was a mile and a half from his flat), Cambridge had a kaleidoscopic intensity. As he wrote to the Longleys: Cambridge is full of misfits and odd-bods, wandering Irishmen, wandering Jews, Boston Anglophiles with imperfect BBC accents, lobotomised pot-smokers, good-natured bad poets, known Communists who can’t get served in bars, and a red-bearded Scottish graduate of forty-plus who wears the kilt and rides a bicycle down Massachusetts Avenue at rush-hour, mad as a hatter. Most of the girls are beautiful.⁹⁰

After the fastidiousness of Belfast and the moral propriety of Dublin, Cambridge’s freedom was a revelation. ‘Really, Harvard is beautiful and Cambridge is delightful. . . . There is drunkenness, indolence, humour, and Joy, damnit.’⁹¹ He called the city a ‘bibliophile’s dream’, and spent his mornings reading American poetry at a small bookshop behind Harvard.⁹² In the afternoons he went to the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard’s Lamont Library, where Jack Sweeney, the Room’s caretaker, invited Mahon to read, work, and listen to poetry recordings. Sweeney (advised by Terence de Vere) had arranged for Longley to record his poems for the poetry room in Dublin in July 1964, Mahon in July 1965—‘an extraordinary endorsement’, said Longley.⁹³ This meant that by the time Mahon arrived in Cambridge he was able to listen to records of his and Longley’s work. Sweeney also invited Mahon to dinner at his home in Beacon Hill, which impressed Mahon enormously. With Sweeney’s help, he placed poems in Harvard literary magazines and even gave a poetry reading at the university, telling Longley he would ‘be represented in the letter if not in the flesh’.⁹⁴ He later put out an eight-poem pamphlet called Design for a Grecian Urn, published in Boston by Erato Press, and spoke about contemporary poetry on a local radio station. He ⁸⁹ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (1966), from Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘I was, frankly, annoyed . . .’ ⁹⁰ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (1967), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Enclosed are three new poems . . .’ ⁹¹ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (late 1965–early 1966), from 1683 Cambridge St., Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘This place is the greatest . . .’ ⁹² Ibid. ⁹³ Longley, ‘A Boat on the River’, 141. ⁹⁴ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (spring 1966), from Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘Thanks for the (rather startling . . .’

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enjoyed the publicity, which had been organized by Sweeney and James Randall, a lecturer at Emerson College and founder of the Pym-Randall Press. As Mahon wrote to Longley, ‘It’s all one big go, isn’t it, my dear?’⁹⁵ Throughout this time, Mahon and Longley exchanged a stream of missives containing poems, anecdotes, and literary gossip. Eavan Boland was a frequent topic, as was Heaney’s success: as Mahon humorously confided to Longley, ‘He is indeed, from what you say, riding the crest of the wave. Bad cess to him—I am frankly and unequivocally black in the face with envy and resentment.’⁹⁶ Longley’s envy was also apparent in a 1968 letter to Mahon, in which he informed him that Heaney was reading in Dublin with Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella; he wrote, ‘I shall probably go to that to cheer ironically from the back row.’⁹⁷ But it was poetry rather than gossip that kept the correspondence alive; in almost every letter, each would suggest slight alterations and larger revisions to the other’s work. These exchanges were certainly fruitful—by the time their first collections appeared, they knew each other’s poems intimately. During this time, Longley sent Mahon ‘Dr Johnson on the Hebrides’, ‘Narcissus’, ‘The Freemartin’, ‘Emily Dickinson’, ‘A Working Holiday’, ‘To Derek Mahon’, and ‘Leaving Inishmore’, among others. Mahon’s criticisms were honest and perceptive; the tone he took with ‘Leaving Inishmore’, for example, was typical of his responses to Longley’s poems: I can appreciate the personal background—but you have used all this imagery before, and more particularly the vocabulary—holiday, shipwreck, idiom. I’m not sure that you haven’t exhausted, for the moment, the theme of emotion recollected in tranquillity. I like the ‘painted ship upon a painted ocean’ effect in verse 4, but by verse 5 you have committed, I think, the sin of allusive obscurity. Perhaps I’m not in a position to judge this one, but there is a definite ‘in-group’ note about ‘Lest that excursion . . .’ which you have struck before. It’s good, but (if we must have advances) it’s not an advance.⁹⁸

During this time, Mahon also sent Longley many poems, among them ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’, ‘As God is My Judge’ (later entitled ‘After the Titanic’), and ‘The Poets Lie Where They Fell’; he eventually sent ⁹⁵ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (Mar. 1966), from Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘Thanks for the letter.’ ⁹⁶ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (1966), from 1673 Cambridge St., Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘Thanks for the letter and the poems.’ ⁹⁷ Longley to Mahon, n.d. (Summer 1968), Box 14, DMP. ‘My term begins on . . .’ Mahon was apparently back in Belfast by this time; Longley was writing to him from elsewhere. ⁹⁸ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (c.1966), from Cambridge, Mass., Box 13, MLP. ‘I was, frankly, annoyed . . .’

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him the completed draft of Night-Crossing.⁹⁹ Though Longley felt intimidated by Mahon’s poetic skill, he could be equally critical. In one letter, for example, he told Mahon he had a ‘tin ear’, and criticized his ‘What Would You Say If I Were to Tell You Darling’, which he said sounded like ‘chopped prose’. He also advised him against using such long titles.¹⁰⁰ Mahon, however, defended himself meticulously: Do you really think it’s that bad? Or are you not just so prejudiced in favour of the regular pentameter that you are blind to a modest experiment with form and rhythm? . . . I am, of course, making a conscious effort to introduce new stylistic devices into my work—to train my ‘voice’ with variety, and perhaps prepare the ground for something richer than the regular rhyming pentameters we have loved for so long, God bless them. Is this ill-advised? I don’t think so. You have to keep running to stay where you are. I am becoming more and more aware of the writing of poetry as a dynamic process. One must keep growing and expanding. For a conservative in matters of form, as I am temperamentally, there is a salutary kick to be had in this, after all, very faintly pink radicalism.

He continued, turning the tables on Longley: Why, do you suppose, have you not written anything for six months? Could it be that you are working an exhausted vein, in terms of form? If the words don’t just fall into place any more in accord with your preconceived notion of what a really good, genuine, solid-gold, floodlit and revolving Poem should be like, why not loosen up a bit? You did before, magnificently, with ‘The Hebrides’ and ‘A Personal Statement’. But I mean really go slack—write humorous verse, pastiche, ee cummings, a new Dingleberry song, a Hobsbaumiad, riddles. Please don’t think me flippant, but I hate to have you feeling sorry for yourself because you haven’t been writing, and all for want of a companionable kick in the arse.¹⁰¹

This poetic exchange was much more than ‘a companionable kick in the arse’, however. It was sustaining. Yet, even as he criticized, Mahon could also be enormously encouraging. In the next letter he sent to Longley, he wrote, ‘Delighted with your new poem! It is quite beautiful and the last image was very distinguished—yes, very distinguished. Congratulations and full marks. . . . Thank God you’re writing again.’¹⁰² In this letter, Mahon agreed with Longley about ‘What Would You Say’: ‘You were, of ⁹⁹ Mahon was happy to learn that Edna had used ‘An Unknown Child’ and ‘Girls in their Seasons’ in her classes. ¹⁰⁰ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (c.Dec. 1966), from 596 Church St., Toronto, Box 1, MLP. ‘Good to hear from you.’ Mahon speaks of Longley’s criticisms in this letter. ¹⁰¹ Ibid. ¹⁰² Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Dec. 1966), from Toronto, Box 1, MLP. ‘Delighted with your . . .’ Mahon does not say which poem he singles out for praise.

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course, right . . . It’s no good, and is therefore to be scrapped.’¹⁰³ Even Edna Longley became involved in the collaborative process, though it seems Mahon was more unnerved by her frank appraisals than he was by her husband’s: ‘Your casual and quite terrifying vivisection (didn’t feel a thing) of the Mahoon [sic] canon has left me stunned’, he wrote to her from Canada.¹⁰⁴ Yet, a year later both Longleys would give NightCrossing glowing reviews. After all, they had read much of the collection as it had been written, and had offered their voices to its final shape. In a fitting gesture, Mahon dedicated the book to both of them. He later commented upon these early dedications, telling Eamon Grennan, ‘What these dedications were saying was “these are the illuminati, and I’m one of them, and we are going to change the world.” Creating a clique, really, a rather self-congratulatory clique.’¹⁰⁵ After a stint teaching English at Lee Academy outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mahon was offered a job teaching English and French at Cambridge Academy starting in September 1966. Before he could accept the job, however, he had to return to Canada to secure an American work visa. While back in Toronto, the headmaster of Cambridge Academy suddenly recalled his offer, leaving Mahon stranded in Canada. He settled for a time in Toronto, where he worked at a university bookshop and as a switchboard operator at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; by 1967, he had quit these jobs and found work teaching English to Canadian immigrants. (He was apparently an excellent teacher.) Yet he longed to return to Ireland. Across the Atlantic, dour and gritty Belfast became a source of nostalgia: the homing urge is on me. I ache with yearning for the wet streets, the horse manure, the shipyard sirens and the cracked and cobwebbed light-shades in a hundred musty little offices in Great Victoria Street and the Dublin Road. How can people live their whole lives without cracked light-shades? And tied-up swings.¹⁰⁶

It is clear from this and other letters that, for all his existential posturing, Mahon missed home. He could not contemplate settling in North America—the culture was too fast-paced, public transportation was ¹⁰³ Ibid. ¹⁰⁴ Mahon to Edna Longley, n.d. (c.Jan. 1967), from Toronto, Box 1, MLP. ‘Am in receipt of your rare . . .’ ¹⁰⁵ Grennan, transcript of ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’ with edits by Derek Mahon, typed MS, Box 34 DMP, 54. This excerpt does not appear in the published interview. ¹⁰⁶ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (Winter 1967), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Enclosed is the final . . .’

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non-existent, and (worst of all) the Guinness was terrible. By the summer of 1967, he was back in Belfast. Yet he would later use those peculiarities of Belfast life that had been a source of nostalgia in Canada—‘the | dank churches, the empty streets, | the shipyard silence, the tied-up swings’¹⁰⁷— to convey a feeling of desolation and hopelessness in his poem ‘Ecclesiastes’. That these same images appear in both a nostalgiac letter and a bitter poem suggests he may well have been the ‘Stephen Dedalus of Belfast’, as Heaney once claimed.¹⁰⁸ If so, Longley was the one who pulled him home. Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 at Mosssbawn, the fifty-acre family farm in Bellaghy, Co. Derry. He was the son of a Catholic cattle dealer and a housewife, and the oldest of nine children. From 1945 to 1951 he attended a liberal-minded primary school in Anahorish, and then won a scholarship to St Columb’s, a prestigious Catholic boarding school in Derry City. It was at St Columb’s that he began his long friendship with Seamus Deane, a day student from Derry’s working-class Bogside who had also won a scholarship. At first, the two were slightly suspicious of one another, as Deane recalls: The countryside that the boarders came from seemed to the day boys strange, and indicated a wildness. . . . Boarders talked so slowly that sometimes you thought a sentence had been spoken when in fact only a place-name had been.¹⁰⁹

The boarders were often mocked by the day students, who came from Derry City and considered themselves urban sophisticates in contrast to the lumbering peasants. Yet Heaney was happy to accept the role of the wide-eyed provincial, Deane equally happy to play the jaded, streetwise city boy: ‘Each of us could caricature himself happily: Heaney slow, calm, solid, country-cunning; Deane quick, volatile, city-smart. Heaney had bulk; I was a wisp.’¹¹⁰ However it was not until their final years at St Columb’s, in 1956 and 1957, that the two became close. Both had won university scholarships to Queen’s and had decided to take a postgraduate year at the school to study with Sean B. O’Kelly, an inspirational English teacher. Under O’Kelly’s tutelage, they read Chaucer, Shakespeare, ¹⁰⁷ Derek Mahon, Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 3. ¹⁰⁸ ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, Richard Ellmann Lecture, delivered at Emory University, 12 Apr. 1988, Box 1, SHP, 18. Published in The Gorgian Review, 42: 3 (1988), 465–80. ¹⁰⁹ Seamus Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2000, 56. Unfortunately the majority of the Heaney correspondence at the Special Collections Archive, Emory University, is restricted. Thus the information in this section comes mainly from published sources. ¹¹⁰ Ibid.

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Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Hopkins, Hazlitt, Shelley, Tennyson, and Arnold. Deane says, ‘We absorbed those texts deeply, drank them like hot tea and then felt the faint sweat of pleasure come out on our skin as they reacted within us.’¹¹¹ The act of learning was itself a source of pride and pleasure, for Heaney and Deane were part of the first generation to benefit from the 1947 Northern Ireland Education Act, which was closely modelled upon the 1944 Butler Education Act. Both guaranteed schooling to all British subjects to the age of 15, and introduced more state funding to universities. (The Northern Ireland Education Act also substantially increased funding for Catholic schools.) The Act had significant consequences for the emerging generation of Catholics, as Deane explains: it was education that delivered the first serious injury to the unionist’s blind bigotry: advancement was now to be achieved on the basis of merit, not on sectarian affiliation. As a consequence, school became vital for us. Learning had an extra dimension to it, an extra pleasure; it now carried a political implication, a sense of promise.¹¹²

This ‘sense of promise’ undoubtedly pushed the two boys to compete and succeed. They graduated in the spring of 1957, by which time Heaney had ascended—perhaps to Deane’s chagrin—to become Head Boy. In 1957, the two began their English studies at Queen’s. Heaney took what was known as Course B, which included Old English, Anglo-Saxon poetry, and philology, as well as the standard English classics. One of his most memorable teachers was John Braidwood, a Glaswegian who was an expert in Old English and Ulster dialects and who exposed Heaney to those images and cadences of the Dark Ages that would later resurface in North and Beowulf. Heaney and Deane were also deeply inspired by the South African poet Laurence Lerner, who alerted them to the subtle but forceful ways in which sectarianism had lodged itself in their minds. Lerner’s experience in South Africa made him particularly attuned to sectarianism in Belfast; as a result, his English lectures contained sociological explorations of race, tribe, and clan. As Deane put it, ‘he reordered the local tyranny in our minds’.¹¹³ Heaney also remembered that ‘Lerner gave me pleasure in the practice of practical criticism, praised an essay of mine in my first year at Queen’s, which “corroborated” me, albeit early on and anonymously.’¹¹⁴ ¹¹¹ Ibid. 62. ¹¹² Ibid. Working- and middle-class Protestants (such as Longley and Mahon) were also beneficiaries of the Act. ¹¹³ Ibid. 63. ¹¹⁴ Seamus Heaney to Michael Parker, 23 Jan. 1986. Quoted in Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1993), 22.

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The English syllabus included Webster, Marlowe, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets, the Romantics, and Hazlitt. Though Deane recalled having read Valéry, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Randall Jarrell, as well as T. S. Eliot’s essays, he claimed no Irish authors were included: ‘I don’t remember reading or talking about any Irish poets at all. I think then I was mercifully ignorant of Yeats, and Joyce was a distant mountain I might someday climb.’¹¹⁵ But in fact students did have the option of studying Joyce or Yeats; Heaney, however, chose Frost and Hemingway instead. In an interview with James Randall, he recalls that he first started thinking about Yeats in 1966 when he began to teach his work, and only really began to confront the poet seriously in the early 1970s. Like Mahon and Longley, the two Catholic students were reared on the classics of the English canon, with little exposure to Irish literature. Deane has said that when the two talked about each other’s poetry during their time at Queen’s, ‘the dialogue was governed by the notion that SD was being excitingly experimental and fancy and SH was being very imitative and modest and careful, although always stalwart and steady’.¹¹⁶ Again, it was the old dichotomy of day boy and boarder reasserting itself. Though Deane is self-mocking in his account of his youthful arrogance, in a 2000 New Yorker article he reiterated the comparison of his daring brashness to Heaney’s boring steadfastness: ‘I was drinking quite a lot and generally played the delinquent; Heaney did not drink, became an official of the university Catholic Students’ Society, attended lectures, went to the library, wrote his essays.’¹¹⁷ Heaney’s image as a pious, dutiful, and rather dull teetotaller is obviously the less intriguing of the two. Given the success achieved by both men, Deane implies that he got by on his wits, while Heaney had to plod through the texts. Like Mahon and Longley, Deane and Heaney lived together during their second year at university in a flat on Parks Road—a living arrangement which, like the parallel one in Dublin, provoked a poetic challenge. The two sent each other many poems over the long summer vacations, which Heaney recalled in ‘The Ministry of Fear’: Here’s two on’s are sophisticated, Dabbling in verses till they have become A life: from bulky envelopes arriving In vacation time to slim volumes ¹¹⁵ E-mail to author, 28 Jan. 1999. ¹¹⁷ Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, 64.

¹¹⁶ Ibid.

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Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’. Those poems in longhand, ripped from wire spine Of your exercise book, bewildered me— Vowels and ideas bandied free As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores. I tried to write about the sycamores And innovated a South Derry rhyme With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled. Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain Were walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution. Have our accents Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak As well as students from the Protestant schools.’ Remember that stuff? Inferiority Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.¹¹⁸

Deane’s charge, that he was the more experimental of the two, is here confirmed by Heaney, who records his ‘bewildered’ response to his friend’s daring use of rhyme and metre. Heaney’s question, ‘Have our accents changed?’ is an expression of both doubt and confidence—on the one hand both men have surpassed their wildest dreams of success, on the other they feel alienated from their working-class and rural backgrounds. Changed accents might ease the way into genteel society, but also distance them from their roots; the question gets to the heart of their conflicting identities as Northern Catholics and Southern intellectuals and alludes to the sometimes painful process of discovering a poetic voice. Heaney rebuts the admonishment that Catholics do not speak as well as Protestants in a line of brazen ineloquence: ‘Remember that stuff?’ The strength of this prosaic response, as the writer well knows, lies in its defiance to the imperialist ‘lawns of elocution’. The poem is partly an acknowledgement of Deane’s role in the drama of finding a voice (or choosing an accent), and suggests a certain gratitude for leading the way. But, like the young Longley, who felt forced to compete with Mahon, Deane was unnerved by and envious of Heaney’s success. He recalls publishing a ‘long shapeless’ poem in the Queen’s university magazine Gorgon, heavily influenced by Allen Tate, alongside Heaney’s ‘short shapely poem “Aran” ’.¹¹⁹ (In a striking coincidence, the same episode occurred between Mahon and Longley at Trinity, when each published a ¹¹⁸ Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 63–4. ¹¹⁹ Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, 64.

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poem in the same issue of Icarus.) Like Longley, Deane felt dejected in the face of what he perceived to be a superior talent: it was modest as mine was pretentious, as precise as mine was vague. Laurence Lerner asked me if I had noticed Heaney’s poem. I had, but I wanted to hear what Lerner had to say about mine. Of course, that was what he had to say about mine, but I was too dumb to realize it then. . . . Heaney was serving an apprenticeship. I was just being an undergraduate. Lerner put it nicely. Heaney, he said, was trying to write poems, and I was trying to write poetry.¹²⁰

Heaney’s early work was, in fact, more accomplished than Deane’s. ‘Reaping in Heat’, which appeared in Q during Michaelmas 1959, shows him experimenting with the ‘South Derry rhyme’ mentioned in ‘The Ministry of Fear’: Hushed And lulled Lay in the field, under a high-sky sun. Pushed And pulled Came the rasp of steel on stone, For, slashing the drowsiness, the mower was whetting his scythe . . .¹²¹

While Heaney stays focused on the motion of the mower, Deane’s work, as Lerner observed, drifts. ‘Pause’, published in Gorgon, May 1959, offers only vague imagery, and is weighed down by heavy rhymes: Where the fire throbs The rhythmic successions of days, And our shadows loom In the awe of the room, And the soft wash of the silence Begins to boom on the drums . . .¹²²

Though Deane was to make his name as an academic rather than a poet, his literary rivalry with Heaney undoubtedly drove his will to succeed— and vice versa. The two graduated with First Class Honours in 1961, and Heaney won the McMullen medal for academic achievement (he used the book tokens to buy the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice and plays by Synge ¹²⁰ Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, 64. ¹²¹ Seamus Heaney, ‘Reaping in Heat’, Q, Michaelmas Term, Queen’s University Belfast (1959), 27. Heaney’s ellipsis. ¹²² Seamus Deane, ‘Pause’, Gorgon, 2, Queen’s University Belfast (May 1959).

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and Wilde).¹²³ Heaney’s English professor, Peter Butter, wanted him to do a D.Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had been offered a scholarship, but Heaney chose to stay in Belfast. He attributes the decision to a sense of confusion, as well as a desire to conform to family expectations, ‘some lack of confidence, and lack of nous’.¹²⁴ Both men opted to teach in secondary schools: Deane in Derry, Heaney in Belfast. From the beginning, Heaney was an exceptional teacher, as Philip Hobsbaum remembers: The then Inspector of Schools for the province was a Protestant called John Ferguson, and he said to me, ‘The news of this man’s teaching went far and wide. I had to haul him out of the school and make him an extra at St Joseph’s College to teach the other teachers how to teach.’ He’s as good a teacher as he is a poet.¹²⁵

The next year Deane went to Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D. on the European Enlightenment while Heaney enrolled in a PGCE course at St Joseph’s Training College in Belfast. Again, their decisions reflected the old divisions: Deane the trendy young intellectual, Heaney the dutiful, civic-minded role model. The two lost touch for about two years until one day, newly married, the Heaneys visited Deane at Cambridge—bearing, as Deane duly noted, a bottle of whiskey. ‘Heaney the teetotaller had gone’, he wrote. ‘Heaney the poet had arrived.’¹²⁶ Years later, Deane would watch Heaney accept the Nobel Prize for Literature with mixed feelings, wondering if their friendship would ever be the same: Would we ever now be as we had been? Would his fame now leave me, and others, feeling that we, I, had nothing left to say except that we had remained ordinary, whereas he had become extraordinary?¹²⁷

Deane’s uneasiness with Heaney’s triumph reflects the range of emotions that would characterize these writers’ relationships with one another throughout their careers. There would be jealousy, resentment, and anger, though these emotions would ultimately be checked by trust, generosity, and admiration. These early friendships were crucial to the writers’ intellectual and artistic development: as young men, they were already finding their voices and tuning their ears against each other. ¹²³ Parker, Seamus Heaney, 26. ¹²⁴ Quoted ibid. 27. ¹²⁵ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ¹²⁶ Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus’, 64. ¹²⁷ Ibid. 79.

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A happy coincidence would soon bring the Heaneys and the Longleys together in Belfast under Philip Hobsbaum’s roof; there, wrote Longley, ‘It was a relief as well as an excitement to meet others for whom poetry was everything, and to sense the “village of minds, poetry’s townland” extending infinitely.’¹²⁸ ¹²⁸ Longley, ‘The Empty Holes of Spring’, 55. Longley is here quoting a line from his poem ‘River & Fountain’.

2 The Belfast Group In 1960, literary life in Belfast had begun to stagnate. Although Sam Hanna Bell, Michael McLaverty, and Roy McFadden were still living and writing in the city, John Hewitt was away in Coventry and the Ulster literary magazine Rann had folded. When looking back, several Northern Irish poets remembered these years as particularly bleak. James Simmons, an English lecturer in Coleraine, was at the time living in Portrush and performing his songs in the local bars. As an aspiring poet, he felt isolated in his provincial surroundings: ‘You can’t believe the loneliness of someone beginning to write, say, in Portrush when I was writing, or Derry, and there’s no one to talk to, no one who’ll listen or understand.’¹ Longley would have empathized. In 1964, he moved back to Belfast in order to be closer to Edna, who had been appointed as an English lecturer at Queen’s. He began teaching Classics at Inst, though he longed to spend more time writing. With Mahon in Canada, and Boland and Kennelly across the border in Dublin, there was little opportunity for lively poetic exchange. Yet one man would soon breathe air into literary Belfast’s sagging sails. Longley remembers: Culturally in the early 60s, Belfast was a 40-watt bulb. There was hardly anything going on. If a continental film came to Belfast, we queued up in the cold at 11 o’clock at night. So there was this 40-watt bulb which you might call Belfast culture, and this hot spot, which was the Hobsbaum house.²

Philip Hobsbaum came to Belfast in 1962 and the next year founded the creative writing workshop—commonly dubbed the Belfast Group—that first brought the Longleys, the Heaneys, Mahon, Simmons, Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty, and many others together under one roof. Hobsbaum ¹ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’, BBC Radio 3 programme, produced by Neal Acheson, written and presented by Roisin McAuley for Zinzan Productions, first aired 30 Jan. 2000. ² Ibid.

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forced these writers to take their literary aspirations seriously; his belief in their work fuelled their creative drive, as MacLaverty remembers: Here, in a room in Belfast, in the mid-60s, when nothing exciting was happening, Philip came into this and said, ‘What you’re all writing about is as valid and as brilliant as anywhere else.’ Always Philip was 100% behind the writer. I think it’s something to do with giving people a voice, and he would find, whether it was in his heart or head, he could find something to say to validate what was written on the page.³

To be sure, it was not Hobsbaum who singlehandedly inspired Belfast’s young writers—John Hewitt, Sam Hanna Bell, W. R. Rodgers, and Louis MacNeice had already given the next generation a sense of identity and purpose, while lecturers such as Alec Reid had mentored Mahon and Longley at Trinity. Yet Hobsbaum was good at cultivating talent; it is this ability which Heaney cites in his famous homage to Hobsbaum, first published in The Honest Ulsterman Group Symposium of 1976: What Hobsbaum achieved, whether people like it or not, was to give a generation a sense of themselves, in two ways: it allowed us to get to grips with one another within the group, to move from critical comment to creative friendship at our own pace, and it allowed a small public to think of us as The Group, a single, even singular phenomenon. There was his introduction of a number of us to ‘The Arts in Ulster’, produced by John Boyd. There was an article in The Telegraph. There was Mary Holland scooping it all for The Observer when she arrived to cover the Festival in 1965. It’s easy to be blasé about all that now, for now, of course, we’re genuine parochials. Then we were craven provincials. Hobsbaum contributed much to that crucial transformation. . . . he helped the unknown locals by creating something of a mystique around them . . .⁴

These remarks show that, according to Heaney, he and the other poets associated with Hobsbaum’s Group were then happy to be regarded publicly as a ‘singular phenomenon’, and that they enjoyed the media attention they received and the ‘mystique’ that surrounded them as a group. Heaney implies that Hobsbaum—as agent, publicist, mentor, and friend—was largely responsible for this ‘crucial transformation’. ³ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ⁴ Norman Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group: A Symposium’, Honest Ulsterman, 53 (1976), 62–3. Though Richard Kirkland argues that Heaney’s remarks here are ‘the clearest endorsement of a coherent writing school in Belfast that exists’, I believe Heaney’s comments to Seamus Deane in ‘Unhappy and at Home’ are even more persuasive (Crane Bag, 1: 1 (1977), 61–7). Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), 78.

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Philip Hobsbaum was born in 1932 in London to a Jewish family of Russian extraction. After experiencing incidents of anti-Semitism, the family left the city in the late thirties, and settled in North Yorkshire. When his father, an engineer, was transferred to West Yorkshire, he enrolled his son in Bellevue Grammar School; a short time later, the young Hobsbaum read Culture and Environment by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, a book which was to have a significant impact not only upon him, but on an entire generation of young scholars. The book sketched the ideas that would come to dominate Leavis and Thompson’s general attitude towards the relationship between literature and culture: namely, that literature was the only remaining national ‘tradition’ left in a world degraded by the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent march of progress. Leavis made it his priority to acquaint his students with the literary and cultural hallmarks of this new society—advertising, popular fiction, the cinema, journalism—in order to ensure that they were equipped to rebel against it. The media and popular culture threatened to contaminate literature, just as industrial ‘progress’ had corrupted the nation: if words are our chief link with the past, they depend for their life, vigour and potency on being used in association with such traditions as the wheelwright’s . . . such traditions as died when George Sturt’s shop became a garage and his Surrey village a suburb. . . . It now becomes plain why it is of so great importance to keep the literary tradition alive. For if language tends to be debased instead of invigorated by contemporary use, then it is to literature alone, where its subtlest and finest use is preserved, that we can look with any hope of keeping in touch with our spiritual tradition . . .⁵

Leavis’s ideas were marked by an evangelical morality that gave him the status of a guru (David Lodge has even gone so far as to call him a selffashioned saint).⁶ As such, he was served by many young disciples at Cambridge, eager graduate students who disseminated his ideas through their own writing and teaching, just as Hobsbaum later would. Many also helped with the production of Scrutiny, a critical review edited by Leavis, his wife, and a rotating circle of acolytes for twenty years. It is something of a cliché to say that Scrutiny lived up to its name, yet there is perhaps no better way to put it. Inspired by the integrity of The Calendar of Modern Letters, a literary journal that had run from 1925 to 1927, Leavis and ⁵ F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), 81. ⁶ David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), 177.

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others founded the magazine in 1932; the name Scrutiny was a reference to the ‘Scrutinies’ section of The Calendar, in which literary works were mercilessly critiqued. Leavis continued this practice in his own pages with even more rigour—and less regard for reputation. It was soon clear that the journal existed in opposition to the ‘modish’ London literary set associated with the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the Nation, and the Criterion—publications, Leavis felt, that were more concerned with flattering egos than analysing texts.⁷ Unlike these journals, Scrutiny had almost no financial backing; contributors were unpaid and subscription fees did not quite cover the printing costs. But Leavis would have it no other way. ‘It was an outlaws’ enterprise’, he wrote, ‘and we were kept very much aware of that from the outset to the close.’⁸ Because the journal did not depend on patronage or high subscription levels, it was free to question the work of even the most revered modern poets, such as Auden. As a result, Leavis and the Scrutiny circle inspired venomous insults from the London literary establishment. Some academics were also at odds with the journal, since Leavis saw nothing wrong with publishing an article about Shakespeare written by a non-Shakespearean. Literature, he felt, was not the exclusive domain of scholars. When Scrutiny finally folded in 1953 for lack of contributors, many breathed a sigh of relief. But Leavis’s particular brand of criticism, a rigorous close reading of the text in order to reveal meaning (initially pioneered by I. A. Richards and William Empson), was to have a profound influence on literary studies for several generations. In Britain, Leavis cleared a space for ‘provincial’ poets by shifting the literary centre of England from London outward. In America, his ideas influenced conservative Southern writers like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, who also believed that a new type of literary criticism could help repair the damage done to society by industry and commercialism.⁹ By the sixth form, Hobsbaum desperately wanted to study with Leavis. He worked hard to win a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, in 1952, where he met with the venerated scholar three times a week for ⁷ F. R. Leavis, ‘Scrutiny: A Retrospect’, Scrutiny XX (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 10. ⁸ Ibid. 1. ⁹ These writers dedicated themselves, like Leavis, to the restoration of rural, pre-industrial lifestyles through a criticism (the ‘New Criticism’, also advocated by T. S. Eliot) that fortified readers against the new literature of media, advertising, and free verse. They became known as the Agrarians, and advocated a complete abandonment of commercial agriculture, which had left so many Southerners displaced, and a return to subsistence farming and traditional values.

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three years. Hobsbaum insists that Leavis was not a remote, lofty figure— on the contrary, he made time for his students and encouraged them greatly: ‘He had a gift of listening. His eyes penetrated to your soul . . . he was an amazing man, an extraordinary man.’¹⁰ Leavis’s approach to literature would heavily influence Hobsbaum’s; nearly five decades after Hobsbaum left Cambridge, he still referred reverently to his mentor as ‘an inspiration’.¹¹ As Peter Porter later noted, ‘Philip believed, because he’d studied with Dr Leavis, that what one wrote was really nothing less than a portrait, or map, of one’s soul.’¹² In 1953, Hobsbaum and two friends, Tony Davis and Neil Morris, became interested in forming a verse-speaking group and together placed an ad in Varsity inviting anyone who wished to come along. Peter Redgrove, Rodney Banister, and David Jones came to the first session and appeared regularly thereafter. At some point, they began bringing their own poems and eventually, Hobsbaum says, it transmuted into a writers’ group which he chaired. From 1953 on, he typed the scripts in duplicate on his Remington typewriter, and then sent them around to the group members before the next meeting. It was very important, he felt, that they had a chance to read their peers’ work before they discussed it aloud. Hobsbaum pioneered this technique, which he would eventually also use in his writing groups in London, Belfast, and Glasgow. The Cambridge Group was very small—there were at most eight members, with five or six attending on average. People came and went, but the two who were most actively involved were Peter Redgrove and Christopher Levenson. For Redgrove, the Group was a welcome distraction from the bleak streets of 1950s Cambridge: It was deadly, really. A shortage of women . . . sexual repression, I should say. They had a man in academic dress and two men in bowler hats who used to parade the streets to make sure you weren’t out late. Cambridge was pretty grim, I found, and this was one of the reasons I went and answered that advertisement in the student newspaper.¹³

Redgrove feared he would not fit into the literary clique on account of his scientific background, but, as he soon discovered, he was wrong: The door was opened by a chap with spectacles, very smartly dressed in a beautiful suit, carrying a cane for elegance. He said, ‘Have you come about the poetry reading?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I’m afraid I’m only a scientist. I shan’t be much good at ¹⁰ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ¹² ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ¹³ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

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this, but I am interested.’ He said, ‘A scientist! That’s just what we need, just what we need.’ And that characterised his whole dealings with things. He was so open. There were no two cultures for him—it was a single culture. And it was real. All the poems dealt with were real.¹⁴

Redgrove edited the 1953–4 volume of the Cambridge literary magazine Delta, and Hobsbaum took over the next year.¹⁵ But the magazine and the Group were separate entities. As Hobsbaum remembers, ‘Some people I couldn’t persuade to come, and some I couldn’t persuade to appear in Delta. There were lots of rivalries, really, lots of factions and infighting.’¹⁶ Ted Hughes never attended the Cambridge Group, since he was part of a separate literary clique associated with St Botolph’s Rectory (though Hobsbaum did publish one of his uncollected poems, ‘The Woman With Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’, in Delta). Hughes’s circle, which included Daniel Huws, Michael Boddy, David Ross, Daniel Weissbort, and Lucas Myers, comprised a raucous crowd; Hobsbaum remembers Myers ‘habitually’ sleeping in a tent on the front lawn of St Botolph’s Rectory, seeking shelter from the riotous noise inside.¹⁷ Later, when Hobsbaum heard that Hughes had married Sylvia Plath, he could not believe a member of this slovenly bachelors’ club had landed (in his estimation) such a clean-cut, all-American girl.¹⁸ In 1955, Hobsbaum graduated from Cambridge and moved his creative impetus to London, where he worked for two years as an English teacher in a school at Tulse Hill (where one of his pupils was Ken Livingstone, the future Mayor of London) and chaired another writing workshop, dubbed the London Group, each week in his Stockwell flat.¹⁹ Most who attended, at least in the early years, had some kind of personal connection to other members, since advertisement was by word of mouth. Redgrove and Hobsbaum, for example, were both acquainted with a man named Julian Cooper, a future film director who brought the Australian Peter Porter (then working in a bookshop) along to a meeting. Redgrove also knew Martin Bell, a friend with whom he used to compete ¹⁴ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ¹⁵ Hobsbaum edited three issues during this academic year. ¹⁶ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ¹⁷ E-mail to author, 25 Jan. 2005. This was, presumably, after Myers had been evicted from the chicken coop in the backyard (he later set up camp in the dining-room). ¹⁸ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ¹⁹ It was largely due to Peter Redgrove’s insistence, Hobsbaum remembers, that he agreed to chair another group. By this time Hobsbaum had married Hannah Kelly, a young secretary he had met at a Jewish debating society. She became responsible for typing and posting the scripts during the Group sessions, in which she also took part.

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for poetry books in the Chiswick public library. Edward Lucie-Smith, who had published an early poem in Hobsbaum’s Delta, joined the Group fresh out of the RAF; later additions included Alan Brownjohn and George MacBeth, who worked for the BBC. Sylvia Plath attempted to join, but was denied admission. It was a decision Hobsbaum came to regret: She sent me four meticulously typed poems, but I didn’t like her early work at all—real college girl stuff—and I didn’t respond appropriately. I was wrong of course. I think I was very cerebral in those days, and they were callow poems . . . two have never been republished and one was republished in very revised form. All very silly and sentimental . . . but I never thought of her as I think now.²⁰

Plath’s rejection went unnoticed in the 1963 Group Anthology, edited by Hobsbaum and Lucie-Smith, who, in their foreword, claimed that ‘anyone who asked if he could come was welcome to do so. No one has ever been expelled or excluded.’²¹ Hobsbaum’s use of the male pronoun here hints at the social barriers which would discourage women writers from joining Hobsbaum’s London and Belfast Groups. There were some women in the London Group, such as Rosemary Joseph, Margaret Owen, and Shirley Toulson, but, as Hobsbaum admits, ‘We were very short of women in the Group. I never thought in those terms—I had some kind of absolute set of values which clearly Plath didn’t match up to.’²² Ted Hughes, however, did come along, often singing ballads such as ‘Lord Randall My Son’ in a powerful baritone voice and upsetting the Rhodesian landlady. Hobsbaum always began the session by asking the featured poet to read his or her poem out loud; afterwards, the group discussed it while the author kept silent. ‘This was most important’, says Peter Redgrove. ‘People then discussed what he was doing and what the poem was doing and this enabled, of course, the author to observe his poem in action. And, most important, sometimes he’d found he’d spoken better than he knew. It was an atmosphere of great interest. There wasn’t a dull moment.’²³ Peter Porter remembers Hobsbaum saying, ‘We are not here to hear from you in prose explanation what you meant. We are here to see what we can find in your writing, to show what you meant.’²⁴ ²⁰ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ²¹ Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith (eds.), A Group Anthology (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. vi. ²² Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ²³ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ²⁴ Ibid.

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The London Group supposedly defined itself in opposition to the Movement, a group of poets—among them Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Philip Larkin, Roy Fuller, John Holloway, Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Conquest, and Thom Gunn—whose work was characterized by anti-Romanticism, anti-Modernism, and what David Lodge called ‘defiant, I-Like-It-Here provincialism’.²⁵ Amis’s introduction to Oxford Poetry (1949) articulates the sense of impatience and frustration Movement poets felt towards the poetry of recent decades: most of our poets had looked not to Auden or MacNeice, but back to Alfred Noyes. . . . The typical furniture of the mass of the poems was not, as we soon came to wish it would be, the telegraph-pole and the rifle, but the amethyst and the syrup . . . the typical rhyme not of ‘lackey’ and ‘lucky’ but of ‘bliss’ and ‘kiss’.²⁶

The Movement poets were particularly hostile to the documentary poetry of the thirties and the neo-Romanticism of the forties; their main targets included Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, W. R. Rodgers, Stephen Spender, and David Gascoyne. Where the neo-Romantics had written, as Wain said, in ‘careless rapture’,²⁷ Movement lines were ‘cold, intelligent, and self-contained’.²⁸ Above all, Movement poets recognized that their England had ‘changed utterly’ since the Romantics, and even since the Modernists. Instead of taking flight on the wings of poesy, they chose instead to celebrate, as Morrison writes, ‘the disfigured townscapes of the present— housing estates, shops, advertising boards, clothes lines’; when rural landscapes do appear, he says, they ‘are less likely to be wandered through than seen from a train window’.²⁹ Movement poets were attentive to the ordinary and the unobtrusive, and regarded Modernist heroes, particularly Stephen Dedalus, as pretentious and phony. In their verse, ordinariness became something to celebrate rather than defy. This was perhaps because many of them hailed from the provinces and had won scholarships to Oxbridge—thus they embodied the more egalitarian spirit of the post-war welfare state. The group, said Donald Davie, challenged ‘the monopoly of British Culture sustained for generations by ²⁵ Lodge, After Bakhtin, 155. ²⁶ Kingsley Amis, ‘Introduction’, in Kingsley Amis and James Michie (eds.), Oxford Poetry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), 3. Quoted in Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 21. ²⁷ John Wain, Preliminary Essays (London: Macmillan, 1962), 174. Quoted in Morrison, The Movement, 25. ²⁸ D. J. Enright, ‘Signs of the Times’, The Month, Aug. 1952, 107. Quoted in Morrison, The Movement, 39. ²⁹ Morrison, The Movement, 165.

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the London “haut-bourgeois” ’.³⁰ Perhaps Amis put it best in his introduction to Poets of the 1950s, where he wrote that ‘nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities’.³¹ Hobsbaum claimed that the London Group preferred the wild romanticism of Ted Hughes to the set, formalist stanzas and epigrams of poets like Davie, Gunn, and Amis: We were all very adverse. We felt the Movement, in terms of poetry, was too circumscribed, too formalistic . . . poetry in Britain, in the early fifties, was at a very low ebb. In fact it had been for quite some time—from about the mid-thirties. People were trying to write like T. S. Eliot, and they didn’t have any sort of background . . . trying to write like Rimbaud, and they couldn’t read French.³²

Yet the Group sometimes seemed more a variant of, rather than an alternative to, the Movement. Like Movement poets, Hobsbaum and other London Group writers felt that poems should be ‘a reflection of the world in which they were made’.³³ They also shared a commitment to ordinariness, a predisposition to formalism, and a distrust of Modernism. Indeed, Hobsbaum’s claim in A Group Anthology that the ‘defects besetting poets who are isolated from their audience’ are ‘abstraction, eccentricity, an element of private jargon, a sensibility so subjective that it failed to relate to the outside world’ reads like a Movement manifesto.³⁴ These ‘defects’ were mercilessly picked apart during Group discussions, during which the poet was encouraged to render his or her subject clearly, with a view to public accessibility rather than private obfuscation—again, features essential to the Movement philosophy and aesthetic. Hobsbaum’s inclusion of a Larkin epigraph at the beginning of his first poetry collection, The Place’s Fault, hints at the two groups’ shared affinities. Though chairing the writing group was fulfilling, Hobsbaum felt his career had begun to stagnate. In 1959, after a brief period of soul-searching, he quit his teaching post, left the London Group in the care of LucieSmith, and moved to Sheffield. There he spent four years working with William Empson on a Ph.D. on current language theory, which he eventually received in 1968. His revised and expanded dissertation, A Theory of Communication, was published in 1970. ³⁰ Letter from Davie to William Van O’Connor, 31 Dec. 1957. Quoted in Morrison, The Movement, 58. ³¹ Quoted in Morrison, The Movement, 61. ³² Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ³³ Hobsbaum and Lucie-Smith, A Group Anthology, p. ix. ³⁴ Ibid. 121.

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In 1962, Hobsbaum accepted a lectureship in the English Faculty at Queen’s University Belfast. He and his wife Hannah initially had doubts about moving to Belfast, which at this time bore much in common with the bleak, provincial city of Brian Moore’s novels. Jobs in agriculture and the textile industry had declined by 40 per cent from 1951 to 1961 and average weekly earnings were just 78 per cent of those in Britain as a whole.³⁵ By 1963, unemployment was almost 10 per cent, and Unionist gerrymandering was standard procedure in cities with high Catholic populations like Derry, where, as Roy Foster notes, ‘disadvantage had apparently become institutionalized’.³⁶ Yet, according to Heaney, the political situation looked brighter than it had in the 1950s, when Lord Brookeborough had reigned in Stormont. Terence O’Neill now headed the province, and his policies suggested a new era of liberalism. He made conciliatory gestures to the Catholic minority by visiting a convent and inviting Sean Lemass to Stormont. He also courted foreign investors such as Du Pont and Goodyear—companies that did not follow the traditional code of discrimination against Catholics.³⁷ Thus, despite rampant unemployment and sectarian discrimination, many hoped that a decade of tolerance and prosperity lay ahead. Still, Hobsbaum found literary life in Belfast extremely fragmented by sectarian segregation. ‘There were good poets like Roy McFadden,’ he remembers, ‘but they were very solo artists.’³⁸ Apart from the BBC and Mary O’Malley’s Lyric Theatre, the city’s artistic life was stagnant. In response, Hobsbaum decided to start yet another creative writing group, and began searching for talent in 1962.³⁹ Hobsbaum claims he paid little heed to the unwritten rules of sectarian Belfast: ‘I was told by more than one person that Catholics and Protestants would never meet under one roof—for any purpose. The Belfast Group, among its other achievements, proved these well-wishers wrong.’⁴⁰ Among the first to receive invitations were Edna Longley, a colleague in the English Department, and Stewart Parker, a graduate student of Hobsbaum’s studying non-realistic drama. Heaney was at this time ³⁵ Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles (London: Arrow, 1996), 46. ³⁶ R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (New York: Penguin, 1989), 583. Foster notes that Catholics, who made up 31 per cent of ‘the economically active population in Northern Ireland’ constituted ‘8 per cent of university teachers, 9 per cent of local authority senior officers, 19 per cent of medical practitioners, and 23 per cent of lawyers’, 582–3. ³⁷ Coogan, The Troubles, 47. ³⁸ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ³⁹ E-mail to author, 25 Jan. 2005. ⁴⁰ Philip Hobsbaum, ‘The Belfast Group: A Recollection’, Eire-Ireland, 32: 2–3 (1997), 173.

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enrolled in a PGCE course at St Joseph’s Training College, where he had begun reading the work of contemporary Irish poets such as Hewitt, Montague, Rodgers, MacNeice, Kinsella, Clarke, and Murphy. He had also discovered the poems of Ted Hughes, whose Lupercal, which he found in the Belfast Public Library in November 1962, confirmed (along with The Great Hunger) that his rural background was worthy of powerful poetic expression.⁴¹ By this time, Heaney had published his first poem, ‘Tractors’, in the Belfast Telegraph. Shortly after, the same paper took a second poem, ‘Turkeys Observed’, while the Kilkenny Magazine accepted ‘Mid-Term Break’ in the spring of 1963. ‘An Advancement of Learning’, which appeared in the Irish Times on 9 March, further increased the young poet’s confidence. Coincidentally, he had also favourably reviewed Hobsbaum’s A Group Anthology in Hibernia, writing that it was ‘a must for all those interested in the progress (and process) of poetry’. He continued: Mr Hobsbaum, who is at present lecturing in the English Department at Queen’s, has this to say: ‘I do not see why the approach adopted here should not work, with suitable amendments, in other places and times. . . . I should like to see similar enterprises started up and down the country and the universities.’ One can only hope his suggestion is taken up. If there was a Group in Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Galway, our young poets would find it easier to meet an audience and above all, interest should increase. Which might not be a bad thing.⁴²

This review shows that, even before he had met Hobsbaum, Heaney was aware of his presence in Belfast, and was impressed by his commitment to fostering local talent. His early enthusiasm contrasts sharply with Longley’s and Mahon’s relative indifference, and shows that he was more susceptible to Hobsbaum’s influence from the start. The passage also reveals the obstacles that Heaney perceived stood in the way of gaining literary recognition: namely, the lack of an appreciative—or even interested—audience. His comment regarding the relationship between the formation of a Belfast writing group and increased public interest displays remarkable foresight. Hobsbaum was likewise aware of the talented young poet in his midst. He had come across an early poem of Heaney’s entitled ‘October Thought’ in Q, the Queen’s University literary magazine, and was immediately struck by the poet’s use of Hopkins: Startling thatch watches, and sudden swallow Straight shoots to its mud-nest, home-rest rafter, ⁴¹ James Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, 5: 3 (1979), 14. ⁴² Seamus Heaney, ‘Poetry From a Co-operative Society’, Hibernia, Sept. 1963, 10.

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The Belfast Group Up through dry, dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter Flitting the roof of black-oak, bog-sod and rods of willow; And twittering flirtings in the eaves as sparrows quarrel Haystacks straw-broken and strewn Hide, hear mice mealing in the grain, gnawing strong the iron-bound, swollen and ripe-round corn-barrel. Minute movement millionfold whispers twilight Under heaven-hue plum-blue and gorse pricked with gold, And through the knuckle gnarl of branches, poking the night Comes the tickling tinkle of bells, well in the fold.⁴³

Impressed, Hobsbaum extended an invitation to his writing workshop by post. Shortly thereafter, he found Heaney at his doorstep on a Saturday morning, ‘smiling and keen’: ‘He seemed incredibly pleased to be noticed, taken up and spoken to. He kept grinning, a trait I didn’t quite understand at the time, but I think it was in pleasure at being recognised.’⁴⁴ Unlike Longley or Mahon, Heaney did not have to be talked into attending Hobsbaum’s Group; on the contrary, he was flattered and eager. After all, he had little idea when he praised Hobsbaum’s anthology and wished for ‘a Group in Belfast’ that this hope would become a reality. The first Belfast Group workshop took place in October 1963, a few months after Heaney met Hobsbaum; it met on Tuesdays (later Mondays) in Hobsbaum’s flat at 5 Fitzwilliam Street.⁴⁵ According to Hobsbaum, ‘The determining factor for recruitment was a person’s potential as a writer’;⁴⁶ he also had ‘to have an instinctive hunch about people’.⁴⁷ The proceedings of this workshop are by now well known: usually about ten participants listened to the featured writer read his or her work, and then discussed the writing with ‘Leavisite rigour’.⁴⁸ After a coffee break, Hobsbaum opened the floor to other writers who wished to read. The session usually ended around midnight, at which point Hobsbaum would select the next week’s writer; his or her work was then typed, copied, and posted by Hannah to the others. The founding members, according to Hobsbaum, were his wife Hannah, Seamus and ⁴³ Seamus Heaney, ‘October Thought’, Q, Michaelmas Term, Queen’s University Belfast (1959), 27. ⁴⁴ Michael Parker, undated interview with Philip Hobsbaum. Quoted in Parker, Seamus Heaney, 50. ⁴⁵ Various sources list the address as 4 Fitzwilliam St., though Hobsbaum says his flat was number 5. ⁴⁶ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 55. ⁴⁷ Neal Ascherson, ‘Great Brain Spotter’, Independent on Sunday, 28 Feb. 1993, 30. ⁴⁸ Michael Longley (ed.), Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 96.

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Marie Heaney, Stewart Parker, Edna Longley, Harry Chambers, Arthur Terry, Paul Smyth, Lucille Gregory, Joan Newmann, John Bond, and James Simmons. Later entrants, also according to Hobsbaum, included Michael Longley, Bernard MacLaverty, Norman Dugdale, Norman Buller, Iris Bull, Jack Pakenham, Hugh Bredin, Michael Mitchell, Michael Allen, John Harvey, Maurice Gallagher, Lynette McCroskery, Marilyn Stronge, Dan McGee, Robert Sullivan, and Rex Mitchell.⁴⁹ Hobsbaum says that Derek Mahon, who was abroad at the time, only came to one Group session when he was back in Belfast; Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson joined after Hobsbaum left Belfast for Glasgow.⁵⁰ During Hobsbaum’s tenure as chairman, the Group met for a period of eight eight-week terms, from October 1963 to March 1966. During this time, sixty-four ‘groupsheets’ were produced by twenty-eight contributors, including seven groupsheets each from Heaney and Bond, four each from Michael Longley, Parker, MacLaverty, and Bredin, and three each from Terry, Gallagher, Newmann, and Hobsbaum himself. A groupsheet normally comprised six or seven poems, or one short story, by a single author. The Belfast Group workshop employed the same critical method as that used in Cambridge and London: all focus was on the text. According to Edna Longley, ‘It was very intimidating, run like a seminar in an autocratic way, which created a sense of occasion—and a sense of controversy.’⁵¹ As always, Hobsbaum was master of ceremonies—a part he played well, whether he knew it or not. Heaney remembers how ‘Philip introduced each poem on the sheet with a comment, and the discussion took care of itself. It ebbed and flowed depending upon the poem, depending upon the energies that were there at the moment, the animal life of the den. . . . Hobsbaum was a very good conductor.’⁵² Marie Heaney agreed. ‘He almost physically conducted’, she said. ‘He had a mannerism of using a pencil which he kept moving almost in time to what he was saying. He’d sort of lean forward . . . extremely impassioned and intent, and this pencil kept going, mesmerically, for anyone who was watching.’⁵³ Heaney added, ‘Sometimes it was like a rod of correction, and sometimes like a little flutter of rejoicing. But it was part, certainly, of his rhetorical equipment.’⁵⁴ ⁴⁹ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 55, and interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ⁵⁰ E-mail to author, 25 Jan. 2005. ⁵¹ Ascherson, ‘Great Brain Spotter’, 30. ⁵² ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ⁵³ Ibid. ⁵⁴ Ibid.

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Michael Longley joined the Group in 1964 upon his return to Belfast from teaching stints in London and Dublin. Hobsbaum says he knew of Longley’s work from Irish literary magazines and was ‘overjoyed’ when the poet settled in the city.⁵⁵ He says he invited Longley to the Group on the strength of his published work,⁵⁶ though Heaney remembers it was he who urged Hobsbaum to invite Longley.⁵⁷ Longley, who was at this time teaching at Inst, claims he joined only upon the insistence of Edna, who worked with Hobsbaum in the English Department at Queen’s. Though he called himself a ‘reluctant joiner’, he began to look forward to the meetings.⁵⁸ It was here that he met the Heaneys, his first close Catholic friends (the Longleys were, likewise, the Heaneys’ first Protestant friends), and realized the extent to which he had missed out on the riches of Irish culture.⁵⁹ He remembered meeting Heaney for the first time at a party in Hobsbaum’s flat: ‘Heaney held my elbow very tightly: “Are you the Michael Longley who wrote ‘Questionnaire for Walter Mitty’ and ‘Emily Dickinson’?” I was flattered and charmed and our friendship got under way there and then.’⁶⁰ Longley also remembered that Heaney urged him to attend the Group, saying, ‘You must have your poems done at the Group. They’ll be the best ever discussed there.’⁶¹ Although he was not particularly impressed by Heaney’s poetry, which he initially felt was too prosaic, he welcomed the friendship none the less. As the two couples grew closer, they often took drives through the County Down countryside in Heaney’s Volkswagen, singing Cole Porter songs; these drives, Longley said, inspired Heaney to write ‘The Peninsula’.⁶² This was around the time the Heaneys gave Longley Joan Littlewood’s O What a Lovely War, a record of First World War songs which, Longley said, ‘awakened filial emotions that had gone underground. Thanks to that interchange with the Heaneys I wrote “In Memoriam”. . . . There were many such reciprocities.’⁶³ Longley also remembered that the Heaneys ‘showed real tenderness towards my stories of my father’s Great War experiences’.⁶⁴ Though Longley was ‘taken aback’ by Hobsbaum’s hostile reaction to his first poems, he was ‘also stimulated’.⁶⁵ Later, he said that ‘The Group, ⁵⁵ ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸ ⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ ⁶³ ⁶⁴

E-mail to author, 25 Jan. 2005. ⁵⁶ Ibid. Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 14. Letter to author, 27 Jan. 2002. Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 297. Letter to author, 27 Jan. 2002. ⁶¹ Ibid. ⁶² Ibid. Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 297. Ibid. ⁶⁵ Letter to author, 27 Jan. 2002.

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when it met, was electric. If your own poems were being discussed, you went with knots in your stomach.’⁶⁶ His description of a typical Group evening evokes the solemnity of the occasion: Every chair in the flat was occupied. People were squeezed about 5 or 6 onto this huge sofa. There were people squatting on the floor. In those days, they hadn’t put the cancer in cigarettes, and we were all chain smoking. So, the drawing room of the Hobsbaum flat was like a kippering shed. He [Hobsbaum] was an important figure, somewhat rotund . . . he had a beard which anticipated designer bristles. There were these thick—Coca-Cola-bottle-thick—spectacles through which he peered.⁶⁷

Though Mahon only attended one Group session, Heaney said that he saw him with Longley often. ‘We met in Longley’s flat quite a bit, just casually. Three young poets, and Edna and Marie.’⁶⁸ Much to Mahon’s chagrin, his friendship with Longley and Heaney would forever link him with Hobsbaum’s Group. In fact, Heaney, Mahon, and Longley formed a subset of that Group, which Michael Foley referred to as the ‘Tight Assed Trio’.⁶⁹ These three gave more readings together in Belfast during the 1960s than any other Group configuration, cementing the public’s perception of them as a clique, and influencing later reviewers habitually to compare their work.⁷⁰ Joan Newmann, a clerical assistant in the Ministry of Defence, was another early addition whom Hobsbaum had met through classes at the Queen’s Adult Education Department. ‘I was a sort of Jude the Obscure kind of person’, she has said of herself in those days. ‘I wandered around Queen’s longingly.’⁷¹ At the Group sessions, she began to find her voice— an achievement for which she credits Hobsbaum: He is a very gifted teacher. I remember someone . . . lauding a poem they’d known as a child: ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade Into the Valley of Death’. And I can remember him saying, ‘What about the horses?’ I thought this was an amazing way of looking at a poem in its entirety, with all its implications, not just the poetics, or indeed the history, but the horses. If somebody can do that, I think they’re very special.⁷²

Newmann read a story in a medical students’ magazine by Bernard MacLaverty, then a lab technician in the Queen’s Anatomy Department, ⁶⁶ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ⁶⁷ Ibid. ⁶⁸ Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 13. ⁶⁹ Michael Foley, review of Energy to Burn, by James Simmons, Honest Ulsterman, 29 (1971), 40–1. ⁷⁰ This issue is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. ⁷¹ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ⁷² Ibid.

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and showed it to Hobsbaum. He was impressed, and extended an invitation to the young fiction writer who would later make his name with Cal and Lamb. James Simmons also came during that first year. Hobsbaum had first met him at the Friends’ School in Lisburn, where he was, in Hobsbaum’s estimation, ‘a meticulous teacher’; he also knew Simmons from the BBC, where he often performed his poetry in song.⁷³ Like Heaney, Simmons was pleased to be asked to Hobsbaum’s Group, which was for him a sanctuary from the isolation he had experienced as a writer in Northern Ireland. As he wrote to his mentor, Professor Bonamy Dobrée, in 1963, he found Hobsbaum’s workshop ‘very stimulating after much lack of contact with poets . . . . The talk is very good on the whole.’⁷⁴ That same year, he wrote about the workshop to Tony Harrison with unabashed enthusiasm: Hobsbaum, choosing from my collected works those that we should discuss at his creative writers group picked quite a few new ones which gives a great fillip [sic] to my confidence. I have seldom felt so much like a real poet since I was at Leeds.⁷⁵

Simmons, who had no luck with publishers before participating in Hobsbaum’s Group, began a prolific career the year Hobsbaum left Belfast, with Ballad of a Marriage in 1966, followed by Late But in Earnest in 1967, and In the Wilderness in 1969. Though he too would try to distance himself from Hobsbaum in the late 1960s, the Group sessions guided him in the direction of success. As he later wrote, ‘I have no doubt that those evenings were useful educational events. I was certainly glad to have some serious people paying attention to my work.’⁷⁶ In the spring of 1964, Simmons left Northern Ireland to teach English at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. But he would be back by 1967, and, like Hobsbaum, would become a patron of Belfast poetry, using his own money to start the Honest Ulsterman. He would eventually go on to found The Poet’s House, a poetry school first in Antrim and afterwards in Donegal, offering accredited degrees in writing. The critical method he employed in his workshops was the same one that Hobsbaum introduced to the Belfast Group in the early 1960s. Hobsbaum felt the dominant presences in the Group were Seamus Heaney and Stewart Parker, who had known each other at Queen’s. It was ⁷³ ⁷⁴ ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶

Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. Simmons to Dobrée, 11 Nov. 1963, Box 1, JSP. Simmons to Harrison, 17 Nov. 1963, Box 1, JSP. Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 59.

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clear to him that these two would go far, but not so clear to his academic colleagues: Though the ability of the star attractions may seem to be agreed now, the matter was not so obvious thirty-four years ago. The university staff thought Seamus Heaney to be a relatively slight figure in comparison with the other first-class students of his year. One of my colleagues in the English Department at Queen’s spoke of Stewart Parker, novelist, poet, and later an original playwright, as ‘nothing out of the ordinary’.⁷⁷

Hobsbaum remembers that Edna and Michael Longley were also ‘highly articulate’, but that Simmons was quieter. ‘I wouldn’t have said he was really one of the key figures, as regards stage presence.’⁷⁸ Hobsbaum said he often urged Edna to read her brilliant satirical poems at the Group meetings, but she always declined. He felt Marie, too, had tremendous talent, yet she only read her poems once. ‘It was hard to find women writers’, Hobsbaum said, ‘even harder to find women writers who would have their poems eviscerated and excoriated by a group of their contemporaries.’⁷⁹ Joan Newmann, however, did allow her poems to be discussed; she eventually published two collections, Coming of Age and Thin Ice. Hobsbaum’s wife Hannah also wrote a play called When Rebecca Comes, which was workshopped in the Group. In 1964, Hobsbaum published The Place’s Fault and Other Poems, most of which had been written during his graduate years in Sheffield. The Larkin epigraph at the start of the collection—‘waking at the fumes | And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed’—refers to his experience there, and must have moved more than a few young Belfast poets to ponder their own provincial roots. The poems in The Place’s Fault, such as ‘Provincial Undergraduate’, emphasize Hobsbaum’s feelings of marginalization in a class-obsessed culture that makes little room for a Jewish scholarship boy from Yorkshire: That somebody! How he hates him! Whoever he is— From a better school, maybe, or dressed up to kill, Who can grow a beard, throw parties, pay out cash, Who can always get the prettiest girls at will. He covertly kicks his ankles in a queue, Or lounges across his path. What else can he do?⁸⁰ ⁷⁷ Hobsbaum, ‘The Belfast Group: A Recollection’, 174. ⁷⁸ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. ⁷⁹ Ibid. ⁸⁰ Philip Hobsbaum, The Place’s Fault and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1964), 2.

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Hobsbaum, despite his Cambridge degree and impressive literary connections in London, relied on intelligence rather than inheritance to make his way in the world. Though born in the city, he never felt at ease among his fellow Londoners; his anxiety surfaces in poems like ‘In London’, in which he describes his sense of ‘Northern’ alienation as he walks a city street: ‘Those hurrying feet would trample me to soot.’⁸¹ He understood what it was like to stand on the periphery of metropolitan literary culture, yet he also knew how to reach the centre, for he had made the journey himself. As Heaney said, ‘He emanated energy, generosity, belief in the community, trust in the parochial, the inept, the unprinted.’⁸² Such ‘trust in the parochial’ was particularly important to the young Mossbawn poet, who remarked that Eliot’s Collected Poems had ‘represented to me my distance from the mystery and my unfittedness—as reader or writer—for the vocation it represented’.⁸³ Even by the time Heaney was a student at Queen’s, he still identified with Leonard Bast of Howard’s End, ‘doomed forever to be familiar with the outsides of books’.⁸⁴ Even Mahon was impressed by Hobsbaum’s networking and influence: ‘Here was this man from London, people thought, whose name and whose friends’ names appeared in the leading journals, and he’s actually taking us seriously.’⁸⁵ Edna Longley also felt that Hobsbaum’s English origin boosted the poets’ morale: ‘it was important in cities like Belfast or Glasgow, where there can be cultural cringe before Dublin or London, that this man had come from England.’⁸⁶ Hobsbaum’s Jewish background meant that he was perceived as someone who would not bring political biases into his workshop; his ‘neutral’ stance, along with his egalitarian manner, must have contributed to the heady atmosphere of freedom during the Group sessions, a freedom described variously as ‘electricity’ or ‘energy’. For these were writers accustomed to guarding their words, practised at gauging the nuances and hidden subtexts of others’ speech. As Northerners, they had cultivated reticence. Heaney explains in ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’: Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us: Manoeuvrings to find out name and school, . . . . . . . . ⁸¹ Philip Hobsbaum, The Place’s Fault and Other Poems, 14. ⁸² Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 62. ⁸³ Seamus Heaney, ‘Learning from Eliot’, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 26. ⁸⁴ Ibid. 27. ⁸⁵ Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (1970), 91. ⁸⁶ Ascherson, ‘Great Brain Spotter’, 30.

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O land of passwords, handgrip, wink and nod, Of open minds as open as a trap, Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks, Where half of us, as in a wooden horse Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks, Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.⁸⁷

The poem acts as both admission and admonishment, and serves as a powerful expression of the poet’s dilemma in a land where the mere act of speaking in the wrong place at the wrong time could have brutal consequences. Enter, then, Hobsbaum, an ‘outsider’ who paid no heed to the unwritten rules of sectarianism that governed Belfast life. And enter a group of young writers eager to challenge Belfast’s code of discrimination— desperate, according to Longley, for culture. The result was an atmosphere where one might have felt he or she could, perhaps for the first time, say anything. The personal, face-to-face forum of the workshop seems to have lent itself to such freedom of expression, for Hobsbaum claimed that the dramatic monologue, along with the confessional, were the two most popular genres within the workshop. He attributed this phenomenon to the fact that all Group poems were read aloud—a constant reminder that ‘poetry is regarded as a function of speech’.⁸⁸ The poets now had an audience, a platform, and hence a ‘public’ voice. One might even go so far as to say the workshop became a site for what Said calls ‘opposition and resistance’ to the degrading forces of imperialism and the cultural hegemony of London and Dublin.⁸⁹ For Hobsbaum’s Group was one of the few places in Belfast—perhaps the only place— where these writers felt free to voice social grievances and to explore the complexities of cultural identity. And it was not just the Catholic poets who felt dispossessed—Ulster Protestants, outsiders in both England and Ireland, were also alienated to a large degree from both cultures. Thus, the two communities were ‘besieged within a siege’—victims of history and imperialism. It is not surprising, then, that both Longley and Heaney began to explore their cultural identities in poems they presented during Group sessions. Heaney, for example, read several poems challenging the Unionist hegemony, such as ‘For the Commander of the ⁸⁷ Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 59–60. ⁸⁸ Hobsbaum and Lucie-Smith, A Group Anthology, p. viii. These were also the most popular genres in the London Group. ⁸⁹ Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 333.

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Eliza’, ‘Requiem for the Irish Rebels, Wexford, 1798’, and ‘Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966’. He also presented ‘Tweed’, an early poem about linguistic dispossession, and ‘Soliloquy for an Old Resident’, an ironic portrait of a declining Ascendancy family.⁹⁰ These poems suggest that the public forum of the Group workshop encouraged Heaney to subvert the Ulster code of silence through his poetry—a daring feat, when one remembers his image of Northern Ireland’s citizens ‘whispering morse’. Longley too presented poems exploring competing English and Irish claims for identity. In ‘The Hebrides’, for example, the Scottish islands become a way station between England and Ireland, a place to meditate upon a conflicting identity, his ‘two minds’.⁹¹ Longley explored similar feelings of estrangement in ‘Leaving Inishmore’, and ‘Birthmarks’ (originally entitled ‘To Derek Mahon’), both workshopped in the Belfast Group.⁹² Most of the major poets who participated in Hobsbaum’s workshop agreed that there was an underlying Group aesthetic, and that several members, like Longley, found themselves at odds with it. This is not surprising, since Hobsbaum’s Leavisite ideas were well formed by this time. Nearly all the testimony suggests that abstract work based upon a writer’s private code of language—and hence inaccessible to the common reader—was discouraged. Such testimony comes as little surprise after reading Hobsbaum’s A Theory of Communication. The book, which reflects the influences of Leavis and Empson, posits that words must rely on their context for meaning—that language is never arbitrary. Because ‘One’s approach to a poem must necessarily be governed by what is available to the reader’,⁹³ Hobsbaum favours the dramatic and concrete over the abstract and remote. If the author limits meaning to a word’s context, then the reader is never confused. In a good poem, according to Hobsbaum, the reader may seek to complete the puzzle, but never to fill in the gaps. However, in a bad or ‘misreadable’ poem, the context is never sufficiently defined, and therefore the reader cannot come to any judgement about its merit or meaning. Hobsbaum took W. S. Graham’s ‘The Nightfishing’ as his ⁹⁰ Seamus Heaney, ‘Tweed’ and ‘Soliloquy for an Old Resident’, part of Groupsheet, typed MS, n.d. (c.1963–4), Box 60, MLP. ⁹¹ Michael Longley, ‘The Hebrides’, poem, part of Groupsheet, typed MS, n.d. (c.1963–4), Box 60, MLP. ⁹² See Longley Groupsheet, typed MS, n.d., Box 60, MLP. ‘Leaving Inishmore’ and ‘To Derek Mahon’ (later entitled ‘Birthmarks’) are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. ⁹³ Philip Hobsbaum, A Theory of Communication (London: Macmillan, 1970), 58.

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example, a poem whose context, he felt, was too vague to give the words sufficient meaning: If Graham conveys something like 30 per cent of an experience, then the critic can either . . . find the poem obscure and give up the puzzle or . . . supply the other 70 per cent. Since we’re all individuals, no person’s 70 per cent is going to be like that of anybody else. For interpretations to have much in common, far more would have to be conveyed by the poet.⁹⁴

According to Hobsbaum, widely divergent interpretations of the same poem are indicative of its failure—that it exists as a private code which only the writer can comprehend. This was why, he felt, ‘Any viable theory of language must be at once semantic, evaluative, contextual and socially oriented.’⁹⁵ He also felt that good, lasting poems should include ‘an extra dimension of experience’—again, a device to combat abstraction.⁹⁶ The arguments posed in A Theory of Communication help explain Hobsbaum’s interest in writing groups, which, under his control, were language laboratories where he could experiment with and test his ‘socially oriented’ theories of language. It also informs our understanding of the way he ran the Group and the aesthetic style he promoted. Why, for example, Heaney’s clear, plain diction was favoured; why Arthur Terry claimed the workshop poets’ main weakness was ‘a tendency to overrate . . . the dramatic monologue, the autobiographical lyric’; why James Simmons said the Group ‘met to thrash through each other’s poetry, removing esoteric and obscure bits’;⁹⁷ perhaps why even Muldoon, who participated in the Group after Hobsbaum’s departure, would later say that ‘one of the writer’s jobs is to reduce the number of possible readings of a text’.⁹⁸ A Theory of Communication corroborates Jack Pakenham’s feeling that ‘Honest-to-God Ulster down-to-earthness was encouraged, poetic flights of extravagant vision and imagination were frowned on as “Pretentious”.’ To him and other Group members, Craft rather than Art seemed to be everything; it didn’t seem to matter what the poem was about, and so week after week there was a proliferation of poems that a naturalist or folklorist would have loved; poems on birdnesting that ‘weren’t only about birdnesting but about Life’. . . Then of course there were the animal poems a la Ted Hughes, remakes of Greek legends and the most popular—poems about friends or distant relatives with boringly inane idiosyncrasies. A bird-watching ⁹⁴ Ibid. 57. ⁹⁵ Ibid. 208. ⁹⁶ Ibid. 66. ⁹⁷ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 59. ⁹⁸ Lynn Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, Contemporary Literature, 35: 1 (1994), 13.

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botanist with a Classical education and a mad uncle who loved stoats would have been the ultimate hero in the ultimate poem in this climate.⁹⁹

Pakenham was probably referring to Heaney’s poetry (although his last sentence also brings Longley’s to mind), and particularly to the type of poem that would later appear in Death of a Naturalist. Heaney has, in fact, admitted that his work was favoured over that of Longley and Mahon: They had more a sense of controversy with Hobsbaum and Hobsbaum didn’t go for their work because he thought it was too elegant. He was a strong believer in the bleeding hunk of experience. So there was an edginess therefore and I was favoured and they weren’t.¹⁰⁰

This statement precipitates the question of just how much Hobsbaum’s poetic ideas filtered into Heaney’s sense of craft. Rachel Buxton has argued that Robert Frost heavily influenced Heaney’s deceptively straightforward language, yet Hobsbaum—influenced himself by the Movement’s antiModernist, provincially minded rhetoric—also encouraged this ‘empirical’ style, and praised those poets who practised it well. Though it is difficult to measure Hobsbaum’s poetic influence, there is a clear affinity between, for example, his early poem ‘The Frog Prince’ (published in The Place’s Fault in 1964) and Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’. Each relates an encounter between boy and nature, manifested by hostile, menacing frogs that invite curiosity and revulsion. In ‘The Frog Prince’, Hobsbaum writes: He honks. Aggressive noise. And honks. His voice Glutinous with a swallowed mass of flies, I fancy. But it carries. Squats and turns Upwards his swollen eyes. . . . . . . . . And oars his ruthless path Through the thick pondweed, skating spiders, gnats Clouding his bluntnosed head, into the shade.¹⁰¹

Heaney’s boy also observes the frogs from a distance, more fearful than curious: I ducked through the hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. ⁹⁹ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 58. ¹⁰⁰ Randall, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 15. ¹⁰¹ Hobsbaum, The Place’s Fault, 53.

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Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails . . .¹⁰²

Change—symbolized by the rotting flax, the sodden, stale weed, and the amphibious nature of the frogs themselves—is at the heart of these two poems, in which both boys are driven to the realization that they must soon exchange childhood sensibilities for adult sense. Yet the ‘coarse croaking’ and military imagery in Heaney’s poem also brings Ulster’s darkening political situation to mind; the language captures the sense of unease in the air, the feeling that nature itself is on the verge of exploding: Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.¹⁰³

The speaker eventually runs from the ‘great slime kings . . . gathered there for vengeance’. In contrast, Hobsbaum’s boy throws a rock at the frog, forcing the reptile to retreat. Though ‘The Frog Prince’ takes a different turn at the end, its final stanza nevertheless brings the speaker of Death of a Naturalist to mind: In me, art Had worked, so that I felt on the plod home Squashed insects in my boots, gnats in my hair, Water-fleas creeping up my arm, my clothes Sodden and stale with weed . . .¹⁰⁴

Although Heaney’s metaphor is more sophisticated and the language more evocative, it is possible that ‘Death of a Naturalist’ owes some of its imagery to Hobsbaum’s poem. As Heaney admitted in an interview, ‘I had absolutely no confidence as a writer qua writer, I was hopeful, tentative, and—you know—wide-eyed with expectation.’¹⁰⁵ This sense of inferiority may have made Heaney more susceptible to Hobsbaum’s influence than Mahon and Longley, who had achieved some level of success by the time they became acquainted with Hobsbaum. Moreover, Mahon and Longley had already been part of their own literary ‘group’ at Trinity, regularly meeting and exchanging ideas with Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly, and Edna Longley (née Broderick). Because, as Heaney said, ‘They were already poets, in a way’, Mahon and Longley were less in need of collective support, and less charmed by ¹⁰² Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 15–16. ¹⁰³ Ibid. 16. ¹⁰⁴ Hobsbaum, The Place’s Fault, 54. ¹⁰⁵ Frank Kinahan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8: 3 (1982), 407.

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Hobsbaum.¹⁰⁶ Heaney, on the other hand, was more malleable. He did not start writing poetry seriously until he was 24, a year after Hobsbaum came to Belfast, and did not possess, as he saw it, the literary sophistication of Longley and Mahon. ‘They had an elegance, they had a self-confidence, they had met Louis MacNeice and W. R. Rodgers, they read contemporary poetry, they had collected slim volumes. I didn’t have any of that at all.’¹⁰⁷ Clearly, Heaney felt himself a literary outsider, intimidated by the urbane literati of Dublin and London, and baffled by modern poetry in general. Longley has suggested as much, telling Mike Murphy, ‘I think we were further along the road of accomplishment and capability than Heaney, who stood up to us and took what must have been a certain amount of aesthetic bullying from us and said in so many words, “I’m going to write my own stuff.” ’¹⁰⁸ Clearly, Hobsbaum’s support gave Heaney the confidence to stand on his own. He helped by demystifying the names of writers we were then reading. He had been to Cambridge and had published Ted Hughes in Delta. He knew the poet-editors in London. He gossiped about Redgrove and Porter. . . . He included us in, encouraged us to try publishing further afield and, in my own case, brought poems to the attention of an editor which resulted, on publication, in a letter from a publisher.¹⁰⁹

Hobsbaum was more a mentor to Heaney than to any of the other major poets involved in the Group; it is perhaps not by accident that in one interview he referred to Hobsbaum as a ‘teacher’¹¹⁰ and his workshop as a ‘class’¹¹¹ (though in a later letter, he stressed that he did not think of Hobsbaum as his teacher).¹¹² Ultimately Heaney credited him with launching his career: ‘Philip Hobsbaum was really the one who gave me the trust in what I was doing and he urged me to send poems out—and ¹⁰⁶ Frank Kinahan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8: 3 (1982), 407. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid. 408. Heaney voiced a similar feeling to James Randall: ‘From a literary point of view, Derek and Michael were more sophisticated about what to do. They had read Louis MacNeice, and they had met other poets. I had never met anybody.’ ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 15. ¹⁰⁸ Mike Murphy, ‘Michael Longley’, in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 124. Heaney remembered Longley writing a parody of his verse entitled ‘Heaney’s Spade’. John Haffenden, ‘Meeting Seamus Heaney’, London Magazine, 19: 3 (1979), 28. ¹⁰⁹ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 63. ¹¹⁰ Kinahan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 408. ¹¹¹ Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 14. ¹¹² Letter to author, 24 Jan. 2000.

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it’s easy to forget how callow and unknowing you are about these things in the beginning.’¹¹³ Not all the Group poets looked up to Hobsbaum as Heaney did: Longley and Mahon were not so much interested in ‘the bleeding hunk of experience’ as the rhythm of the singing line. Longley was particularly aggrieved by Hobsbaum’s criticisms; their relationship was fraught with tension from the start. As Longley wrote: I didn’t much care for the Group aesthetic or, to be honest, the average poem which won approval. I believed then that poetry should be polished, metrical and rhymed; oblique rather than head-on; imagistic and symbolic rather than rawly factual; rhetorical rather than documentary. I felt like a Paleface among a tribe of Redskins.¹¹⁴

Longley’s hostility towards Hobsbaum’s aesthetic reveals how much he felt himself at odds with the kind of poetry encouraged in the Group. Later, Hobsbaum would admit, ‘At the time it seemed to me that Michael’s literariness . . . got in the way of his experience.’¹¹⁵ Longley, however, was confident of his own voice, and of the direction he wanted his poetry to take: He used to say, ‘Longley, you’re a great big man, you’ve a great farting laugh, you’ve a filthy sense of humour, and you write these polite little poems!’ I think I was being encouraged to roughen up my utterance.¹¹⁶

But he resisted, saying, ‘I had my own music in my head.’¹¹⁷ Yet Hobsbaum’s aesthetic, aided perhaps by Longley’s exposure to Heaney’s verse, eventually rubbed off on him. He admits, ‘I think subconsciously my poetry might have become more rooted and more earthed as a result of the Group experience.’¹¹⁸ He cites ‘Dr Johnson on the Hebrides’ as a turning point, for it was his first poem to earn Hobsbaum’s unmitigated approval—Hobsbaum even went so far as to say that if he were compiling an anthology of contemporary poetry, he would include the poem in it ¹¹³ Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 14–15. Heaney also owed his early success to Charles Monteith, an Ulsterman who was poetry editor of Faber and Faber. Most people did not realize Monteith was from Northern Ireland, since his accent was distinctly upper-class English, but Hobsbaum thought this may have been one of the reasons he took to Heaney’s poetry from the very beginning. ¹¹⁴ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 56. ¹¹⁵ Hobsbaum, ‘The Belfast Group: A Recollection’, 176. ¹¹⁶ ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’. ¹¹⁷ Ibid. ¹¹⁸ Ibid. This idea validates John Redmond’s claim that Longley’s interest in Ted Hughes was a result of Hobsbaum’s mediation. See John Redmond, ‘Fighting for Balance: The Influence of Ted Hughes on Michael Longley’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003), 258.

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(Longley, in turn, dedicated ‘Dr Johnson’ to Hobsbaum). Although Brearton has criticized Hobsbaum for neglecting Longley’s early poems, it was he who launched the young poet’s career by persuading Macmillan to publish No Continuing City, which they had previously rejected.¹¹⁹ And although Longley has claimed he never altered a word of the poems he presented during the workshop, examination of his groupsheets shows that he made alterations to ‘Elegy for Fats Waller’, ‘Christopher at Birth’, and ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, all of which he presented more than once. At the same time, Hobsbaum’s criticisms may have confirmed Longley’s belief in his poetic voice as much as praise had confirmed Heaney’s, since the Group aesthetic gave Longley something to work against—an example of how not to write. In this way, he was defining himself against Heaney early on, finding his voice against the grain. This double-edged spirit of cooperation and competition was, in part, what drove the Group’s momentum. According to many poets involved, one of the most valuable aspects of Hobsbaum’s Group was its Leavisite scrutiny, which encouraged—indeed demanded—intense rivalries. As Longley said, the competition was ‘combative and no-holds-barred’.¹²⁰ Even after Hobsbaum left Belfast, the poets continued to apply the same unrelenting critical eye to each other’s work. Years later, Longley would recall his palpable trepidation as he read a new poem aloud to his ‘immediate circle’: the first critic of a poem that I write would be my wife Edna, and she’s quite hard to please, so I feel more confident then about showing it to Michael Allen and Paul Muldoon. So if those two like it and Edna likes it, I don’t really care what anyone else says. Heaney and Derek Mahon used to be in the immediate circle of readers. I would send them poems through the post, but by that time the poems would have had the Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Edna, Michael, and Paul, and there would be less urgency. I mean, I’m talking about those circumstances where you order the pints and you sit down and you nervously take a folded bit of paper out of your pocket.¹²¹

It is no coincidence that every reader Longley mentions attended either Hobsbaum’s or Heaney’s Group at one stage. His recollection makes clear the importance of this ‘circle’ of readers, who continued the tradition of ‘Leavisite rigour’ long after Hobsbaum left Belfast. ¹¹⁹ See Fran Brearton, ‘ “The privilege | Of vertigo”: Reading Michael Longley in the 1960s’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003). ¹²⁰ Robert Johnstone, ‘The Longley Tapes’, Honest Ulsterman, 78 (1983), 21. ¹²¹ Dillon Johnston, ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, Irish Literary Supplement, 5: 2 (1986), 21.

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In 1963, poems by Heaney and Newmann appeared in a prestigious anthology entitled Young Commonwealth Writers of 1963, while in 1964 Hobsbaum famously introduced Heaney to Edward Lucie-Smith at a dinner party. The meeting resulted in Lucie-Smith showing three Heaney poems to Karl Miller, literary editor at the New Statesman, who accepted them for publication. That year, Heaney, Stewart Parker, and Newmann read at the annual Irish P.E.N. meeting in Belfast, chaired by Hobsbaum, while the BBC aired two programmes publicizing the young writers, ‘The Arts in Ulster—Festival ’64: Stewart Parker on Poetry in the University’ (February 1964) and ‘The Arts in Ulster—Writing in the University, Philip Hobsbaum and Three Readers’ (February 1965). Hobsbaum also helped Heaney secure a lecturing spot at the 1964 Belfast Festival. By the mid-sixties, then, Belfast was a place where a poet might find support, inspiration, and, most importantly, an audience. As Longley said, ‘A convection current seemed to be lifting us upwards. We wanted to get better and better.’¹²² In March 1966, Hobsbaum ended his chairmanship of the Group and moved to Scotland to take up a position at the University of Glasgow; there, he founded another writer’s group, which he considered even more successful than his Belfast venture. Seamus and Marie Heaney continued the workshop at their home on 16 Ashley Avenue and at the Four in Hand pub on the Lisburn Road, where they welcomed new members Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson. The Group workshop continued to function on and off until 1972, the year of the Bloody Sunday shootings and Heaney’s departure for Wicklow. At this point, sectarian violence had strained relations between Catholics and Protestants to such a point that the weekly Group sessions seemed too much like fiddling while Rome burned. Yet, through their varied efforts, Simmons, Frank Ormsby, Longley, Muldoon, and others would make sure poetry remained at the forefront of the Belfast arts scene throughout the Troubles. If Donald Hall is right, that poets need the friendship of other poets much more than they need mentors, then Hobsbaum’s legacy may merely be that of convener.¹²³ Yet the testimony of those who participated in his workshop leads one to believe he played a larger role. The extent of Hobsbaum’s aesthetic influence upon these poets will continue to be a matter of contention, but there is no question his sway in London literary circles gave him the power to jump-start Heaney’s and ¹²² Jody Allen Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003), 297. ¹²³ Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1988), 21.

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Longley’s careers, and to give the Group poets, as Heaney said, ‘a sense of themselves’.¹²⁴ In fact, all the major poets interviewed in the 1976 Honest Ulsterman Group symposium had something positive to say about their experience with the workshop, which they regarded as a formative, enabling experience that allowed them to grow in confidence and stature. Heaney, for one, called his time with Hobsbaum’s Group ‘one of the most active, sociable and satisfying that I have experienced’.¹²⁵ Longley wrote that ‘Hobsbaum generated an atmosphere filled with controversy and excitement’ and ‘committed himself to Belfast and the writers here with great energy and generosity’.¹²⁶ Even Mahon said that Hobsbaum’s ‘enthusiasm generated activity in people who might otherwise have fallen silent’.¹²⁷ But perhaps Norman Dugdale put it best: I have heard it stigmatized as a corrupt clique whose members pushed each other’s reputation. This they undoubtedly did, but only incidentally, as a by-product. The Group’s chief merits lay in taking writing seriously as craft and expression; in providing an audience, however localised, which was prepared to listen; in creating conditions where newcomers could find (in both senses) their feet. It could be argued that talents, if real, would have flourished independently anyway. There is no doubt that, in essence, the Group was a fortunate conjunction of the man with the moment: of Hobsbaum, with his Pound-like belief in the existence of village Miltons under every bush, and the brief new dawn of Belfast in the 1960s. Yet the Group, like any other association of people, is entitled to be judged on its record. And its record was remarkable by any standards. In what other city of these islands have so many competent poets lifted off the launching-pad in the space of a few years?¹²⁸

It was Hobsbaum who brought this remarkable group together, provided a sanctuary against sectarianism, and put them in touch with the metropolitan media. Without his validation, it is possible Heaney might not have found the confidence to pursue his literary aspirations seriously. He might never have befriended Mahon, Longley, or Simmons, and Simmons might not have had an incentive to start the Honest Ulsterman.¹²⁹ In short, Hobsbaum’s presence was ultimately more ¹²⁴ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 62. ¹²⁵ Ibid. 63. ¹²⁶ Ibid. 57. ¹²⁷ Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, 91. ¹²⁸ Dugdale et al., ‘The Belfast Group’, 54. ¹²⁹ Longley recalls, ‘I introduced Heaney to Mahon and Heaney introduced me to Simmons.’ ‘A Boat on the River’, in Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (eds.), Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), 139.

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important than his influence—or rather his presence was his influence. It comes as little surprise, then, that when Heaney wrote about the Ulster Renaissance in 1966, he claimed it was ‘a renaissance due among other things to the energetic fostering of Philip Hobsbaum’.¹³⁰ Now it was up to the poets to keep the momentum. ¹³⁰ Seamus Heaney, ‘Out of London: Ulster’s Troubles’, New Statesman, 1 July 1966, 24.

3 Renaissance According to Longley, the mid-sixties marked ‘a turning point’ for the poets of Belfast.¹ This was a time of political optimism, when, as Heaney put it, ‘a Catholic might believe in shades of grey’.² Terence O’Neill’s overtures to the Nationalist community encouraged many, including Heaney, to believe in a more equitable future. He wrote in 1968: O’Neill was asking for better relations between the two communities, hoping to promote a gradual healing of the sectarian sores in the politics of Ulster. One trusted him because his personality is redolent of honesty and good will.³

Almost twenty years later, Heaney again emphasized this idea in The Government of the Tongue, where he spoke of the optimistic civil rights movement: by the mid-1960s there was a nascent expectation of better things, on both sides. . . . with a more active and vocal Civil Rights movement at work, and a less blatantly triumphalist generation of Unionist politicians emerging, an evolution towards a better, juster internal balance might have been half trusted to begin.⁴

Fran Brearton, Michael Parker, and Roy Foster have all suggested that this period was not as idyllic as Heaney remembers—Foster calls O’Neill an ‘unconvincing liberal’ who did nothing for civil rights reform.⁵ Heaney ¹ Michael Longley, ‘Ulster Poetry’, typed MS, n.d. (c.1971), Box 37, MLP. ² Seamus Heaney, ‘Old Derry’s Walls’, Listener, 24 Oct. 1968, 522. ³ Ibid. ⁴ Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), p. xxi. See Michael McKeown, ‘Captain Terence O’Neill’, Hibernia, 28 Feb.–13 Mar. 1969, 5, for a discussion of the impact of O’Neill’s liberal policies in Northern Ireland. ⁵ R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (New York: Penguin, 1989), 585. See also Fran Brearton, ‘Poetry of the 1960s: The “Northern Ireland Renaissance” ’, Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98; Michael Parker, ‘Changing Skies: The Roles of Native and American Narratives in the Politicisation of Seamus Heaney’s Early Poetry’, Symbiosis, 6: 2 (2002), 133; Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972, 582.

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himself, as Foster notes, expressed despair over the political situation in 1966, writing in the New Statesman, ‘Life goes on, yet people are reluctant to dismiss the possibility of an explosion. A kind of double-think operates; something is rotten, but maybe if we wait it will fester to death.’⁶ Yet it may be that for Heaney, O’Neill’s liberal gestures—even if ultimately empty—were enough to sustain hope that reform was possible. The fact that, according to Foster, ‘O’Neill’s strategy lost him more Unionists than it gained him Catholics’⁷ helps to explain why Heaney would so often speak of the literary revival and O’Neill’s policies in the same breath. Yet it was Hobsbaum, not O’Neill, who had jump-started the Belfast poetry scene; as Heaney explains, ‘The fact that a literary action was afoot was itself a new political condition’.⁸ John Hewitt’s departure to Coventry in 1957, as well as the deaths of MacNeice in 1963 and Kavanagh in 1967 (whose funeral Mahon, Heaney, and Longley attended) further emphasized the need for a new generation to revive the place of poetry in the North. As Heaney said, ‘we all were brought beyond our highly developed caution to believe that the effort to create new movement and language in the Northern context was a viable project’.⁹ In 1965, several Belfast poets became involved in the Festival at Queen’s, a musical, literary, cinematic, and artistic showcase organized by the 23-year-old entrepreneur Michael Emmerson.¹⁰ The young poets gained valuable publicity through numerous Festival appearances: Heaney, Hewitt, Friel, and Rodgers gave lectures and readings while David Hammond performed his songs.¹¹ Heaney, Longley, and Hobsbaum participated in a seminar on Louis MacNeice and Ulster ⁶ Seamus Heaney, ‘Out of London: Ulster’s Troubles’, New Statesman, 1 July 1966, 23–4. Quoted in Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972, 585–6. ⁷ Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972, 586. ⁸ Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, xxi. ⁹ Seamus Heaney, ‘Cessation 1994’, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber, 2002), 45. See Michael McKeown, ‘A Cultural Sahara?’, Hibernia, July 1968, for a discussion of the role the Arts Council played in fostering local talent. ¹⁰ The annual autumn event, which began in 1962 under the young Englishman’s directorship, was a relatively provincial affair until 1965, when he expanded the artistic programme to include ballet, opera, jazz, theatre, comedy, choral music, the BBC Northern Ireland orchestra, vaudeville, wind ensembles, French cinema, literature seminars, and poetry readings. ¹¹ The 1965 Belfast Festival at Queen’s took place 12–27 Nov. Heaney’s reading and lecture (‘Homage to Daniel Corkery’) took place on the 18th; the seminar on Ulster poetry took place on the 20th; Hewitt’s lecture (‘Coming to Terms’) on the 22nd; Rodgers’s lecture (‘Speak and Span’) on the 25th; Friel’s reading on the 15th; and Hammond’s performance on the 26th. For more information see Festival 1, ed. Ian J. Hill (Nov. 1965), Special Collections Archive, Queen’s University Belfast.

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poetry chaired by another Group workshop member, W. J. Harvey. The greatest boost to local poetry, however, came in the form of individual poetry pamphlets published by Emmerson as part of the new Festival Publications series; pamphlets by Heaney, Mahon, Simmons, Longley, Hobsbaum, Joan Newmann, Stewart Parker, Arthur Terry, and Seamus Deane were distributed and sold in Belfast, Dublin, London, and university towns across Britain.¹² These small pamphlets were, in almost every case, the poets’ first ‘collections’ (only Hobsbaum had previously published a book).¹³ What began, then, as a grass-roots attempt to publish local poetry quickly became an important vehicle for national recognition; soon literary magazines such as Phoenix and the Honest Ulsterman began producing pamphlets on their own. On account of their close affiliation with both magazines, the Belfast poets were the primary beneficiaries of this trend: in 1968, Longley published Secret Marriages while in 1969 Heaney published A Lough Neagh Sequence with Phoenix in editions of 1,000 copies; Muldoon’s Knowing My Place was published by the Honest Ulsterman in 1971. Because Phoenix had moved from Belfast to Manchester, the poets had, according to Muldoon, ‘a sense of an audience not only in Ireland but in England—and that seemed to give, in a provincial way, some kind of credibility to what was happening’.¹⁴ The pamphlet-producing venture and the lively 1965 Festival caught the attention of the Observer, which commented upon the ‘cultural efflorescence in the city’ in a promotional article that autumn.¹⁵ Years later, Heaney would invoke this article in Preoccupations as a formal inauguration of the provincial renaissance. Longley would also recall that 1965 marked ‘a new phase’.¹⁶ This was, furthermore, the year Mahon and Longley won Eric Gregory Awards. The awards only intensified the rivalry: when Mahon learned (after Longley) that he too had won, he sent Longley a telegram which read, ‘Checkmate Derek’.¹⁷ Encouraged by the award, Longley sent a batch of poems to Faber and to George MacBeth at the BBC, but was ¹² Harry Chambers, however, was critical of the lack of promotion and distribution of the Festival pamphlets. The next Festival Publications Series included pamphlets by Laurence Lerner, John Montague, Norman Buller, John Hewitt, Arthur Terry, and Norman Dugdale. ¹³ The pamphlets contained between ten and fifteen poems each. ¹⁴ Michael Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, Chicago Review, 35: 1 (1985), 77. ¹⁵ Quoted in Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1993), 59. ¹⁶ Michael Longley (ed.), Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 95. ¹⁷ Mahon to Longley, 8 June 1965, Box 1, MLP. The awards were for £268 each.

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rejected by both. Heaney had better luck: after sending poems to Dolmen Press in Dublin, he received a letter from Charles Monteith at Faber in January 1965 asking for a manuscript. He was jubilant, if shocked: ‘I just couldn’t believe it, it was like getting a letter from God the Father.’¹⁸ He wrote all winter, and Faber accepted Death of a Naturalist in the summer of 1965. Heaney’s debut was universally praised by scores of reviewers who celebrated his direct style and his quotidian sensibility, which they related to his rural background. All were content to cast the collection’s young protagonist as Heaney had ostensibly cast him(self )—a boy coming to consciousness through nature. The TLS noted that his subjects were ‘his own growing-up in the Ulster countryside, the life of his family in that community, and his anger about the Irish past’, while the best poems were those which achieved ‘an unforced fidelity to his rural experience’.¹⁹ In the New Statesman, Christopher Ricks praised poems such as ‘The Diviner’ and ‘Churning Day’ for their ‘directness [and] freedom from all obscurity’, writing that Heaney’s subjects were ‘inherent or the inherited’.²⁰ Hibernia spoke of Heaney’s ‘knowledge of the countryside and of farming, his feeling for Irish history, his unsentimental approach to his own childhood’ while the Irish Times claimed the poet’s best work was ‘well rooted in the life around him’.²¹ In Belfast, John Hewitt noted Heaney’s ‘colloquial vigour’, remarking that the poems seemed indebted to Ulster and Donegal prose writers such as Michael McLaverty, Peadar O’Donnell, Michael J. Murphy, and John O’Connor. Hewitt’s attempt to link Heaney to the region by subtly pointing to the influence of his Ulster elders—thereby fusing the prerogatives of two generations—would strengthen the notion that Heaney was a poet tied to the land.²² In a way, Heaney never quite escaped this characterization—nor, perhaps, was it in his interest to do so. If getting published by Faber and Faber was like receiving a letter from God the Father, stellar reviews in the TLS and New Statesman must have seemed like canonization. One wonders how much these early reviews contributed to his own sense of self-identity as a ¹⁸ Quoted in Parker, Seamus Heaney, 58. ¹⁹ Anon., ‘Life in Numbers’, review of Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney, Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 1966, 512. ²⁰ Christopher Ricks, ‘Growing Up’, New Statesman, 27 May 1966, 778. ²¹ Anon., review of Death of a Naturalist, Hibernia, Apr. 1967, 16; Douglas Sealy, ‘Irish Poets of the Sixties—2’, Irish Times, 25 Jan. 1966, 8. ²² John Hewitt, ‘The Progress of a Poet’, review of Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney, Belfast Telegraph, 19 May 1966.

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‘rooted’ poet, a poet who was defined two years later in Hibernia as a man with a ‘nest of robins in his pocket’.²³ Though the political situation in Northern Ireland would eventually cast a long shadow, in 1966 literary life was in full swing. On account of the Festival pamphlets, publicity in the Northern Review, promotion via the BBC and British newspapers, the Eric Gregory Awards, the critical success of Death of a Naturalist, and Heaney’s elevation to English lecturer at Queen’s, the word ‘renaissance’ was in the air. Although the Belfast poets would later tire of the term, during the late sixties and early seventies they relished the idea; Heaney was the first to talk about a ‘renaissance’ in a 1966 article for the Listener,²⁴ while Longley often used phrases like ‘poetic flowering’ and ‘surge of creativity’ to describe these years in his Arts Council writings. Confirming this optimism in print was the 1965 launch of the Northern Review, a regional literary magazine that ran until 1969. Along with Mary O’Malley’s Threshold and Harry Chambers’s Phoenix—which ran, at respective intervals, out of Liverpool, Belfast, and Manchester during the 1960s—it was a major publishing outlet for Northern Irish poets. But unlike those magazines, the Northern Review self-consciously positioned itself as the mouthpiece of Northern Ireland’s new literati. The magazine was initially edited by Michael Mitchell (a member of the Belfast Group workshop) and Patrick Lynch; Hobsbaum, Longley, and Heaney were all on the editorial board and, along with Mahon, frequent contributors. Its first editorial, entitled ‘Mainly for Irish Readers’, emphasized Belfast’s growing status as a literary centre—a strategy hatched not only to encourage local writers, but also to define the new Northern literary scene against that of the South: the signs are that we are at last breaking out of our long standing cultural deep-freeze. This break-through can be seen on several levels. The Arts Council subsidy has been greatly increased, while both government and civic authorities are closely involved in Festival 65 and the New Theatre project. The Arts Council itself has sponsored a highly successful series of exhibitions, operas and concerts, while at grass-roots level a growing involvement in the arts is to be seen in the flourishing of dramatic, musical and creative writing groups. All of this goes to show not merely that creative talent exists in the province, but also that there is an audience for it. The primary function of the Northern Review is to provide a platform for this creative talent . . . the second issue will be primarily devoted to a group of young ²³ Padraic Fiacc, ‘Seamus Heaney’, Hibernia, May 1968, 23. ²⁴ Heaney, ‘Out of London: Ulster’s Troubles’, 24.

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Irish writers who we feel represent an important and long-awaited revival in our literary tradition. Among this group Michael Longley and Derek Mahon recently shared the EE Gregory Award, Seamus Heaney has published extensively in the New Statesman and the Listener, while Stewart Parker, now lecturing in the United States, has had several of his poems broadcast on American radio.²⁵

This editorial was not aimed at local writers, who were already aware of the exciting developments; rather, it was a declaration of independence to the literary world at large, which needed to hear the news that creative talent did indeed exist in the province and that, despite Ulster’s reputation as a cultural Sahara, ‘there is an audience for it’. The inaugural editorial in the Northern Review—whose very title, like the Honest Ulsterman, provoked a sense of oppositional regionalism—was the first of a long series of self-inventive, bombastic pieces aimed at the Dublin literati.²⁶ Regional promotion continued in the second issue, in a section entitled ‘New Irish Poetry’, devoted to work by Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Newmann, and Parker. A glossy press photograph of Mahon and Longley reading Larkin’s The Less Deceived showed that the New Irish Poetry was deeply indebted to the New English Poetry—that it was, in fact, a distinct Ulster hybrid. On a nearby page, a Guinness advertisement surrounded by the poets’ names revealed the extent to which they were marketed for consumption. Despite the burgeoning sense of oppositional regionalism exhibited in the Northern Review, there was, in fact, a good deal of literary exchange between Dublin and Belfast during the late sixties. In 1966, for example, the editor of Icarus admitted to Longley that the arts scene in Dublin was, at the moment, less vibrant than Belfast’s, and requested poetry from him and from Mahon. He also mentioned that the Belfast Festival and its offshoot productions were receiving much publicity in Dublin.²⁷ In 1967, editors from the Dublin Magazine and Northern Review met in Dublin and agreed that each would promote the other, while several articles in the Irish Times and Hibernia promoted the work of Heaney, Simmons, Mahon, and Longley.²⁸ That month, Hibernia also ran an ²⁵ Anon., ‘Mainly for Irish Readers’, Northern Review, 1: 1 (1965), 1. ²⁶ This issue is given more attention in Chapter 5. ²⁷ Tony Lowes to Mahon, 14 Oct. 1966, Box 1, MLP. ²⁸ See, for example, Sealy, ‘Irish Poets of the Sixties—2’, 8; Padraic Fiacc, ‘New Ulster Poets’, Hibernia, Nov. 1967, 22; Anon., ‘Irish Poets: The New Generation and Their Work’, Hibernia, Apr. 1967, 16; Anon., review of Phoenix 2, Hibernia, July 1967, 14; Rivers Carew, ‘Writing in Ireland Recovers its Dynamism’, Hibernia, Jan. 1967, 22; Fiacc, ‘Seamus Heaney’, 23; Rivers Carew, ‘Review of 1968 Poetry’, Hibernia, 17 Jan. 1969, 14; Padraic Fiacc, ‘Ulster Happening’, Hibernia, 14 Feb. 1969, 18. Brendan Kennelly also discussed the Dublin poetry scene in ‘The Rebirth of Irish Poetry’, Hibernia, 11 Sept. 1969, 18.

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Plate 2. 1965 Eric Gregory Award publicity photograph of Derek Mahon (left) and Michael Longley, Northern Review, 1965

article on the Belfast Festival attesting to its cross-border appeal.²⁹ Heaney, Hewitt, McFadden, Simmons, Longley, and Padraic Fiacc frequently contributed poems and articles to the magazine, many of which concerned the phenomenon of the ‘Ulster writer’—particularly during and after 1969.³⁰ ²⁹ Anon., ‘All-Ireland Interest in Belfast Festival’, Hibernia, Nov. 1967, 21. ³⁰ See, for example, Michael Longley, ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’, Hibernia, 7 Nov. 1969, 11; Seamus Heaney, ‘John Hume’s Derry’, Hibernia, 21 Nov. 1969, 7; and James Simmons, ‘Riots and Writing’, Hibernia, 10 Oct. 1969, 16.

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Plate 3. Advertisement for the ‘New Irish Poetry’, Northern Review, 1965

There were other, more personal links between the two cities. In the mid-sixties, Eavan Boland was still close to Longley and Mahon. Both men were a great source of support to her in those days, as is clear from her correspondence with Longley, who remained an active participant in the Dublin literary scene; when the first issue of the Dublin Magazine appeared in 1965, Boland joked that his poems occupied half

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the issue.³¹ Her letters indicate that the Longleys were frequent visitors to the city, where they counted Kennelly as a close friend. When apart, Boland and Longley often exchanged poems; this practice continued throughout 1966 and 1967. Brendan Kennelly also visited the Longleys in Belfast; after attending a party there in the summer of 1967, he returned to Dublin singing both Longley’s and Heaney’s praises (Boland promptly relayed the news back to Belfast).³² In April 1970, Heaney, Kennelly, Boland, Mahon, and Longley all read at the Dublin Festival in a spirit of cross-border cooperation. Yet by the early seventies, the Dublin literati would become the target of Northern ridicule, particularly in the pages of the Honest Ulsterman. Though Mahon was out of Ireland for most of this time, the Longleys kept him abreast of the local literary developments as he had requested: ‘you must write soon and give me all the news. Send the Dublin Magazine when it comes out next, if ever—keep me informed.’³³ In fact, so often does Mahon’s name appear on the programmes of Belfast readings and in the pages of local magazines that one could be forgiven for thinking he never left. Though he would later attempt to distance himself from association with Hobsbaum and disentangle himself from the idea of an Ulster Renaissance, Mahon managed to keep a foothold in the Ulster poetry scene throughout his residency abroad. His Eric Gregory Award in 1965 assured plenty of publicity in the English and Irish papers, while his poetry pamphlets continued to generate a buzz. Contrary to his own testimony, he made a concerted effort to maintain his place alongside his Ulster peers, frequently meeting with Heaney and Longley when in Belfast and publishing regularly in magazines like Phoenix, Threshold, the Honest Ulsterman, and the Northern Review. The example of Seamus Deane, who left Belfast for Cambridge, England, in 1962, serves as an example of how easy it was to lose touch: Deane, who had published a poetry pamphlet with the Festival Publications Series, had distanced himself from the Northern literary scene during the late sixties, and felt deeply displaced when he returned to Ireland in 1969.³⁴ Mahon never let this happen. In the summer of 1967, he returned to Belfast and later joined Longley, Heaney, Montague, and Simmons at the Belfast Festival ³¹ Capella, edited by Peter Fallon in Dublin, also published poems by Heaney and Longley at this time. ³² Boland to Longley, June 1967, Box 1, MLP. ³³ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Sept.–Oct. 1965), from 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘Just moved into the above . . .’ ³⁴ Deane to Simmons, 6 Feb. 1975, Box 1, JSP. In this letter Deane expresses his amazement at the ‘sea-change’ which had taken place in Belfast between his departure and return.

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that November; he would spend part of the following year in the city. By this time, Heaney was editing the 1967 Festival pamphlet series, teaching English literature at Queen’s, and running what was formerly Hobsbaum’s Group. Longley was teaching English at Inst, while Simmons was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Ulster in Coleraine. That autumn, Hibernia published Padraic Fiacc’s promotional article entitled ‘New Ulster Poets’, which featured publicity photos of Mahon, Longley, Heaney, and Simmons.³⁵ The article was meant to promote the ‘new generation’ of Ulster poets; its guiding premiss was strength in numbers. Heaney was presented as the guru of the group on account of the fact that Death of a Naturalist had entered its third printing and had been published in an American edition. The article was the first of many that would cast Heaney as the star with Mahon and Longley lingering in the background. This approach may have been part of the reason the work of the latter two remained under-appreciated for so long, particularly in America. In 1968, Heaney won the Somerset Maugham award, Mahon published Night-Crossing with Oxford University Press, and Simmons founded the Honest Ulsterman. Heaney, Longley, and David Hammond continued to build momentum that May during a successful poetry reading tour entitled ‘Room to Rhyme’, funded by the Arts Council. During the ten-day tour, the poets read and Hammond sang at parish halls, primary schools, and pubs in small towns and cities across the Province. Heaney remembered feeling ‘empowered’ by the tour, which he felt was a manifestation of burgeoning political concession: ‘The fact that I felt free to read a poem about the 1798 rebels [‘Requiem for the Croppies’] to a rather staid audience of middle-class unionists was one such small symptom of a new tolerance.’³⁶ He also recalled that the tour made him ‘conscious that an Irish dimension was at last beginning to figure in the official life of the North’, noting that Hammond had sung ‘The Boys of Mullaghbawn’ and Longley had read ‘Leaving Inishmore’ to those same Unionist audiences.³⁷ After the announcement of the 1994 IRA ceasefire, Heaney wrote a moving article for the Sunday Tribune in which he invoked the tour as a prophetic example of what the Northern poets might have achieved had twenty-five years of violence not stalled their efforts. The tour marked the first time that Heaney and Longley were publicly introduced to a wider audience; the biographical sketches at the beginning ³⁵ Fiacc, ‘New Ulster Poets’, 22. ³⁶ Seamus Heaney, ‘Cessation 1994’, Finders Keepers, 46.

³⁷ Ibid.

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Plate 4. Cover of the Room to Rhyme Programme, 1968

of the programme, as well as the poems each chose to read, reflected the personas the young poets were trying to cultivate. Heaney, for example, wrote that he ‘learned how to milk a cow and mow with a scythe’ when he was a child, but ‘never became perfect in either art’.³⁸ Longley’s brief biography mentioned the influence of Larkin, Hughes, and Hill, as well ³⁸ ‘Room to Rhyme’ programme, Folder 214, JSP.

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Plate 5. Promotional photo for the Room to Rhyme Poetry Tour, 1968. From left to right, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and David Hammond

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as his love for jazz.³⁹ But even as they attempted to define themselves in opposition to each other—Heaney the country boy, Longley the aesthete—they presented a united front to the public. Later Arts Council poetry tours, including Montague and Hewitt’s ‘The Planter and the Gael’ (1970–1), Simmons and Muldoon’s ‘Out of the Blue’ (1974), and Heaney and Mahon’s ‘In Their Element’ (1977), would further strengthen the public’s perceptions of these poets as a tightly knit group. It was around this time that Paul Muldoon first met Heaney and Longley. Though Muldoon was aware of their presence (and their poetry) while still in secondary school, he did not meet the poets until April 1968, when his English teacher, Jerry Hicks, introduced them after a reading at the Armagh Museum.⁴⁰ According to Hobsbaum, Heaney had already judged a poetry competition which Muldoon won when he was in his mid-teens, and was well aware of the young poet by the late sixties; he had published two Muldoon poems (‘Stillborn’ and ‘Snail’) as a guest editor of the Summer 1969 issue of Threshold, and had directed Muldoon’s work to Karl Milller at the Listener and to Faber’s Charles Monteith.⁴¹ Clearly Muldoon benefited from the attention of Heaney and the Longleys (both Heaney and Edna Longley were his tutors at Queen’s), who felt he possessed great talent, and encouraged him to keep writing. As Hobsbaum recalls: I remember going over on a visit and Edna said, ‘Come along for this recital, there’s an extraordinary young chap.’ He was only about 17 or 18 then. There was no mistaking it. There was no mistaking the quality. The question was what would you do with it. Heaney brought him on slowly and carefully rather than giving him a lot of publicity.⁴²

The local presence of Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and Simmons, whom Muldoon remembers as ‘very generous and welcoming’, was enormously important to the young poet.⁴³ After reading Heaney’s and Longley’s 1965 Festival pamphlets, he was surprised to find poets writing about the features of his own daily life. ‘These people were publishing poems about ³⁹ Heaney read, ‘For Marie’, ‘The Diviner’, ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, ‘Digging’, ‘Eel Returning’, ‘Last Look’, ‘The Peninsula’, and ‘Churning Day’; Longley read, ‘Epithalamion’, ‘Dr Johnson on the Hebrides’, ‘Christopher at Birth’, ‘Freeze-Up’, ‘Leaving Inishmore’, ‘The Osprey’, ‘Remembrance Day’, ‘Emily Dickinson’, and ‘Elegy for Fats Waller’. ⁴⁰ Paul Muldoon, notes for Chez Moy: A Critical Autobiography, typed MS, n.d., Box 29, PMP. ⁴¹ Kendall, Paul Muldoon, 15. ⁴² Interview with author, 27 Oct. 2000, Glasgow. ⁴³ Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, 77.

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walking through fields and I thought, “I can do that”—it was a very familiar activity to me.’⁴⁴ Muldoon’s remarks echo Heaney’s own feelings after reading Hughes; each poet felt displaced by High Modernism, and chose to bypass it, at least initially, for something closer to his own experience.⁴⁵ In 1969, Longley published No Continuing City with Macmillan (Muldoon praised the book in an Honest Ulsterman review, calling Longley ‘one of the best technicians around’), and Heaney published his second Faber collection, Door into the Dark, to wide acclaim.⁴⁶ Boland, reviewing the work in the Irish Times, spoke of Heaney’s increasingly mature voice, while Christopher Ricks confirmed that the volume would ‘consolidate him as the poet of muddy-booted blackberry-picking’.⁴⁷ Edna Longley also joined in the chorus of praise, calling it ‘an even bigger achievement’ than Death of a Naturalist.⁴⁸ Only A. Alvarez questioned Heaney’s growing stature: ‘At his best, Heaney reminds me of a latter-day Robert Frost, but without any of that old magician’s flair and willingness to commit himself.’⁴⁹ It was the first real swipe at Heaney, and one of many to come. Yet that year, success followed success. In the spring, the Honest Ulsterman announced (apparently without irony) that since Heaney was ‘the best known Irish poet now writing’, the magazine would invite poems ‘in the Heaney manner’ for a competition judged by Heaney himself.⁵⁰ During the summer, Heaney edited an important issue of Threshold, in which he included work by Muldoon, Montague, Simmons, Longley, and Mahon, and announced that the magazine had come of age.⁵¹ In September, Heaney and Longley read together at the Arts Council Gallery in Belfast, while in December they joined Hammond and Mahon in Derry for a one-night performance at the City Hotel, advertised as ‘Poets Loused with Song’. This was also the year that ⁴⁴ Interview with Alan Jenkins, quoted in Kendall, Paul Muldoon, 15. ⁴⁵ Although Muldoon was drawn to Eliot as an adolescent, Rachel Buxton has shown that Robert Frost was a more significant influence. Kendall has noted that only one reviewer of New Weather picked up on the volume’s Frostian overtones—the rest were too busy comparing Muldoon to Heaney. Paul Muldoon, 28. ⁴⁶ Paul Muldoon, review of No Continuing City, by Michael Longley, Honest Ulsterman, 21 (1970), 47. ⁴⁷ Christopher Ricks, ‘Lasting Things’, review of Door into the Dark, by Seamus Heaney, Listener, 26 June 1969, 900–1. ⁴⁸ Edna Longley, review of Door into the Dark, by Seamus Heaney, Phoenix, 6/7 (1970), 145. ⁴⁹ A. Alvarez, ‘Homo Faber’, review of Door into the Dark, by Seamus Heaney, Observer, 22 June 1969. ⁵⁰ James Simmons, ‘Competition’, Honest Ulsterman, 11 (1969), 2. ⁵¹ Seamus Heaney, ‘Foreword’, Threshold, 22 (1969), 3.

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BBC Northern Ireland aired a programme called ‘The Northern Drift’— a forum for lesser-known Ulster writers—and the Belfast Telegraph ran a series of articles on poetry and Ulster poets in conjunction with the Belfast Festival. Padraic Fiacc named no fewer than thirty new Ulster writers in his Hibernia article, ‘Ulster Happening’, which featured photos of Heaney and Longley.⁵² Interestingly, Longley and Montague both derided the idea of themselves as ‘Ulster poets’ even as they contributed to an article that unabashedly promoted them as such (Simmons, Fiacc wrote, ‘wouldn’t want to be called anything else but an Ulster poet’). It was a pattern that would be repeated in the coming years; the article shows that the competing reluctance and desire to be labelled part of a regional or literary group began early. During the coming decades, Mahon, Longley, and to some extent Heaney would deny the idea of an Ulster movement with one hand, only to invoke it with the other. The larger the poets’ reputations grew, the less they wanted to admit the extent of collective endeavour and achievement: as Mahon advised Longley in 1965, ‘Adopt a Yeatsian pose. Be arrogant.’⁵³ Any discussion of the Ulster Renaissance must pay considerable homage to the Honest Ulsterman, the irreverent ‘handbook for a revolution’ that would become, against all odds, the most influential literary magazine in Belfast during the late sixties and early seventies. Any discussion of the Honest Ulsterman, in turn, must pay homage to its founder, James Simmons, who published the first issue in May 1968. Simmons, born in Derry in 1933 (the grandson of a former mayor), was educated at Campbell College but refused readmittance in 1950. He left school and went to Guernsey, where he picked tomatoes for a time, and then returned home to work at his father’s stockbrokering firm. In 1951, he moved to London in hopes of striking a lucrative record deal, but fame was elusive; he spent most of his hours doing menial jobs rather than performing. He began writing poetry in his spare time and, in 1953, won the Varsity poetry competition judged by Cecil Day Lewis. At this point, his work came to the attention of Bonamy Dobrée, an English professor at Leeds University, who secured him a place there in 1955. By this time, Simmons had married Laura Stinson from Coleraine, the woman who would support him financially through his university years and eventually bear him five children. At Leeds, he edited a university poetry magazine called Poetry and Audience during the 1957–8 academic ⁵² Fiacc, ‘Ulster Happening’, 18. ⁵³ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (c.1965), from 939 Western Rd., London, Canada, Box 13, MLP. ‘I’m delighted you’re so pleased with the poems.’

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year, as well as a poetry anthology entitled Out on the Edge. He also met and grew close to the poet Tony Harrison, with whom he eventually collaborated on a play, Aikin Mata: The Lysistrata of Aristophanes, in 1966. Simmons earned his BA in 1958 and soon returned to Northern Ireland, where he worked for five years at the Friends’ School in Lisburn. By 1964, the year he joined Harrison as an English lecturer at the University of Ahmadu Bello in Zaria, Nigeria, he was a local celebrity in Ulster, best known for his ballads. After civil unrest in Nigeria forced him to return home in 1967, he was appointed by the novelist Walter Allen (a friend of MacNeice) as a lecturer in Drama and Anglo-Irish literature at the New University of Ulster at Coleraine. For years Simmons had dreamed of founding and editing a regionalist Ulster literary magazine. When he returned from Africa, he found the atmosphere in Northern Ireland conducive to such a venture: though Belfast was alive with poets and readings, the increasingly fragile political situation threatened to destroy the literary momentum that had been building since the early days of Hobsbaum’s Group. Student protests in Paris and Prague, as well as the marches and sit-ins of the American civil rights movement, contributed to the sense that young people could make a difference in the political affairs of Northern Ireland. Simmons felt literature possessed a reconstructive power, and was in itself a political force for freedom. As an editor of a literary magazine, he could harness that force and challenge the rigidities of Ulster thought. He could also assume control of a literary scene from which he felt increasingly alienated. Immediately upon his return to Northern Ireland in 1967, he wrote to the Arts Council to ask whether it published a literary magazine which he could edit. When they responded negatively, he asked the organization to fund a poetry reading and singing tour through the Province. This led to a disastrous night in Bangor in which Simmons, his wife, and a friend performed bawdy songs and poetry before an audience of shocked senior citizens—most of whom left the hall before the night was over. It was, Simmons angrily wrote to the Arts Council, ‘a sad and humiliating experience’.⁵⁴ But the incident only made him more determined to launch a literary magazine that would galvanize the young writers of Ulster. After joining his nephew, Michael Stephens, on a reading tour in the North of England (organized by Tony Harrison), he again wrote to the Arts Council about funding another tour on home ground. ⁵⁴ Simmons to Jamison, 30 Oct. 1967, Box 1, JSP.

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His letter touches upon the provincial renaissance already taking place across the Irish Sea: The readings in England were a very exciting experience for the both of us. One has a definite feeling that new life is coming into poetry. This North of England council seems very enlightened . . . they pay Tom Pickard £10 a week to organise regular readings in an ancient tower on the walls of Newcastle . . . All the Beat poets come as pilgrims . . . some nonsense and pretention, but very interesting, alive.⁵⁵

That May, the Arts Council took Simmons’s advice and funded the ‘Room to Rhyme’ tour, featuring Heaney, Longley, and Hammond. Simmons, however, was not included in the roster—a source of grievance which further fuelled his sense of exclusion from the poetry community. His anger is palpable in a letter to Tony Harrison, written in May 1968: The Ulster Arts Council played a rather dirty trick on Jimmy—They rejected, when approached by him to back a tour of poetry and singing—no cash, etc. Yet 3 months later sent Heaney, Longley, and a singer called David Hammond all around the province—I could spit—I suppose their material is safe with just enough SEX thrown in to make an audience feel mature and sophisticated.⁵⁶

Simmons thought of himself as the lone voice of liberalism in the puritanical wilderness, and felt he had been slighted on account of his outspokenness. After this episode, he was increasingly suspicious of Heaney in particular, and also of Mahon and Longley, though they remained friends. He began to define his image against these three, comforting himself with the knowledge that he was too candid and uncompromising for Arts Council support. A News Letter article entitled ‘Poet Ignored’ captured what was surely Simmons’s attitude: ‘He calls himself the most neglected poet and singer in the Province. I hear they did not appreciate a recital he gave in Bangor a month or so ago; there is too much smugness there to prick, too much prudery to outrage.’⁵⁷ He criticized his ⁵⁵ Simmons to Jamison, 2 Feb. 1968, Box 1, JSP. This provincial renaissance was made possible by the 1944 Education Act. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of secondary school students rose from 1.75 million to 3 million, while the period between 1962 and 1967 saw the number of university students increase more than it had over the past twentyfive years. The education boom meant that more people were reading serious literature than ever before. In response to this, the Arts Council established a literature panel in 1966, gave more grants to individual writers, and increased its spending on literature from 5,000 in 1964 to 80,000 in 1968. Also, between 1960 and 1968, expenditure on public libraries doubled. All statistics come from Stuart Laing, ‘The Production of Literature’, in Alan Sinfield (ed.), Society and Literature (London: Methuen, 1983), 121–72. ⁵⁶ Simmons to Harrison, 6 May 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁵⁷ Ralph Bossence, ‘Poet Ignored’, News Letter, 24 Jan. 1968.

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peers for their complacency, yet he was beset by jealousy. As he wrote frustratedly to Harrison, ‘The Irish papers still won’t publish my poems. Derek Mahon is Poetry Book Society choice for Autumn. Grrr. Heaney is Somerset Maugham award.’⁵⁸ Editing a literary magazine was a way for Simmons to restore his reputation and to challenge the Heaney–Longley–Mahon trio. The Honest Ulsterman, as he wrote to George McAvoy, was to be ‘simple but new’. It was, he continued, A high class regional mag. with no literary gossip or pretentiousness . . . a platform and a voice for honest Ulstermen, if there be any such. Contributors are asked to imagine they are addressing an extraordinary nice and intelligent stranger in a pub, with much experience and little education. He will not know Leavis, but he will have read some Lawrence.⁵⁹

Simmons’s distinction between Leavis and Lawrence is particularly revealing of the magazine’s ethos: it would be earthy, sensual, and outspoken instead of fastidious and moral. The ideal reader would not be someone well trained in literary analysis, but an intelligent layman without critical prejudices. Yet, ironically, morality would become a prominent theme in Simmons’s evangelical editorials, which suggests his ideas were closer to those of Leavis—and Hobsbaum—than he perhaps realized. Thus the Honest Ulsterman was a renegade’s venture from the start. Though it was to be a literary magazine, it was also a way to voice opposition to Ulster’s conservative cultural establishment: Queen’s, the BBC, the Ulster Museum, and Threshold were all targets.⁶⁰ Simmons’s magazine did not possess establishment virtues, nor did it aspire to. Instead, it was raucous, irreverent, and independent. It was also the first literary magazine in Northern Ireland directed towards an under-thirty readership without being associated with a university. According to Paul Muldoon, it was the most ‘cutting-edge’ magazine in Belfast.⁶¹ Simmons had high hopes for his first issue. ‘We expect an initial circulation of 2000, are well supplied with eager agents, and much publicity ⁵⁸ Simmons to Harrison, 6 June 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁵⁹ Simmons to McAvoy, 21 Feb. 1968, Box 1, JSP. As Simmons wrote to Harrison, ‘Decided to start a magazine, popular enough to live off, God willing. Monthly. HONEST ULSTERMAN. Can you send me a few poems (even prose) in your most popular style, but good. . . . Poems or prose for the elusive intelligent Ulsterman. Non-specialist.’ Feb. 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁶⁰ Threshold’s conservatism was made clear in the first editorial: ‘Controversial subjects will not be avoided, but presentation will be balanced and courteous.’ Anon., ‘Editorial’, Threshold, 1 (Feb. 1957), 1. ⁶¹ Interview with author, Oxford, 17 Nov. 1999.

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from the press and T.V.’⁶² This was overstating the case—circulation was just below 1,000 in 1969—but Kennelly did promise to introduce Simmons to editors of newspapers in Dublin who might help with sales, while John D. Stewart assured him he would publicize the magazine on his BBC radio programme ‘The Arts in Ulster’. Simmons also had agents afar: Cynthia Cockburn and Michael Stephens offered to help market the magazine in England, while John Hearsum would do the same in Paris. He had more difficulty finding an American contact: Stewart Parker, who was teaching in New York state, turned down a request to be his American agent on account of a heavy teaching load. By March 1968, most of the poets in Belfast, as well as many others in Dublin and England, had heard of the new venture. Brendan Kennelly, John Hewitt, Stevie Smith, Maurice Leitch, Padraic Fiacc, Derek Mahon, Kingsley Amis, Stewart Parker, Michael Longley, and Harry Chambers all wrote to Simmons wishing him success; many promised to send work. Chambers, then editor of Phoenix, was particularly glad Simmons had created a forum for Ulster poets, as he had been accused of turning his own magazine into a ‘blurb’ for them.⁶³ Simmons was a savvy promoter of his work, and realized a provocative title was essential if his magazine was to have an impact. The title Honest Ulsterman worked on several levels, as he remarked to George McAvoy in February 1968: I think the title is masterly. It dissociates it immediately from the usual literary mag., challenges the specialist to appear outside his specialisation . . . and it also challenges the common reader to read. With a title like that you could go into pubs and sell it. It also makes everyone uneasy. They feel they are being got at. The innocent title undermines the government and the university.⁶⁴

Simmons was right about the title’s impact: it became a catchphrase, stirring interest from journalists and poets alike, provoking many to remark that ‘honest ulsterman’ was a contradiction in terms. Though most of the comments regarding the title were made in jest, the amount of attention it initially received points to a general feeling of scepticism that the men of Ulster could be united under any heading, let alone that of ‘honest’. As Simmons predicted, the reader was not sure whether to take the title seriously in a society where honesty was often undermined by mutual ⁶² Simmons to James Michie, 25 Mar. 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁶³ Chambers to Simmons, 18 Mar. 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁶⁴ Simmons to George McAvoy, 21 Feb. 1968, Box 1, JSP.

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suspicion. One look inside the magazine, however, would reveal that its editor was earnest—perhaps too much so. The first issue—subtitled ‘A Magazine of Revolution’—was 44 pages long, and included poems by Stevie Smith, Brendan Kennelly, John Hewitt, Derek Mahon, W. Price Turner, and Gavin Ewart.⁶⁵ There was prose by John D. Stewart, John Hearsum, and Michael Stephens, as well as an interview with the Liverpool poet Roger McGough. Simmons put a great deal of energy into its production. In May 1968, he wrote to Tony Harrison, ‘I have never had anything so hectic as last week. Up and down to Belfast every day, and sweating around, urging printers and seeing shops and pasting up posters.’⁶⁶ He promoted the magazine as tirelessly as he promoted his own poetry, and his efforts paid off. Favourable reviews appeared in the Irish Times (‘The HU is a brave effort, and good value’), the Belfast Telegraph (‘For Writers with Courage’), the Belfast News Letter, and the Irish Press.⁶⁷ Sam Hanna Bell commended the initiative: Having had some experience, I admire the courage and optimism of anyone who launches a literary journal in Ulster. James Simmons deserves much more for his The Honest Ulsterman. . . . This promises to be a fresh and vital magazine. I would commend it to those people who protest, rightly, at the miasma that hangs over the Ulster scene. For three shillings a month they can help James Simmons keep an airhole open.⁶⁸

An Irish Press writer may have been thinking of Bell and the regionalists of the 1940s when he noted, ‘One feels—and not for the first time—that the coils of literary expression that lie at the heart of Ulster culture are at last freeing themselves. This may yet give us a major regional creative movement in the North.’⁶⁹ Most of the reviewers spoke of the magazine’s ⁶⁵ Simmons was disappointed by the printing, which he found ‘amateurish’. John Hewitt also noted sourly that the proofreading was poor. ⁶⁶ Simmons to Harrison, 6 May 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁶⁷ Reviews included: Anon., ‘Book Chat: The Best of ’69’, Hibernia, 9 Jan. 1970; Anon., ‘For Writers with Courage’, Belfast Telegraph, 30 Apr. 1968 (this article includes a picture of Simmons with a caption reading ‘Rescuing literature from the academies’); Anon., untitled review, Hibernia, 29 May 1970; Brian Bell, ‘£360—The Price James Simmons Paid for Being an Honest Ulsterman’, newspaper clipping, Box 73, JSP; Sam Hanna Bell, ‘Talking About Books’, newspaper clipping, Box 73, JSP; Ralph Bossence, ‘Of Youth and Young Love’, News Letter, 19 Aug. 1969, ‘As I See It’, News Letter, 26 June 1968, ‘New Outlet for Our Literary “Intellectuals” ’, News Letter, n.d. (c.1968), Box 73, JSP; John Jordan, ‘Magazine Scene’, Irish Press, 12 Apr. 1969, ‘Magazine Scene’, Irish Press, 27 June 1970, ‘Magazine Scene’, Irish Press, 28 Mar. 1970; John D. Stewart, ‘New University Surely Flourishes in the Old Triangle’, Sunday News, 6 Oct. 1968. ⁶⁸ Sam Hanna Bell, ‘Talking About Books’, newspaper clipping, Box 73, JSP. ⁶⁹ John Jordan, ‘Magazine Scene’, Irish Press, 12 Apr. 1969.

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irreverence and applauded its sense of controversy. Yet others were not so easily impressed: in one swift, condescending stroke, Ian Hamilton labelled the Honest Ulsterman ‘a slightly dotty little magazine’ in the Observer.⁷⁰ The report from America, however, was most damning: Mr Simmons is the Stephen Dedalus of the literary magazine—he wants nothing less than to form the conscience of his race. In pursuit of this worthy goal, he fills every issue with his own work . . . One’s response to The Honest Ulsterman, then, has to be one’s response to Mr Simmons. The display of deep feeling unformed by creative genius or even intellectual discipline is . . . incredible vanity. Mr Simmons is energetic and sincere; he is not a genius, which is not his fault, nor is he a disciplined thinker and writer, which is.⁷¹

The tone of this Eire-Ireland article differs markedly from that of the local papers, which were happy to cast Simmons as a crusader, a man of initiative, someone who would rescue literature from the Academy. Here, however, his motives and his mission are deemed nothing more than the scribblings of a vainglorious dilettante. The female reviewer was also appalled by Simmons’s breezy sexism, which sailed by his male reviewers: Someone, after all, ought to be embarrassed when in the first issue Mr Simmons dismisses the considerable achievements of Mrs Mary O’Malley, the most potent force in the cultural life of Belfast and the founder of Threshold, a solidly good literary magazine, by noting that the lady is neither as beautiful nor as socialist as she was twenty years ago.⁷²

From a distance, it was easy to fault Simmons for what he would later be accused of by his own peers: vanity, arrogance, sexism, and bad writing.⁷³ But at the time, local writers could not afford to condemn his achievement, for, as Sam Hanna Bell noted, it was an airhole which helped prevent Belfast’s cultural life from suffocating. And so, praise outweighed criticism. Indeed, members of the English literary élite, including Graham Greene, Geoffrey Hill, and John Betjeman, wrote to Simmons praising the Honest Ulsterman (Simmons, one presumes, had sent them copies).⁷⁴ Ulster writers, too, were full of encouragement. Bell was ⁷⁰ Ian Hamilton, ‘Tremblings of Promise’, Observer, n.d. (c.1969), newspaper clipping, Box 72, JSP. ⁷¹ Jeanne Flood, ‘Book Reviews’, Eire-Ireland, 4: 3 (1969), 122–3. ⁷² Ibid. ⁷³ Kirkland argues that Simmons ‘has provoked the most sustained critical vilification of any Northern writer from within Northern Ireland itself ’. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), 71. ⁷⁴ Letters to Simmons, 1968, Box 1, JSP.

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pleased with the September issue, and was happy to report that many of his fellow BBC producers were already subscribers.⁷⁵ Brian Moore wrote from Canada in October 1968, wishing Simmons good luck and expressing his pleasure at being referred to as an Ulster writer in the magazine’s prospectus. John Montague said he was ‘amused’ by the Honest Ulsterman, and sent Simmons a batch of poems as a token of his interest; he also asked Simmons to contribute poems to his edition of the Faber Book of Irish Verse.⁷⁶ The doyen of Ulster regionalism, however, was not so impressed. Hewitt wrote to Simmons in May 1968 expressing disappointment with the magazine; he wrote again in June to say he was put off by its ‘bawdy tone’, which, he said, would alienate an older audience.⁷⁷ If Hewitt thought the magazine was bawdy, young writers found it sexually liberating. In July 1968, Michael Foley wrote to Simmons praising his Ballad of a Marriage pamphlet, saying he was one of the few Belfast poets who did not try to write like Heaney.⁷⁸ One guesses this was just the kind of comment Simmons had been fishing for, and had, in some ways, used the Honest Ulsterman to provoke. Though he published many poems by Heaney in the early issues of the magazine, letters from this period document the fact that he felt maliciously edged out from the inner circle of the Belfast poetry clique. This was one of the reasons why Simmons marketed the magazine to students, enlisting his 16-year-old nephew Michael Stephens as his main sales representative in England. He had seen the way young, insecure writers flocked to Hobsbaum for guidance, and had cast a similar role for himself as editor of the Honest Ulsterman. The strategy was successful: young writers—including an 18year-old Muldoon—deferred to his editorial judgement and regarded him as a poet of influence and stature. The denunciation of the Honest Ulsterman from the Presbyterian pulpit in the late sixties only valorized his image as a latter-day Lawrence. Simmons cast his net far and wide during his first year as editor, and was rewarded by contributions from Stevie Smith, Brendan Kennelly, Tony Harrison, Roger McGough, and John McGahern. Yet most of the contributors, including Hobsbaum, Hewitt, Heaney, the Longleys, Mahon, Padraic Fiacc, Frank Ormsby, Denis Ireland, Michael Foley, Arthur Terry, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin, lived closer to home. The emphasis on locality was intentional: though Simmons claimed to ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸

Sam Hanna Bell to Simmons, 6 Sept. 1968, Box 1, JSP. Montague to Simmons, 11 Nov. 1968, Box 1, JSP. Hewitt to Simmons, 7 May 1968 and 7 June 1968 respectively, Box 1, JSP. Foley to Simmons, 12 July 1968, Box 1, JSP.

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welcome writers of all nations, one of his main goals was to ‘work for regionalism in politics and education’.⁷⁹ He was a disciple of Hewitt’s regionalism, which he frequently tried to resurrect in the pages of the Honest Ulsterman. In a promotional flyer for the magazine, which he distributed to papers and bookshops in the spring of 1968, he wrote: The Honest Ulsterman will be a regional magazine in the same sense as Huckleberry Finn is a regional novel. Regionalism in literature and politics needs thinking about. Are the people of Ulster beginning to feel that there is something dull and humiliating about going ‘step by step’ behind England?⁸⁰

He later echoed this key thought in the magazine’s first editorial: Just as it is necessary for each individual to claim his own freedom and make his own decisions, so it is important for the regions . . . to establish their independence. They say it makes economic sense for Ulster to keep step by step behind England; but it makes no other sort of sense.⁸¹

Regionalism ostensibly offered an alternative to sectarianism in an increasingly polarized political atmosphere. Yet regionalism, as an ideology, was by this time itself politicized—characterized by some as an evasion of politics, by others as a manifestation of Unionism. Stewart Parker, for example, was critical of the magazine’s regionalist slant, and enjoined Simmons to pursue a more international audience.⁸² Of course, Simmons wanted this too; ideally the Honest Ulsterman would make its mark in America, England, and Continental Europe. But under his direction, its priority would be to encourage local authors rather than to import foreign ones. As he told a local reporter: Why ‘The HU’? Because in a region you can have some hope of knowing the community, being in touch with those in power, getting people to take responsibility for their way of life, fighting for freedom. . . . a lot of good people have come out of Ulster. Perhaps if they had stayed we wouldn’t think of Ulster as a sort of second-rate country, with second-hand ideals. We might be giving a lead to England.⁸³

It was the same policy the BBC employed in Northern Ireland during the forties and fifties, and which had been partly responsible for the first ⁷⁹ James Simmons, ‘Five Year Plan’, handwritten MS, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. Simmons also here calls regionalism his ‘cause’. ⁸⁰ James Simmons, Prospectus for the Honest Ulsterman, Box 17, JSP. ⁸¹ James Simmons, ‘First Steps in Revolution’, Honest Ulsterman, 1 (1968), 5–6. ⁸² Parker to Simmons, 4 Mar. 1968, Box 1, JSP. ⁸³ Ralph Bossence, ‘New Outlet for Our Literary “Intellectuals” ’, Box 73, JSP.

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regional literary movement in Ulster. (These issues will be dealt with in greater depth in Chapter 4.) Simmons was also on a mission to promote literature as a popular art form. As a singer/songwriter who had been performing in bars and clubs for nearly fifteen years, he felt poetry should be accessible, and possessed a keen awareness of the way it could be distilled through song. As he told a reporter for the Belfast News Letter, ‘I think it was Arnold Bennett who said that the word “poetry” could disperse a crowd more quickly than a fire-hose. I know what he meant, but people like Roger McGough are helping to change that and I would like to help.’⁸⁴ The magazine’s other prime motive was to advocate what Simmons called liberal humanism. The editorial of the first issue—‘First Steps in Revolution’—was a lofty statement of his intentions for the magazine, art, and Northern Ireland. The following evangelical rhetoric was typical of Simmons’s prose, and ironically brings to mind Leavis’s ideas about art, culture, and morality: Political progress from now on will not depend on our allegiance to leaders, ideas and systems, but in each individual’s allegiance to himself, his courage and wit to use all the wisdom and experience literature puts at his disposal, to get up off his knees and stop praying to be set free, to realise that he is already free.⁸⁵

Yet most contributors to the Honest Ulsterman resisted the call for ‘committed’ poetry and prose. In fact, most of the political commentary appeared in Simmons’s editorials, which advocated religious tolerance and supported the civil rights movement. But he was politically unsophisticated in his treatment of Northern Ireland, which he sometimes approached with the naive bravado of an adolescent. For example, he claimed that one of the purposes of the Honest Ulsterman was ‘to take the sting out of the IRA,’ yet Che Guevara was frequently praised and quoted.⁸⁶ Edna Longley aptly characterized Simmons as possessing a ‘neo-Hewitt regionalist emphasis, neo-Kavanagh “parochial” fervour, and neo-Davisite cultural vision . . . somewhat compromised by an absence of political foresight’.⁸⁷ By this, she meant that Simmons was not prepared for the real revolution lurking just over the horizon. As she noted, comments such as, ‘I look to a new flowering when . . . Ulster education, politics and architecture will be as distinctive as our police ⁸⁴ Ibid. ⁸⁵ Simmons, ‘First Steps in Revolution’, 3. ⁸⁶ Elgy Gillespie, ‘James Simmons’, newspaper clipping [Irish Times?], 1976, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ⁸⁷ Edna Longley, ‘Poetry from the North’, newspaper clipping, 1976, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP.

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force’, revealed the extent of his political naiveté.⁸⁸ However, he should not be criticized for his lack of foresight concerning the political eruption which would soon take place, since other poets (such as Heaney) were similarly optimistic about a more just future. Writing in 1971, Simmons would look back on the venture with a degree of disappointment: The hopeful Civil Rights movement that grew parallel to the Honest Ulsterman little literary revival is now swamped by old bitterness and all Yeats’s Civil War and 1919 meditations are applicable . . . we thought the worst rogues and rascals had died out, and a great army but a showy thing.⁸⁹

Simmons’s essential mission for the Honest Ulsterman—to get people talking across the sectarian divide—would later be echoed by Michael Longley in his role as Literature Director of the Northern Ireland Arts Council. Simmons’s claim that the Honest Ulsterman was founded ‘in hope of action’ would be invoked and applied to other literary endeavours in Northern Ireland at more turbulent moments by Longley, who was at the helm of literary action throughout the seventies and eighties.⁹⁰ In a sense, Simmons launched Longley’s campaign before Longley took office. The amiable tone of the correspondence among Simmons, Heaney, Mahon, and Longley during this time suggests that Simmons, despite his grumbling, was on friendly terms with his peers. In fact, he actively promoted them to his publisher James Michie at the Bodley Head: in July 1967, he wrote to Michie, ‘If you are looking for more good poets to publish, it would be worth looking at the work of Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Joan Newmann.’⁹¹ That December, he again wrote to Michie urging him to contact Longley.⁹² At the same time, the magazine was attracting young writers like Paul Muldoon. In 1969, after Simmons published Muldoon’s first poems (‘January’ and ‘Easter Island’), the young poet submitted more work, writing, ‘I’m afraid I might be trying your generosity but I’m back at your door again.’⁹³ At this point, ⁸⁸ Edna Longley, ‘Poetry from the North’, newspaper clipping, 1976, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. Simmons, ‘First Steps in Revolution’, 6. Simmons’s regionalist vision, like Hewitt’s, was essentially Protestant; his ‘socialist-liberal’ politics, writes Kirkland, were very much at odds with his ‘essential acquiescence in partition during and after the dominant formation of Stormont Unionism’. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 67. ⁸⁹ Simmons to Tony Harrison, 24 Aug. 1971, Box 1, JSP. ⁹⁰ Simmons, ‘First Steps in Revolution’, 5. ⁹¹ Simmons to Michie, July 1967, Box 1, JSP. ⁹² Simmons to Michie, 2 Dec. 1967, Box 1, JSP. ⁹³ Muldoon to Simmons, 28 Aug. 1969, Box 1, JSP. Among the new poems he submitted were ‘Hedgehog’, ‘Centrepiece’, ‘Seanchas’, ‘Rodgers at Loughall’, and ‘Poem at Eighteen’. Simmons published Muldoon’s first poems in the May 1969 (no. 13) issue of the

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Simmons assured him that he was aware of his great talent, but said he found his poetry ‘too obscure’ and advised publishing in a more intellectual publication. The Honest Ulsterman, he said, was a forum for popular literature, and would only consider Muldoon’s ‘more direct poems’.⁹⁴ Two days later, Muldoon wrote a gracious reply, thanking Simmons for his previous letter, which, he said, ‘has made me think a great deal about my concepts of poetry, and the poet–audience relationship. I hope to meet you and discuss the thing further’.⁹⁵ He submitted another two poems, ‘Taking the Rust’ and ‘Seanchas’, which he categorized as ‘possibly more “direct” ’ than his other poems.⁹⁶ ‘Taking the Rust’ intrigued Simmons, who wrote back that he, Michael Foley, and Frank Ormsby had spent many hours arguing over the poem’s meaning—a fact that showed, Simmons wrote, ‘we care about you’.⁹⁷ Yet Muldoon was perturbed by Simmons’s criticism of a dialect phrase at the poem’s end, which the editor claimed did not add anything. The young poet, still an undergraduate at Queen’s, responded respectfully: I got the shock of my life in last week’s Telegraph and I’m sorry to hear you’re giving up the editorship of the H.U. I don’t pretend to agree with all your views on the ‘popular literature’ but I’m bound to admire your courage and honesty.⁹⁸

Yet he held his ground, stating that Simmons did not understand what he was trying to achieve with ‘Taking the Rust’. ‘Believe me when I say that it had to be written, and that it had to be written into a certain landscape (which happens to be Heaneyesque). Believe that I try to use words with reverence and calculation.’⁹⁹ The correspondence shows that Simmons was an influential figure at this time, someone whom the young poet listened to and argued with, someone who led him to reflect upon his own work and the idea of an audience. Muldoon was not influenced by Simmons’s poetry, but Simmons’s magazine gave the talented young poet the chance to publish his work, participate in poetic debate, and correspond with other local poets. Indeed, Muldoon later expressed great gratitude toward Simmons for publishing his first poems.¹⁰⁰ Muldoon’s story highlights the importance of the Honest Ulsterman as a forum for Northern writers. Though it claimed not to be cosy, it was, in Honest Ulsterman. ‘Taking the Rust’ and ‘Centrepiece’ were eventually published in the Dec. 1969 (no. 20) issue. ⁹⁴ Simmons to Muldoon, 1 Sept. 1969, Box 6, PMP. ⁹⁵ Muldoon to Simmons, 3 Sept. 1969, Box 1, JSP. ⁹⁶ Ibid. ⁹⁷ Simmons to Muldoon, 2 Oct. 1969, Box 6, PMP. ⁹⁸ Muldoon to Simmons, 18 Oct. 1969, Box 1, JSP. ⁹⁹ Ibid. ¹⁰⁰ Interview with author, Oxford, 17 Nov. 1999.

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reality, a mouthpiece for the Belfast Group workshop members, and gave local poets a collective identity: as Longley remarked in 1971, the Belfast poetry circle ‘might almost be termed the Honest Ulsterman School of Poets’¹⁰¹ (later he would deny this claim, writing in 1999 that the Honest Ulsterman ‘was far too rumbustious ever to be considered a house magazine’¹⁰²). Like the Northern Review, the magazine defined itself in opposition to Southern poetic models even as it looked to Dublin poets (like Kennelly) for support and publicity. By the summer of 1968, Michael Foley wrote that Queen’s students were not buying the magazine on account of its high price and ‘glossy’ covers. He recommended printing on rough, brown paper since students would rather support a magazine on the edge of folding than one which seemed commercially viable.¹⁰³ Simmons took Foley’s advice, and ensured that the early covers looked carelessly thrown together, like a second-rate collage. Inside, typographical errors lurked on almost every page: there was no standard fount or typeface for titles, layout appeared left to whim, there were smudges from the printing block, and the ink was often either too faint or too bold. This lack of professional presentation was due to financial constraints (Simmons fronted the money himself until he received an Arts Council Grant in January 1970), but its thrown-together look was also a way to lure young readers and writers. Foley also suggested starting a letters column, sponsoring Heaney parody competitions, and printing embarrassingly sectarian quotes from ‘respectable’ provincial newspapers in order to gain more student subscriptions. Simmons realized Foley was right: to have appeared too polished would have undermined the magazine’s provocative edge. This was, after all, ‘a monthly handbook for a revolution’. This slogan (which was later dropped) may have inspired suspicion on the part of the police: after the riots surrounding the 1969 People’s Democracy march in Derry, the Honest Ulsterman was marked for investigation. Simmons was warned by his friend George Campbell that the police might try to invade the magazine’s ‘offices’ and seize material; he was worried enough to write to a law professor at Queen’s for legal advice about what to do in such a case. Ultimately, a mild-mannered policeman called on Simmons and took a few notes, but no censorship resulted. Later, however, guest editor Michael Stephens was forced to cut a quote from William Burroughs, three poems by John Chadbon, and one poem ¹⁰¹ Longley, Causeway, 96. ¹⁰² Michael Longley, ‘A Boat on the River’, in Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (eds.), Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), 139. ¹⁰³ Foley to Simmons, 3 Aug. 1968, Box 1, JSP.

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by Richard Brautigan out of the April 1969 issue.¹⁰⁴ That year, Simmons was denounced from the pulpit by an ex-Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, the Very Rev. Dr Alfred Martin, who raved against the indecency of the Honest Ulsterman and urged the government to ban it from the Province. Another clergyman, the Rev. Desmond Mock, wrote to the Belfast Telegraph in support of Martin, decrying the magazine’s lewd language and subject-matter. Simmons responded by attacking the Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland and warning against the use of censorship. ‘An uncorrupted church would welcome The Honest Ulsterman, for the work of young writers that I have the privilege of printing has more spiritual authority, is more serious and honest than a whole wilderness of Ulster sermons.’¹⁰⁵ This incident shows that the magazine was powerful enough to incite controversy beyond the Belfast literary community; as such, it must have given the coterie a great deal of free publicity. As John D. Stewart had earlier commented in a Sunday News article: I see that young James Simmons, editor of ‘The Honest Ulsterman’, has been accused of publishing ‘depravity’ by Dr Alfred Martin—right on the opening day of NUU . . . Good show! A little honest depravity may be badly needed here— bearing in mind that what the old churchmen call depravity many of us would call straightforward common sense.¹⁰⁶

Michael Longley was one of the first to realize that the Honest Ulsterman was more than just a forum for local writing—it was a vehicle for corroboration and cohesion. In May 1969, there was an ‘Honest Ulsterman’ poetry reading in Belfast at which Foley, Stephens, Simmons, and Arthur Terry read. The reading was followed by a discussion of the aims and objects of the Honest Ulsterman—an event that perhaps prodded Longley to write to Simmons in September 1969, ‘more power to your elbow, and continue building up an informed and alive COTERIE audience’.¹⁰⁷ Edna Longley remarked in 1976 that ‘No magazine could sow the seed for the imaginative “flowering” and cross-fertilisation that was already taking place when it was founded, but it could provide earth and a shop-window and encourage the plants to spread.’¹⁰⁸ She also ¹⁰⁴ Jack Holland, ‘Broken Images’, newspaper clipping, 1976, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ¹⁰⁵ James Simmons, ‘Letter to the Editor’, clipping from the Belfast Telegraph (1969), James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ¹⁰⁶ John D. Stewart, ‘New University Surely Flourishes in the Old Triangle’, Sunday News, 6 Oct. 1968. ¹⁰⁷ Longley to Simmons, Sept. 1969, Box 1, JSP. ¹⁰⁸ Edna Longley, ‘Poetry from the North’, newspaper clipping, 1976, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP.

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admitted that Simmons had ‘talent-scouting flair’.¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the magazine was making a mark not only in literary circles, but with a lay audience as well. Michael Foley was astonished when, over Easter 1969, middle-aged neighbours had approached him on the street to talk about the magazine, which they were buying and reading.¹¹⁰ Yet by June 1969 Simmons was already beginning to talk about giving up his editorship, for lack of time. There was an air of despondency and frustration in his editorial that month: To make it worthy of influence YOU must write or persuade the good writers that you know to send in poems, articles, stories and reportage (particularly that) in the Norman Mailer manner of public events, marches, meetings. . . . Most of the good work I get is personal, lyrical, fragmentary, fine in itself; but what the magazine in particular and society in general lacks desperately is more public issues treated with this sort of seriousness. We don’t get it at all in the local press, and very little in the quality papers.¹¹¹

But contributors resisted following Simmons’s example. The good poems remained ‘personal, lyrical, fragmentary’. This avoidance of politics was mirrored in the theatre. In October 1969, the Lyric Theatre decided not to stage Over the Bridge, Sam Thompson’s play about sectarian dispute in a Belfast shipyard, due to the worsening political situation. The Honest Ulsterman responded indignantly with an article entitled, ‘The Anatomy of Intimidation’. ‘We must tread carefully, but—and this is the whole basis of the Honest Ulsterman—we must not allow fear or self-deception to prevent outspoken discussion.’¹¹² Yet this is exactly what was to happen in the coming months. In December 1969, Simmons gave up his editorship to his future brother-in-law Michael Foley, whom Richard Kirkland has called ‘one of the most interesting satirists of this period’, someone who ‘foresaw in his own writing a role as the George Moore of the Ulster Revival’.¹¹³ Foley, erstwhile poet and graduate science student at Queen’s, felt that literature should be both amoral and apolitical.¹¹⁴ He voiced contempt for student protest movements such as the People’s Democracy, feeling that the marchers were motivated more by glamour and excitement than by ¹⁰⁹ Edna Longley, ‘Poetry from the North’. ¹¹⁰ Foley to Simmons, 13 Apr. 1969, Box 1, JSP. ¹¹¹ James Simmons, ‘What Must I Do To Be Saved?’, Honest Ulsterman, 14 (1969), 2–3. (This issue is erroneously labelled Number 13, May 1969, in the Table of Contents.) ¹¹² Michael Richards, ‘The Anatomy of Intimidation’, Honest Ulsterman, 18 (1969), 23. ¹¹³ Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 60. ¹¹⁴ See Michael Foley, ‘The Art of Not Caring’, Honest Ulsterman, 13 (1969), 3–5.

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concern for civil rights.¹¹⁵ Under Foley’s editorship, petty bickering replaced political soul-searching. He attacked Hobsbaum’s poetry workshop in verse, then later dubbed Heaney, Longley, and Mahon the ‘Tight Assed Trio’.¹¹⁶ Heaney retaliated with a verse letter of his own, in which he called Foley an ‘editorial dope’.¹¹⁷ That same month Simmons also slighted Foley’s editorial skills, saying he had an ‘unfortunate way of presenting literature’,¹¹⁸ while Hibernia accused the magazine of literary inbreeding.¹¹⁹ It is little wonder then that in July 1970 Foley prefaced the issue with an editorial disclaimer: An obvious conclusion is that literary magazines are at best irrelevant and at worst a menace. The Ulsterman was started in hope of changing this and reaching a new audience with a more direct kind of writing. . . . I’m convinced now that this is impossible . . .¹²⁰

In late 1971, a frustrated Foley gave up his position as editor and moved to England; Frank Ormsby took over the editorship in January 1972. Simmons was still involved, but the leftist slant of the magazine all but disappeared, as did most of its political commentary. It was Ormsby’s feeling (ironic in hindsight) that ‘Poetry has never had much relevance in Ulster; at the present time it has even less. To write poetry about the troubles is to fiddle while Belfast and Derry burn.’¹²¹ In an early editorial he emphasized this position, thus significantly changing the political thrust of the magazine: ‘In the end it is a question of staying aloof as far as possible, an essentially defensive struggle against infection. Silence, exile and cunning are still attractive alternatives, perhaps more than ever.’¹²² Tellingly, Bloody Sunday received no comment in the January/February issue of 1972, nor in any other issue that year. The magazine became almost entirely devoted to poetry, while infrequent editorials tended to criticize poets for writing about the Troubles. Simmons’s initial hope that the Honest Ulsterman would bring about a revolution through literature became the subject of parody. In one satiric editorial, for example, ¹¹⁵ See Michael Foley, ‘The Revolutionaries’, Honest Ulsterman, 13 (1969), 30–4. ¹¹⁶ Michael Foley, review of Energy to Burn, by James Simmons, Honest Ulsterman, 29 (1971), 40–1. ¹¹⁷ Seamus Heaney, ‘Letter to an Editor’, Honest Ulsterman, 31 (1971), 7. Heaney, however, praised Foley’s satiric prose style, which he called an ‘excellent, | fit instrument for cheek-slash and death blow’. ¹¹⁸ James Simmons, review of The Big Chapel, by Thomas Kilroy, Honest Ulsterman, 31 (1971), 35. ¹¹⁹ Anon., ‘Magazine Reviews’, Hibernia, 29 May 1970, 13. ¹²⁰ Michael Foley, ‘Seriously, Though’, Honest Ulsterman, 24 (1970), 2–3. ¹²¹ Frank Ormsby, review of An Ulster Reckoning, by John Hewitt, Honest Ulsterman, 29 (1971), 39. ¹²² Frank Ormsby, ‘Coping’, Honest Ulsterman, 35 (1972), 3.

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Ormsby presented the figure of a ‘Troubles poet’ (‘Tragic Anguish’) and his young protégé (‘Disciple’): Tragic Anguish: . . . Tell me, have you mentioned flying glass in your poem? Disciple: (Promptly) Splinters flying through the air Lacerate the face and hair. Tragic Anguish: (Assured) Brilliant. Sweet Jesus, it’s brilliant! (Curtain descends to the sound of unrestrained weeping.)¹²³

It was too easy, Ormsby felt, to exploit the Troubles for poetic copy. ‘Whether to loot or salvage is a matter of opinion’, he wrote. ‘It is not difficult to give second-rate poetry a spurious importance by playing this sort of game—let’s call it The Dilemma of the Ulster Protestant Poet, or Look! I’ve Got a Split Identity!’¹²⁴ The following spoof, which appeared in 1976, revealed just how much the editorial policy of the Honest Ulsterman would change under Ormsby’s direction: For Hire: Qualified War Poet * Prepared to bleed in public. * Documentary realism guaranteed. Legs, arms, bits in polythene bags etc. provided. * Was in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday, Bloody Monday, Bloody Tuesday, Bloody Wednesday, Bloody Thursday, Bloody Friday, and Bloody Saturday. * Would like to meet genuine publisher/producer with view to furthering career. * Strictly relevant, concerned, committed.¹²⁵

Ciaran Carson’s negative review of North—in which he called Heaney ‘the laureate of violence’—reflected the editorial shift.¹²⁶ The ‘committed’ poet was no longer a revolutionary but a mercenary. By 1972, John Montague claimed in the TLS that ‘The Honest Ulsterman, which began as a handbook to a revolution, has declined into ¹²³ Frank Ormsby, ‘Tragic Anguish’, Honest Ulsterman, 46/47 (1974–5), 2–3. ¹²⁴ Ormsby, review of An Ulster Reckoning, 39. ¹²⁵ Anon., ‘For Hire: Qualified War Poet’, Honest Ulsterman, 53 (1976), 23. ¹²⁶ Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?’, review of North, by Seamus Heaney, Honest Ulsterman, 50 (1975), 183. This editorial shift was also mirrored in the magazine’s format. Under Ormsby, the layout of the magazine became clearer, the fount standardized, and the thrown-together look of the early years was abandoned. The political situation in Northern Ireland may have been breaking down, but inside the Honest Ulsterman there was, at least typographically, a sense of order and stability. Writers could turn their backs on the violence outside as they turned through the magazine’s pages, which were now clean, spare, and minimalist. Each cover was designed by the same artist, John Middleton, whose eclectic drawings made no reference to the political situation. Advertisements for literary magazines such as Phoenix and Caret took the place of the ‘fighting left-wing weeklies’ and Che Guevara’s name disappeared (except in mockery).

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a student magazine.’¹²⁷ But this was not quite true, given that Muldoon, Carson, Longley, Gavin Ewart, Desmond Hogan, Stewart Parker, as well as Ormsby and Simmons, were still frequent contributors. Despite its bad press, the magazine remained an important force in Belfast literary life, though by the 1980s it had firmly set itself in opposition to Field Day and the entire notion of Irish post-nationalism. It has become the longest-running literary magazine in Northern Ireland, no doubt surprising everyone involved with its inception—no one more so than James Simmons. Yet as the renaissance gained momentum, the political situation deteriorated. Increasing acts of violence propelled Heaney to write in 1966, ‘A month ago it was still possible to say “hooliganism”, but with the shooting down of three youths on Sunday and the death of one of them nobody can ignore the threat to public safety.’¹²⁸ However, the transformation of Belfast from a provincial backwater to a literary metropolis during the 1960s was in itself an act of unity, a ‘new political condition’ the poets themselves had engendered. The renaissance laid the groundwork for further investigations into the troubled psyche of Northern Ireland through poetry, giving the literary community confidence and coherence, and the younger generation a sense of a venerable Northern tradition. It was much more than a coincidence of talents—it was an historical moment: a brief window of optimism and tolerance that encouraged cross-community interaction and creative collaboration. The friendships, strengthened by the numerous readings, public appearances, and informal gatherings during the late sixties, would lead a growing audience to think of these poets as a group—a categorization which would lead each of them, in time, to define himself against this label. Indeed, the construction of a collective identity would inevitably lead to the construction of the self.

¹²⁷ John Montague, ‘Order in Donnybrook Fair’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 Mar. 1972, 313. ¹²⁸ Seamus Heaney, ‘Out of London: Ulster’s Troubles’, 23.

4 ‘Genuine Accents’ If the Belfast poets needed, in Mahon’s words, to ‘insist upon a different court of appeal from that which sits in the South’, they would have to insist upon different poetic fathers, ones who had wrestled with the peculiarly Northern ‘schizoid’ identity to which Longley frequently alluded.¹ The work of Kavanagh, Hughes, Frost, Hill, Larkin, Yeats, and Lowell, though deeply influential, could not provide a common point of origin. But John Hewitt and Louis MacNeice could: for all their differences, both poets had confronted a sense of displacement that was familiar to Heaney, Mahon, Simmons, Longley, and Muldoon. Hewitt’s strategy was to turn his attention to the region, while MacNeice fashioned himself a restless cosmopolitan. Frank Ormsby noted that the release of the two poets’ Collected Poems came almost back to back—MacNeice in 1966, Hewitt in 1968—and referred to the publications as ‘poetic milestones’ which ‘confirmed these poets as exemplars and influences’ on the next generation.² Each offered the Belfast poets a model of how to engage with a self and a poetics that were frequently torn in different cultural directions; perhaps more importantly, each also served as a literary forebear who might distinguish a Belfast poetic ‘tradition’ from that of Dublin, London, or New England. Though today the Belfast poets are quick to point out their stylistic and aesthetic differences, they admit that they all share a taste for the finely wrought lyric poem. Mahon has called himself ‘an out-and-out traditionalist’,³ while Longley, speaking of his fellow Northern poets, has said, ‘I think we’ve all in our different ways attended to the mystery of the way

¹ Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (1970), 90. ² Frank Ormsby (ed.), ‘Introduction’, A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992), p. xvi. ³ Eamon Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, interview with Derek Mahon, Paris Review, 154 (2000), 165.

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the constraint of form is the release.’⁴ Heaney, as I have noted, echoed these comments, saying, ‘I suppose we shared traditional beliefs about whatever good writing is—it wasn’t the let-it-all-hang-out school, it was the well-made school.’⁵ He also admitted that they shared a formalist sensibility that has ‘continued to inform the work’.⁶ As he told Seamus Deane in 1977: I think there is a recognizable group in the literary sense. This would include Simmons, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon and others . . . I’m talking of a certain literary style which arose from the ‘well made poem’ cult in English writing in the late fifties and sixties. Though harking to different writers all of us in this group were harking to writers from the English cultural background. In that sense, there is a kind of tightmouthedness which might be considered ‘Northern’ by many in the South, but which is really the result of a particular literary apprenticeship.⁷

Here Heaney aligns himself with an English tradition critics have more often associated with Mahon and Longley; Brearton notes, for example, that Longley is frequently cited as ‘an adherent of the Movement’s style . . . an adept at producing the “well-made poem”, whose formalism is indicative of refined Anglicanism’.⁸ That Heaney draws a line from the Movement to a ‘tightmouthed’ Northern aesthetic, downplaying the influence of, say, Kavanagh, reveals the extent to which the poets were working within (and reworking) an English poetic tradition—an idea which accords with Terence Brown’s sense that the Ulster Renaissance was ‘a renaissance of a poetic form that seemed to have exhausted its possibilities in England’.⁹ While Kirkland argues that Hobsbaum’s ‘Leavisite/New Critical’ method reinforced an alignment with English poetry,¹⁰ Brearton claims British war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, and Keith Douglas showed the Northern poets that ‘the lyric tradition [was] alive and kicking’.¹¹ In a 1997 interview with Brearton, Longley suggested that the ⁴ Mike Murphy, ‘Michael Longley’, Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 124. ⁵ Frank Kinahan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8: 3 (1982), 408. ⁶ Ibid. ⁷ Seamus Deane, ‘Unhappy and at Home’, interview with Seamus Heaney, Crane Bag, 1: 1 (1977), 61. ⁸ Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 282. ⁹ Terence Brown, ‘An Ulster Renaissance? Poets from the North of Ireland, 1965–1980’, Concerning Poetry, 14: 2 (1981), 19. ¹⁰ Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), 80. ¹¹ Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry, 265.

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Northern tendency towards the ‘well made poem’ had to do with a search for ‘tact’ and ‘order’ to set against the violence—an explanation that seems to straddle both Leavis’s literary-critical-cultural programme and the war poets’ aesthetic priorities.¹² London Group member Alan Brownjohn attributed the ‘straight and narrow traditionalism of form’ not to refined Anglicanism but to a harsher (Presbyterian) Puritanism, noting, ‘trendy transatlantic and European influences seem mercifully to have passed them by’.¹³ Despite the general agreement that the Northern aesthetic is, in the words of Terence Brown, ‘stylistically conservative’,¹⁴ recent work by Edna Longley, Rachel Buxton, Michael Allen, and Jonathan Allison has shown that Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and Muldoon were extremely susceptible to ‘transatlantic influences’. American poetic examples were perhaps more important to the Catholic poets because they offered an alternative to the English literary tradition, yet Mahon and Longley also had one eye across the Atlantic. All admired the way Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Lowell, Plath, and others had followed Emerson’s famous call in ‘The Poet’ to shed English models. Although Heaney and Muldoon were weaned on English literature, their marginalized backgrounds as Irish Catholics living in an English province made American literature a resonant and enabling tradition. Allison notes that for Heaney, during the early 1970s, ‘the field of American writing was associated with the limitless, whereas English writing expressed a Movement aesthetic of rational control. To go beyond gentility was to go beyond Englishness.’¹⁵ As Buxton has shown, Robert Frost helped Heaney and Muldoon get ‘beyond Englishness’; perhaps Frost’s greatest legacy to the Irish poets was his use of the New England vernacular, which, Buxton says, ‘contributed to the opening up of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century in such a way as to give validity and strength to regional poetry’.¹⁶ Yet even ¹² Fran Brearton, ‘ “Walking forwards into the past”: An Interview with Michael Longley’, Irish Studies Review, 18 (1997), 37. ¹³ Alan Brownjohn, ‘An Unprovincial Province’, Encounter, n.d. (c. 1979), Box 48, MLP. ¹⁴ Terence Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 172. ¹⁵ Jonathan Allison, ‘Beyond Gentility: A Note on Seamus Heaney and American Poetry’, Critical Survey, 8: 2 (1996), 181. ¹⁶ Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 16. Buxton also argues that ‘the use of the vernacular in Irish poetry is certainly not attributable solely to Frost . . . Yeats’s cultivation of the colloquial in literature might in some way have influenced the American’, 21.

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as America was a post-colonial nation intent upon forging a distinct poetics, it had also played the part of the colonizer, brutally oppressing native and slave populations. The darker implications of manifest destiny were not lost on Heaney and Muldoon; Muldoon, in particular, would look to Native American history and folklore (in ‘The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants’ and ‘Meeting the British’, for example) when addressing his own colonial predicament. Heaney, despite his great admiration for Frost, noted in ‘Frontiers of Writing’ that Frost had participated in an ‘unconscious erasure of native American stories’ in ‘The Gift Outright’, in which he painted aggressive colonial expansion as rightful pursuit of a national inheritance.¹⁷ Although Michael Allen has claimed that Mahon and Longley were ‘excluded at the outset from a Hiberno-American rapport by their Northern Protestant cultural antecedents’, the Protestant poets did find affinity with the New England tradition—particularly in the poetry of Robert Lowell.¹⁸ John Hewitt picked up on certain parallels between the two regions in 1945, writing, ‘The careful rejection of the rhetorical and flamboyant, the stubborn concreteness of imagery . . . make us bold enough to claim Concord as a townland of our own.’¹⁹ As sceptical Protestants, Mahon and Longley sympathized with Lowell’s efforts to subvert New England Puritan orthodoxies, and identified with Boston as a post-industrial Atlantic city in decline like Belfast.²⁰ Brearton cites the debt Mahon’s The Hunt by Night bears to Lowell’s ‘neocolonial exposé’ in Near the Ocean (1967), a work whose engagement with ‘an oppressive Calvinist theology’ resonated with the Belfast poet.²¹ Indeed, Mahon reviewed this collection for Phoenix in 1969, calling Lowell a ‘midwife and gravedigger to the American personality in the high noon of its apotheosis’.²² Though Lowell’s friendship with Heaney is well documented, he ¹⁷ Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, 2nd edn. (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 197. ¹⁸ Michael Allen, ‘The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969–1987’, Southern Review, 31: 1 (1995), 727. ¹⁹ John Hewitt, ‘The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer’, in Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987), 111. Quoted in Edna Longley, ‘ “Atlantic’s Premises”: American Influences on Northern Irish Poetry in the 1960s’, Poetry and Posterity (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2000), 270. See this essay for a detailed discussion of American poetic influences on Mahon, Longley, and Heaney. ²⁰ Longley, ‘ “Atlantic’s Premises”: American Influences on Northern Irish Poetry in the 1960s’, 267. ²¹ Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry, 192. ²² Derek Mahon, ‘Derek Mahon on Lowell’, review of Near the Ocean, by Robert Lowell, Phoenix, 2 (1969), 54.

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was also acquainted with the Longleys, with whom he stayed during a visit to Belfast in the early seventies. (Longley later sent him a sheaf of poems in 1976, to which he responded enthusiastically.²³) The Protestant poets were also drawn to the work of Crane and Stevens, whose influence, says Edna Longley, can be seen in Longley’s ‘The Hebrides’ and ‘Circe’, and Mahon’s ‘Day Trip to Donegal’ and ‘Beyond Howth Head’, among others.²⁴ Crane in particular ‘helped to rescue the coastal city of Belfast from the drably factual, anti-poetic role in which it had often been cast’.²⁵ She remembers the two poets constantly listening to a recording of Stevens, cummings, Wilbur, and Lowell (reading ‘The Quaker Graveyard’) during their Trinity days and notes that Michael Allen’s appointment as a lecturer in American literature at Queen’s in 1963 helped further to acquaint the poets with the American literary tradition.²⁶ Despite their interest in American poetry, however, Heaney, Mahon, and Longley never strayed far from the English forms they had been taught at school and university. Williams, cummings, and Ginsberg may have presented an intriguing new mode of lyric expression, but, for the most part, it was not imitated. As Allison puts it, Heaney prefers ‘a poetic which may give expression to emotions beyond the pale but which relies upon paradigms developed within the pale of English literary convention’.²⁷ In fact, during this time Heaney and Longley were sceptical of Allen Ginsberg’s beat poetry: Heaney called his unpromising undergraduates at Berkeley ‘Ginsberg-gullible’,²⁸ while Longley complained, ‘the irritating or boring manifestations of recent years—pop poetry, sound poetry, found poetry, full frontal poetry, etc. etc.—don’t matter’.²⁹ In the same vein, Longley told Dillon Johnston, ‘I read quite a lot of American poetry and most of it I find is chopped prose. . . . I like some of Williams, but I find it thin on my ear, not rich enough.’³⁰ Nor did he admire Plath—reviewing Ariel, he chastised her for using ‘poetry . . . as therapy’.³¹ Mahon, for his part, called confessional poetry ‘formless exhibition, like the worst of Anne Sexton. It’s not poetry; it’s not interesting; it’s not even ²³ Lowell to Longley, 12 July 1976, Box 1, MLP ²⁴ Longley, ‘ “Atlantic’s Premises”: American Influences on Northern Irish Poetry in the 1960s’, 264. ²⁵ Ibid. 265. ²⁶ Ibid. 263. ²⁷ Allison, ‘Beyond Gentility: A Note on Seamus Heaney and American Poetry’, 183. ²⁸ Heaney to Longley, 26 Apr. 1971, Box 15a, MLP. ²⁹ Michael Longley, ‘The State of Poetry: A Symposium’, the Review, 29–30 (1972), 48. ³⁰ Dillon Johnston, ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, Irish Literary Supplement, 5: 2 (1986), 21. ³¹ Michael Longley, draft of review of Ariel, by Sylvia Plath, handwritten MS, n.d., Box 36, MLP.

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readable.’³² Curiously, Mahon admired Ginsberg, whom he called ‘a genuinely gifted poet’, but disdained Whitman, whose works, he proclaimed, ‘should be burnt and the ashes scattered’.³³ The poets were also deeply critical of American imperialism. Heaney, writing to Longley from Berkeley, asked, ‘Tell me what you want from America, besides withdrawal from Vietnam, an end to air pollution and big-business corporations.’³⁴ Mahon, writing to the Longleys from North America in 1967, said that poets had a responsibility to speak out against the Vietnam War: ‘it is for people like us, the self-appointed custodians of sensibility, to keep the distinctions clear between imagination and fantasy, humanity and brutality, for if we don’t the best lack all conviction.’³⁵ The same year, again writing to the Longleys, he described Americans as ‘corrupt’: I find American light brassy, banal and without variety. It’s just very bright and dry. Functional. . . . In American cities there is no sky at all—just the glaring reflection of a million gleaming car-roofs. Perhaps it was different in James’s time, when the Yanks themselves were not quite so stale and corrupt as they are now and could manage a fair semblance of freshness and innocence. But ‘fresh and innocent’ are the words for Irish light. . . .³⁶

Longley later echoed Mahon’s feelings when he identified his misgivings towards American poetry with its alien landscape: I don’t see how someone living in a small island where the landscape changes at every turn in the road and where the fields are small and where the sky is low could write the same way as someone who lives on the prairies where the vista is unchanged for hundreds of miles. . . . I think what I can learn from American models is limited.³⁷

There was also much suspicion towards the American academy: as Mahon wrote to Longley in 1966, ‘the big firms in Boston and NY are too busy turning out the well-wrought droppings of tight-assed literocrats ³² Grennan, transcript of ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’ with edits by Derek Mahon, typed MS, Box 34, DMP, 35. This excerpt does not appear in the published interview. ³³ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (Nov. 1966), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Your prolonged silence . . .’ ³⁴ Heaney to Longley, 26 Apr. 1971, Box 15a, MLP. ³⁵ Mahon to Edna and Michael Longley, n.d. (1967), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Enclosed are three new poems . . .’ ³⁶ Mahon to Edna Longley, n.d. (c. Jan. 1967), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Am in receipt of your rare . . .’ Mahon’s poem, ‘Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass.’, seems to have been inspired by this nostalgia for Irish light. ³⁷ Johnston, ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, 21.

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who teach at the right places. It’s all part of the Great Society, from which God save us. Better a real fish in a real pond than in a vast aquarium kept alive by a central heating and artificial light.’³⁸ In January 1967, he further exclaimed his frustration in a letter to Edna Longley. Speaking of an acquaintance who taught literature at Harvard, Mahon wrote: I must confess I could never talk about poesy to him because he would always bully me with the most amazing academic jargon, picked up from some desiccated literary calculating machine in Harvard. I can never quite get over the suspicion that academic criticism consists of transliterating King James English into computerese to the greater glory of the American Way of Life, and that the essential purpose of the New Critics and people like that (not excepting that fine poet J. C. Ransom) was to make literature seem to be about itself and not about things the well-fed American prefers not to notice, like social evils, the ugliness of his whole system and the corruption of his very humanity. To say it was a rightwing, crypto-fascist conspiracy engineered by a junta of embittered Southern gentlemen from Saint Louis and Nashville, Tennessee, would be to leave myself open to charges of hysteria, but I can’t help suspecting there is a grain of truth there, way back. Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour!³⁹

During this time, Mahon advised Longley to abandon any thoughts he might have had of pursuing a teaching career in America: ‘America will solve nothing for you that you can’t solve on the home stomping-ground. . . . please don’t even consider the possibility of a university career over here. . . . It would be selling out.’⁴⁰ Indeed, as the poets grew more familiar with the American poetry scene throughout the seventies and eighties, they became increasingly critical of its slick professionalism. As Longley wrote, ‘It’s alarming that the ambition of some American poets is so often confused with achievement: garrulity has become an aesthetic principle, almost. For me a good poem by Larkin or Hill weighs more than the verbal tonnage of all those trans-Atlantic Breathers and Bleeders.’⁴¹ Four years after Heaney ³⁸ Mahon to Michael and Edna Longley, n.d. (1966), from 596 Church St., Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘The above will be my address until . . .’ ³⁹ Mahon to Edna Longley, n.d. (Jan. 1967), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Am in receipt of your rare . . .’ Mahon wrote to Dillon Johnston in 1983, ‘I’m always amused by the baffled American response to elaborate form, my Belfast baroque. They don’t like it because they don’t understand it; they think one is gilding the lily when in fact one is offering a different kind of lily.’ Mahon to Johnston, 26 Dec. 1983, Box 1, DMP. ⁴⁰ Mahon to Edna and Michael Longley, n.d. (1967), from Toronto, Box 13, MLP. ‘Enclosed are three new poems . . .’ ⁴¹ Longley, ‘The State of Poetry: A Symposium’, 48.

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began teaching at Harvard, he wrote in the Observer that poetry in America was peopled by a guild of makers . . . among whom it is difficult for anybody to distinguish the uniquely gifted and the highly destined. In the resultant pluralism, grant-aided and indiscriminately tolerant, a blurb-induced sleep of the critical faculties has tended to produce not monsters but molehills.⁴²

That same year he told the Literary Review that it was ‘very difficult’ to be a writer in America on account of the high expectations of constant productivity and success; he also complained that ‘The problems of social justice do not seem to concern the intellectual community very much here. The fulfillment of the self seems to be the priority.’⁴³ Longley, too, was worried by what he saw as an American tendency to indulge in ‘favours and backscratching’: ‘You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That’s death, really, if you take pleasure in it.’⁴⁴ Muldoon also criticized the American poetry scene, claiming in 1994 that American poetry had ‘in so many instances retreated into inconsequential gobbledygook . . . written by one poet for another’.⁴⁵ In 2000, Mahon concurred, saying, ‘for all the immense quality of stuff being done in the States, there’s very little that I can actually read’.⁴⁶ Influenced by British, American, and Irish poetry, yet hesitant to embrace those traditions fully, the poets sought out a Northern poetic predecessor who understood the realities of life in Ulster and who had successfully inscribed those realities onto the page. In 1962, as a postgraduate student at St Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast, ⁴² Seamus Heaney, ‘Like a Greedy Shark’, Observer, 28 Dec. 1986. Quoted in Allison, ‘Beyond Gentility’, 184. ⁴³ June Beisch, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, The Literary Review, 29: 2 (1986), 164, 167. Allison notes that Heaney rarely wrote about America, despite his prolonged residency there. ⁴⁴ Peter McDonald, ‘An Interview with Michael Longley’, Thumbscrew, 12 (Winter 1998/9), 6. ⁴⁵ Lynn Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, Contemporary Literature, 35: 1 (1994), 22. ⁴⁶ Grennan, transcript of ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’ with edits by Mahon, typed MS, Box 34, DMP, 62. This excerpt does not appear in the published interview. Edna Longley, too, would maintain a certain distance from the American academy during the coming years. In her 1995 article, ‘Irish Bards and American Audiences’, she criticized the American hesitance to situate Irish poetry in its proper historical and intertextual contexts, stating plainly, ‘Many American academics read Irish poetry naively’ (757). In ‘An ABC of Reading Contemporary Irish Poetry’, published three years later in the Princeton Library Chronicle, she echoed Heaney’s criticism of the American poetry scene, and bemoaned its ‘loss of critical nerve’ (541).

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Heaney wrote an extended essay on Ulster’s literary magazines that deepened his sense of being part of a literary tradition with homegrown roots. The essay, he wrote, gave me a certain purchase on what had been happening at Queen’s and in Belfast during the 40’s and 50’s, so I ended up with a good sense of the efforts made at that time to get a ‘regional literature’ going. I knew about the work done by people like Robert Greacen and John Gallen in The New Northman at Queen’s in the early 40’s, by John Boyd and John Hewitt in Lagan, and by Roy McFadden in Rann. At this time I also met Michael McLaverty (I did my teaching practice in his school and subsequently taught there in 1962–3) and the painter T. P. Flanagan. Through Terry and Sheila Flanagan I got to know the artist Colin Middleton and eventually became personally friendly with John Hewitt. All this grounding in a pre-Hobsbaum, pre-Group, pre-Longleys and Mahon context was important to me. . . . Another extra-group context that was important to me then was my friendship with the singer David Hammond, and through him a connection to an older generation of writers, such as Sam Hanna Bell and Joseph Tomelty. These met in a café in Fountain Street . . . They were not particularly ‘influential’ at a stylistic level, but they gave one a strong sense of local context, of creative endeavour having been there from the start, of high (or highish) artistic ambition proceeding in an Ulster accent.⁴⁷

Clearly the presence of so many older writers in Belfast was important to Heaney, if only as evidence that one could lead a literary life in the city. But one writer stood out, and that was John Hewitt: in the period before I left Belfast in 1972, I had a stronger sense of John Hewitt’s work and a stronger sympathy with it than any of my contemporaries: Louis MacNeice and W. R. Rodgers, whom the Longleys and Derek Mahon had coincided with in Dublin were ‘their’ master poets. I visited John and Ruby more than once in Coventry and they came to see Marie and me in Belfast.⁴⁸

Heaney’s interest in Hewitt is indicative of the elder poet’s respected position within the Ulster poetry community at this time. He was someone who, according to Longley, ‘held out the creative hand rather than the clenched fist [and] made himself heard in a land of bellowers without raising his voice’.⁴⁹ Although Heaney and Mahon would eventually disavow Hewitt’s regionalist philosophy, during the 1960s he was an important local presence. By privileging the provincial, he encouraged young writers who believed that Belfast was, in W. R. Rodgers’s words, ‘a ⁴⁷ Letter to author, 24 Jan. 2000. ⁴⁸ Ibid. ⁴⁹ Quoted in ‘Introduction’, Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991), p. 1xxiii.

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backwater of literature out of sight of the running stream of contemporary verse’.⁵⁰ Unlike MacNeice, who offered himself up as ‘an example of uprootability’,⁵¹ Hewitt was, Heaney wrote in 1969, ‘true, rooted, within a tradition’⁵²—not to be mistaken for an English poet as, Mahon noted, MacNeice had.⁵³ Yet, like MacNeice, he too attempted to negotiate an identity fulfilled by both Irishness and Protestantism. At least this is how Heaney interpreted Hewitt’s ars poetica in 1969: ‘Perhaps this two-way pull, back into the grave and eloquent mainstream of English and out into the shifting, elaborate, receding currents of the Irish experience lies behind Hewitt’s poetic voice.’⁵⁴ Hewitt’s attempt to reconcile his competing sense of origins involved writing poems that displayed, according to Heaney, ‘a stubborn determination to belong to the Irishry and yet tenaciously aware of a different origin and cast of mind’.⁵⁵ One might say the same of MacNeice, except that he journeyed out from the centre, whereas Hewitt, like the pioneers in Heaney’s ‘Bogland’, preferred to ‘keep striking | Inwards and downwards’.⁵⁶ Such a strategy appealed to Heaney and Longley in particular. As Longley wrote, ‘We learned from him that poetry like charity begins at home; that if you enjoy a vivid inner life and are alert to people and places, your home-ground may prove to be a gold mine.’⁵⁷ He further recalled that, as young poets, Hewitt had taken ‘an avuncular interest’ in his and Mahon’s poems.⁵⁸ Mahon has said that Hewitt’s poems ‘contributed important work to our culture’,⁵⁹ while Simmons, who fashioned himself a latter-day regionalist in the pages of the Honest Ulsterman, called Hewitt ‘the Daddy of us all’.⁶⁰ Although these writers would eventually reject the idea of the region as a foundation for Northern poetry, all engaged at some point with the idea of a Northern aesthetic independent of British and Irish influence. A disaffected Methodist of Planter stock with multiple contacts in the art world, Hewitt was the principal proponent of literary regionalism in ⁵⁰ See W. R. Rodgers, Awake! And Other Poems (London: Secker & Warburg, 1941). ⁵¹ Louis MacNeice, ‘Traveller’s Return’, Horizon, 3: 14 (Feb. 1941), 110–17. Reprinted in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 88. ⁵² Seamus Heaney, ‘The Poetry of John Hewitt’, Threshold, 22 (1969), 76. ⁵³ Derek Mahon, ‘Mother Tongue’, review of The Faber Book of Irish Verse, ed. John Montague, New Statesman, 29 Mar. 1974, 451. ⁵⁴ Heaney, ‘The Poetry of John Hewitt’, 75. ⁵⁵ Ibid. ⁵⁶ Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 56. ⁵⁷ Michael Longley, draft of untitled obituary for Hewitt, typed MS, n.d. (1987), Box 37, MLP. ⁵⁸ Ibid. ⁵⁹ Derek Mahon, ‘A Wider Measure of Recognition is Due to John Hewitt’, newspaper clipping, n.d. (1967), James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ⁶⁰ James Simmons, ‘Flight of the Earls Now Leaving’, Irish Times, 4 June 1974.

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Ulster. Born in Belfast in 1907, he first began publishing poetry in left-wing journals such as the Irishman, the Worker’s Voice, and the New Leader in 1928. By the time he graduated from Queen’s in 1930 with a BA in English, he had already been published in AE’s Irish Statesman. During the war years, when travel outside the Province was heavily restricted, he remained in Northern Ireland and lectured on art and Marxism to soldiers. At this time, Hewitt wrote, ‘I felt very enclosed and segregated, and then my thinking turned inwards’; he says his interest in regionalism was partly ‘a reaction to the isolation of the war years’ (though his work as an art assistant at the Belfast Museum also prompted an interest in local history and folklore).⁶¹ Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1938) and Faith for Living (1940) only confirmed his feeling that the best course of action for the Ulster writer was to focus on the idea of a shared geography and folk tradition rather than on a divided religious heritage. In an early essay, ‘Regionalism: The Last Chance’, he wrote: Regionalism is based upon the conviction that, as man is a social being, he must, now that the nation has become an enormously complicated organisation, find some smaller unit to which to give his loyalty. This unit, since the day of the clan is over and that of the large family is passing, must be grounded on something more than kinship. Between these limits lies the region; an area which possesses geographical and economic coherence, which has had some sort of traditional and historical identity and which still, in some measure, demonstrates cultural and linguistic individuality.⁶²

In poetry, regionalism manifested itself through place names, idiomatic speech, rural or working-class dictions, and translations from Irish legends. In prose, it often took the form of articles exploring Ulster’s pre-Plantation history. Hewitt’s socialism inspired his regionalist campaign; for him, a collective awareness of a shared history and landscape was the first step towards implementing socialist ideas. Ideally, regionalism would encourage not just artists, but citizens to overcome sectarianism and class prejudice; only then would Ulster achieve social equality. This vision remained central to Hewitt’s philosophy. As he articulated in his 1972 essay, ‘No Rootless Colonist’: ‘Ulster, considered as a region and not as the symbol of any particular creed, can, I believe, command the loyalty of every one of its inhabitants. For ⁶¹ Quoted in ‘Introduction’, The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Ormsby, pp. xlviii–xlix. ⁶² John Hewitt, ‘Regionalism: The Last Chance’, Northman, 15: 3 (1947), 7–9. Reprinted in Ancestral Voices.

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regional identity does not preclude, rather it requires, membership of a larger association.’⁶³ Regionalism never gained the social momentum Hewitt wished, but it did influence writers like Roy McFadden, John Boyd, Robert Greacen, Michael McLaverty, W. R. Rodgers, and Sam Hanna Bell. During the 1940s many of these writers felt they were the main players in a new movement, much like the poets of the 1960s. For example, Greacen, in his preface to the 1944 Northern Harvest anthology, wrote about the ‘new awakening in Ulster writing, which has taken place since the War started’ and even used the word ‘renascence’ to describe it.⁶⁴ Robert Lynd similarly felt that No such collection as this of Northern Irish literature could have been made when I was a boy in Belfast during the nineties of the last century. In those days neither our city nor our province was the centre of much literary activity. . . . The older generation of Ulstermen reading this selection will be delighted by the evidence it gives of a more wide-spread literary vitality than Ulster has hitherto known. The omens for the future are good.⁶⁵

The Irish Times agreed that ‘Belfast at present is an increasingly vigorous centre of both literature and art’,⁶⁶ while Hugh Shearman, writing also in Northern Harvest, was struck by the city’s literary activity: There has been a great increase in the quantity and quality of the literary output of Ulster writers. . . . the term ‘Athens of the north’ applied to Belfast in all earnestness at the end of the eighteenth century cannot be used by sarcastic adverse critics of that city with quite the same degree of ironical emphasis as a few years ago.⁶⁷

John Hewitt concurred, writing in 1944 that ‘At the present time many qualified persons assert that the best verse in the country is being written north of the Boyne.’⁶⁸ Sam Hanna Bell felt that this ‘new growth’ in Ulster letters could be dated from the beginning of the war: Perhaps it was a sudden sense of interrupted isolation, of being cast from the fringe of Europe into portentous happenings. But, whatever the alembic through ⁶³ John Hewitt, ‘No Rootless Colonist’, Aquarius, 5 (1972), 90–5. Reprinted in Ancestral Voices. ⁶⁴ Robert Greacen (ed.), ‘Preface’, Northern Harvest: An Anthology of Ulster Writing (Belfast: Derrick MacCord, 1944), p. i. ⁶⁵ Robert Lynd, ‘Introduction’, Northern Harvest, p. v. ⁶⁶ Anon., Irish Times advertisement in Now in Ulster (Belfast: A. & G. Campbell, 1944), 75. ⁶⁷ Hugh Shearman, ‘Ulster To-Day’, Northern Harvest, 125. The phrase ‘Athens of the North’ also applied, more commonly, to Edinburgh. ⁶⁸ John Hewitt, ‘Painting in Ulster’, Northern Harvest, 140.

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which this new awareness passed, it is a fact that the past decade has been one of importance so far as creative art in Ulster is concerned.⁶⁹

Hewitt felt that the war was a catalyst for the surge of literary activity, but disagreed with Bell on the nature of its influence. He claimed it had caused people’s thinking to turn inward instead of outward as a result of the heavy travel restrictions imposed on British citizens during this time (one even needed a permit to travel to the Free State of Ireland). Since most of the writing that characterized this period had a regionalist agenda, Hewitt’s theory seems credible. But Bell too had a point: the war gave Protestant Ulster a sense of importance, of suddenly being part of ‘portentous happenings’. The common goal of victory gave the Protestant community the opportunity to prove its loyalty and stamina to Britain, to the world, and to itself; at the same time, the war further distanced Protestant Ulster from the neutral Free State. The newfound sense of selfworth manifested itself in regional introspection: as Greacen wrote in 1944, ‘Whatever the reasons, the life and character of the North-East have had for long an unmerited obscurity: it is high time that at least the edges of the veil were lifted, so that the world may have a few glimpses of the kind of people we are.’⁷⁰ This introspection benefited the arts, which had already experienced a resurgence due to the demand for entertainment and distraction during the war. Literature, music, and visual art were powerful expressions of freedom and beauty—the very things a Nazi victory threatened to obliterate. The realization that the arts could serve a vaguely national purpose in times of hardship was the ulterior motive of the British government’s 1946 decision to subsidize the fine arts through the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, or CEMA. The mission was to ‘develop a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the fine arts exclusively, and in particular to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public’.⁷¹ The Council was eventually split into twelve regional offices, each one governed by a local body with the aim of discovering and encouraging local talent. Government funding to the Arts Council was paltry at first, but it increased throughout the fifties: in 1946, government grants to the organization totalled £235,000; ten years later that figure ⁶⁹ Sam Hanna Bell, ‘Introduction: A Banderol’, in Sam Hanna Bell, Necca A. Robb, and John Hewitt (eds.), The Arts in Ulster (London: George Harrap, 1951), 19. ⁷⁰ Greacen, ‘Preface’, Northern Harvest, p. i. ⁷¹ Quoted in Stuart Laing, ‘The Production of Literature’, in Alan Sinfield (ed.), Society and Literature (London: Methuen, 1983), 141.

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rose to £820,000.⁷² The result was something of a provincial renaissance: by 1946 the Northern Orchestra was performing lunch time concerts in Manchester, while in 1947 a miners’ choir performed Bach’s St John Passion in Birmingham. Similarly, the Scottish Orchestra hired its first full-time conductor in 1946, the same year that a Welsh Orchestra was created. In the 1950s, CEMA was renamed the Arts Council of Great Britain, and was broadened to include literature as well as the fine arts. In 1953 the Arts Council began funding the Poetry Book Society, an organization that was (and still is) instrumental in making a poet’s reputation; after 1955 the Council began giving small three-year subsidies to literary magazines. The New Statesman and the Spectator published poetry on a regular basis, paying particular attention to the Movement poets. Blake Morrison reports that the former magazine published forty such poems between 1949 and 1953, while the latter published 240 Movement works between 1953 and 1956.⁷³ By 1965, the first volume of the Penguin Modern Poets series had sold an amazing 50,000 copies on its first run.⁷⁴ Culture, it seemed, was no longer the exclusive domain of the metropolis; the centre of gravity was shifting, slightly, from London to the provinces. Regionalism maintained a powerful hold on several Northern writers who devoted their creative energy to exploring Ulster’s landscape and dialect, often through the pages of Rann and Lagan, the two most influential literary magazines of the period. For example, in 1948 Roy McFadden trumpeted a regionalist editorial in the first issue of Rann: we are offering this region an opportunity to find its voice and to express itself in genuine accents in these pages. The future rests with the small articulate communities that will crystallise out of the turmoil of our time. . . . the local artist guards and nourishes a native way of life against the chaos which lurks behind standardisation. We welcome all Ulster poets to our pages. We invite poets writing with genuine accents in other regions, whether they be Welsh, Scottish, English or American, to join us. And we invite all self-respecting Ulster men and women to read us.⁷⁵

McFadden’s repeated emphasis on ‘genuine accents’ shows just how seriously Rann took the idea of regionalism, despite its Irish name. Note, however, that McFadden does not include Ireland in his list of regions from which other writers are welcomed—perhaps because he understood that the South did not think of itself as a ‘region’, but as a nation. ⁷² Ibid. 135. ⁷³ Ibid. 134. ⁷⁴ Ibid. 132. ⁷⁵ Roy McFadden, ‘Editorial’, Rann, 1 (1948), inside cover.

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In its first issue, Rann published poems by McLaverty, Hewitt, Boyd, and Greacen. There was also a piece entitled ‘Ancestral Voices’, which focused on the work of past Ulster poets such as William Allingham, Joseph Campbell, John McKinley, and Samuel Ferguson. One year later, the magazine published a similar article by Hewitt, which explored Ulster’s nineteenth-century literary heritage. Hewitt urged contemporary Northern Irish writers to look back to their regional past for inspiration, and scorned those who fixed their gazes in other directions. McFadden echoed this line in a review of MacNeice’s Collected Poems 1925–1948, chastising the poet for looking forwards instead of backwards: This retreat from childhood and country is a pity, for, in the absence of any spiritual roots, Mr MacNeice might well have strengthened his work by an allegiance to place. The man who has no country had no God, Dostoevsky wrote some little time ago; and the intellectual poetry of to-day would seem to bear him out, not only in that statement but its corollary. Allegiance to something beyond one’s immediate time is a valuable asset in poetry. Mr MacNeice may yet apply for membership of Mr Hewitt’s School of Regionalism, and, studying the superstitions and sagas of the forefathers, discover Louis MacNeice.⁷⁶

McFadden here implies that because MacNeice has (allegedly) ignored his place of origin in his poems, he does not ‘know’ himself. This is exactly the kind of reductive thinking that would eventually cause Northern Irish writers (including, eventually, McFadden himself ) to view regionalism with suspicion. Although engagement with the region was, in theory, supposed to offer the artist a more fulfilling sense of self, in practice it often confined him to a more limited mode of expression. McFadden’s sweeping dismissal of MacNeice’s work illustrates that, though regionalists were trying to combat parochial attitudes towards literature and culture, they could sound as provincial in their opinions as those they criticized. This, of course, was the danger inherent in a literary movement that upheld the local over the cosmopolitan, and was one of the main reasons regionalism would begin to lose momentum by the mid-fifties. Still, even a Southern Catholic writer like Sean O’Faolain could find something admirable in the concept. It was right, he felt, for the North to take pride in its own ways and to cultivate an identity in opposition to Dublin. In a 1942 Ulster issue of The Bell, he wrote: The strength of the North is that she does live and act in the Now. Belfast has immediacy, Ulster has contemporaneity—our southern curse is that we have ⁷⁶ Roy McFadden, review of Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice 1925–1948, Rann, 7 (1949–50), 10.

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never cut the umbilicus. Of course it is also true that Belfast is a city of mixed grills and double whiskies, stalking poverty and growling hate. But even if these things generate enmities and rivalries, what is the important thing? Cork is a far more pretty town, Dublin a finer city by far, but how we who come from them loathe and curse them for their soapy softness and their shrugging vacillations as of a smoke in a south wind! The important thing is that so long as the gantries go on producing writers like these in this and the next issue the victory is not with the brutality of nineteenth century industrialism, non-conformity, the kirk, the lodges, the bosses, but with the fine and intelligent humanity of the natural, wide-awake Ulsterman.⁷⁷

Already O’Faolain was touching upon some of the ideas that would come to mark the new Ulster regionalism; in his estimation, the city of the gantries provided the writer with more authentic literary material than Dublin’s ‘soapy softness’. His gendered description of the two cities— Belfast as hard, Dublin as soft—would later be taken up by Belfast writers seeking to ridicule the Dublin literati.⁷⁸ Politicians also encouraged pride in the provincial: in October 1945, the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Sir Basil Brooke, announced in a civil address, ‘There is no disgrace in being provincial. Give me the good red blood of a province that has a mind of its own, for we here are lavishly endowed with both character and imagination—and the language with which to express them.’⁷⁹ Brooke here reverses the traditional concept of provincialism as a stagnant state of conformity and instead links it with collective scepticism and nonconformity: Ulster is provincial, therefore Ulster has ‘a mind of its own’. During these post-war years, Brooke and other leaders urged their constituents to look upon provincialism as a source of pride rather than embarrassment, something which set Ulster apart from the rest of Britain—and, of course, Ireland. For, as much as regional self-definition was a way to promote non-sectarianism by ⁷⁷ Sean O Faolain, ‘Editorial’, The Bell, 4: 4 (1942), 1. ⁷⁸ Indeed, The Bell remained a staunch supporter of Ulster writing throughout the forties and early fifties. Frank Shovlin relates how, in 1953, with Rann about to fold, The Bell’s editor Peadar O’Donnell summoned Hewitt, Sam Hanna Bell, McFadden, and Rodgers to a meeting at the Union Hotel in Belfast to discuss strategies for keeping the magazine in circulation. Although O’Donnell offered Rann financial support, McFadden refused the offer, claiming exhaustion. The incident reveals that despite Rann’s six-county bias, it had not alienated its Dublin literary peers. (Twenty years later, however, the relationship between the two cities’ literary magazines would be less cooperative.) For a detailed discussion of this incident, see Frank Shovlin, The Irish Literary Periodical 1923–1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 178–9. ⁷⁹ Quoted in Rex Cathcart, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland 1924–1984 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984), 136. Basil Brooke became Lord Brookeborough in 1952.

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emphasizing a shared landscape, it was also a brand of Unionism that sought to justify Partition. Indeed, the Ulster writer and BBC producer John Boyd has written that the BBC, which instituted regional programming throughout Britain after the war, had the ulterior motive in broadcasting regional programmes in Northern Ireland of preserving the fabric of the state.⁸⁰ Because the ‘Ulster’ bias was a Protestant one, the voices and history of the Catholic minority were largely excluded from programming; according to Boyd, the BBC in Belfast did not employ a Catholic in a senior post until the mid-fifties. He remembers, ‘This was no accident but a deliberate policy of exclusion. Catholics were considered to be untrustworthy for posts of responsibility.’⁸¹ Boyd was dismayed by what he defined as literary apartheid: ‘The emphasis was almost entirely on the “Ulster” way of life, and “Ulster” was defined as the Six Counties only, and the Six Counties were predominantly Protestant.’⁸² Be that as it may, the BBC’s decision to hire local writers would have positive and far-reaching effects upon literary creativity in Northern Ireland. Before the war, Henry McMullen wrote in the 1950 BBC Yearbook, ‘the “imported” artists were many and the amount of genuine Northern Ireland material very small. Now the country stands on its own broadcasting feet, with a preponderantly Ulster staff to serve the needs of Ulster people.’⁸³ The fact that local writers were preferred over those from elsewhere encouraged Features writers such as Sam Hanna Bell to solicit both fiction and poetry from the literary set that congregated at Campbell’s café, across the street from the Belfast City Hall. Such recognition brought a measure of confidence to these writers, who needed to be convinced that their province could be a worthy home to creative endeavour. As Boyd wrote of his younger years in Belfast: I regarded Belfast as an incredibly provincial city which could only produce provincial writers of small consequence whose work could not possibly hold any interest for me. My literary standards would not permit me to take any local writer seriously, none being of the first rank.⁸⁴

This attitude would change over the course of the forties and fifties as writers from Northern Ireland began to feel included in a literary movement centred around the concept of regionalism. This sense of inclusion ⁸⁰ John Boyd, The Middle of My Journey (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990), 205. Boyd writes, ‘I remember one BBC Controller proclaiming to his staff with all the dignity he could command, “The fabric of the state must be preserved.” ’ ⁸¹ Ibid. 74. ⁸² Ibid. ⁸³ Quoted in Cathcart, The Most Contrary Region, 169. ⁸⁴ Boyd, The Middle of My Journey, 25.

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replaced the sense of exclusion that had long characterized the Ulster literati (in so far as they existed) and helped men like Boyd, Bell, Hewitt, McLaverty, McFadden, Greacen, and others to take themselves seriously as writers. Even Boyd, who claims to have had misgivings about regionalism, asserted in 1951: The separation of Northern Ireland politically from the rest of the country has had . . . an interesting result in stimulating a regional movement, a certain attitude of self-sufficiency among artists and writers, and in directing their attention to what lies nearest to hand.⁸⁵

Two years later, in a Rann article, he expressed continued optimism about Ulster’s literary future: I have no conclusions to offer, except to say that Northern Ireland, which is often regarded as the province of industrial progress and cultural backwardness, can no longer be so regarded. The future development of industry and commerce may be uncertain; what is certain is that a native literary tradition has become firmly established and is now beginning to flower.⁸⁶

Clearly the BBC’s regionalist manifesto (which neatly dovetailed with Hewitt’s) had filtered down into the work and ideology of local writers by the late forties. In Northern Ireland, regional poetry received a great deal of attention after 1945; it featured in at least 33 BBC programmes produced between then and 1963.⁸⁷ This emphasis on regional poetry must have made younger poets like Heaney, Longley, and Mahon aware of the many others writing in their own backyard. Philip Hobsbaum would eventually introduce the young men and women in his writing group to these elder statesmen of the Belfast arts scene—particularly Boyd and McFadden, who chaired the BBC radio programme The Arts in Ulster. These two became friendly with the Group members, and eventually, says Hobsbaum, ‘There was a kind of informal link-up with the writers in my group . . . a kind of informal bond’.⁸⁸ This introduction to Boyd and McFadden probably helped pave the way for Heaney, Longley, and Simmons to find work at the BBC; for by 1970, these three, along with John Montague, Paul Muldoon, David Hammond, and Stewart Parker, ⁸⁵ John Boyd, ‘Ulster Prose’, in Sam Hanna Bell, Necca A. Robb, and John Hewitt (eds.), The Arts in Ulster (London: George Harrap, 1951), 131. ⁸⁶ John Boyd, ‘The Ulster Novel’, Rann, 20 (1953), 35. ⁸⁷ See Heather Clark, ‘Regional Roots: Poetry and the BBC in Northern Ireland, 1945–55’, Eire-Ireland, 38: 1–2 (2003), 87–105, for a complete list of programmes. ⁸⁸ Interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000.

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had all read or written for the Corporation.⁸⁹ Heaney’s poems alone received 51 readings between 1970 and 1974—a staggering figure when one considers that Ted Hughes was given only 57 readings in the fourteen years between 1957 and 1971, and MacNeice only nine between 1945 and 1966.⁹⁰ The sound of Heaney’s voice over the airwaves, whether on Radio 4 or Radio Northern Ireland, must have encouraged his peers. Initially Hewitt’s poetry resonated with Heaney, Mahon, Simmons, and Longley as much as that of MacNeice, who regarded himself as a tourist in his own country.⁹¹ After being allegedly ousted from his position at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery on account of his tolerant political views, he retreated to Coventry in 1957—a move that further endeared him to Longley, Heaney, and Mahon. To these young poets, he became something of a martyr to the cause of provincial enlightenment; his refusal to give up his socialist views and comply with standard Unionist ideology made him a hero-in-exile. As Mahon wrote in 1968, ‘Although he has been living in Coventry for over ten years, he has never, in spirit, really left Ulster. He has stood his ground.’⁹² When Longley heard Hewitt would be moving back to Belfast in 1973, he wrote ‘The news . . . felt like a blessing.’⁹³ Hewitt’s poetry struck a deep chord with the Protestant poets who, like him, sought to reconcile Irishness with Protestantism. Hewitt’s presence, said Longley, ‘was very important to me: an enormous endorsement . . . he endorsed this place with his life.’⁹⁴ Mahon was particularly moved by Hewitt’s ‘An Irishman in Coventry’, which he said made ‘a deep impression’ on him, and which he called ‘a finely controlled study in nostalgia, as good as, or better than, some of the great retrospective passages in MacNeice’.⁹⁵ In 1976, Longley claimed Hewitt as ‘the profoundest spokesman of the Irish Protestant imagination’.⁹⁶ During the late 1960s, it was Heaney in particular who looked to Hewitt as an example; this was a time when, he wrote, he felt a stronger ⁸⁹ Muldoon worked as a BBC radio and television producer from 1974 to 1986. ⁹⁰ Hughes, Heaney, and MacNeice Papers, BBC Written Archives, Caversham, Reading. ⁹¹ MacNeice, ‘Traveller’s Return’, Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, 88. ⁹² Mahon, ‘A Wider Measure of Recognition is Due to John Hewitt’, newspaper clipping, James Simmons’s scrapbook, 1967, JSP. ⁹³ Michael Longley, ‘A Boat on the River’, in Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (eds.), Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), 139. ⁹⁴ Robert Johnstone, ‘The Longley Tapes’, Honest Ulsterman, 78 (1983), 22. ⁹⁵ Mahon, ‘A Wider Measure of Recognition is Due to John Hewitt’, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ⁹⁶ Michael Longley, ‘The Northerner’, Sunday Independent, 26 Sept. 1976, 2.

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sympathy with Hewitt’s work than did Longley or Mahon. Indeed, a cursory glance through Hewitt’s oeuvre will reveal that he often uses settings, moods, and poetic language readers have come to associate almost exclusively with Heaney; his poems are full of alders, whin, turfstacks, blackberries, ploughs, ploughmen, sods, ditches, stone walls, haystacks, flax, brooks, farms, haw, scythes, ‘well-hedged fields’, ‘seeded grass’, ‘raw earth’, and ‘heavy sky’. Though critics have attributed the use of such language in Heaney to Frost or Kavanagh, it also had a source closer to home.⁹⁷ Much has been made of Heaney’s Marian ‘imaginative co-ordinates’,⁹⁸ but before he left Belfast for America and, eventually, the Republic, he was deeply drawn to Hewitt’s aesthetic, which John Wilson Foster has described as ‘Calvinist, displaying as it does simplicity, sobriety and measure’.⁹⁹ These virtues resonated with Heaney because, independent of religion, they were recognizable virtues of country life. They also resonated with his self-image, characterized by Michael Allen as that of ‘a humble worker-craftsman’.¹⁰⁰ Terence Brown’s feeling that one of Hewitt’s main duties was ‘to record and celebrate the everyday life of a people—to save even “a little people” from oblivion’ accords with Heaney’s desire, in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, to grant dignity to rural life.¹⁰¹ This shared concern transcended the cultural trappings of religion. At this time, Heaney’s preoccupations were generally pastoral rather than political; thus Hewitt, grounded to the soil, offered a more familiar landscape and vocabulary than did MacNeice. Indeed, Hewitt’s mark is evident in many early Heaney poems. For example, Heaney’s ‘The Diviner’ brings to mind Hewitt’s ‘The Alder Stick’, which ascribes unusual powers to the object of its title, while ‘Death of a Naturalist’ tells a startling tale of a child’s loss of innocence similar to that in ‘The Witch’. ⁹⁷ Heaney’s articles about Hewitt include ‘The Poetry of John Hewitt’, Threshold, 22 (1969), 73–7 and ‘John Hewitt, 1907–1987: The Universal Poet. An Appreciation’, Sunday Tribune, 5 July 1987. Brown notes, in Northern Voices, that as an undergraduate at Queen’s, Heaney had read the work of Estyn Evans, author of Irish Heritage and Irish Folk Ways, and that these books ‘suggest the intellectual groundwork . . . for John Hewitt’s quiet celebration of man in relation to earth’, 175. Longley, in his notes to An Exploded View, also wrote that his poem ‘Lares’ owed much to his reading of this same book. ⁹⁸ Edna Longley, ‘Pastoral Theologies’, Poetry and Posterity, 100. ⁹⁹ John Wilson Foster, ‘ “The Dissidence of Dissent”: John Hewitt and W. R. Rodgers’, in Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley (eds.), Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985), 147. ¹⁰⁰ Allen, ‘The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969–1987’, 728. ¹⁰¹ Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, 90.

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Heaney’s ‘The Peninsula’ invites comparison with Hewitt’s ‘Glenarriffe and Parkmore’ (1948), which relates an exhilarating trip over Antrim’s hills, valleys, and coasts: Go to Glenarriffe if you’d know this Antrim, from Waterfoot’s wide street of lime-washed walls with the broad sandbank where the children play and gulls cry among the billowy washing. Go to Glenarriffe, take the rising road, the curving road that hugs the northern slope, that winds and clambers among the trees and spreads the little valley flat below: . . . . . . . You reach the open country. Wide and bare the rounded hills spread far as eye can draw¹⁰²

For Hewitt, knowledge of place is intimately connected to self-knowledge; the journey through the region is hence an encounter with one’s ‘true’ identity. This is a variation of the Wordsworthian doctrine that nature is the force which lifts the veil of one’s falsified, social exterior to reveal the authentic self. Hewitt, influenced by Frost and Yeats, tweaks this paradigm so that ‘the region’ replaces ‘nature’ as the medium through which one might be cleansed of modern, urban (and, ideally, sectarian) malaise. Although one can attribute Heaney’s use of local settings and place names to the Gaelic practice of dinnseanchas, it is likely he was also inspired by Hewitt’s regional vision. In ‘The Peninsula’ (1969), Heaney’s observant, awed speaker, like Hewitt’s, instructs his reader to explore the local countryside: When you have nothing more to say, just drive For a day all round the peninsula. The sky is tall as over a runway, The land without marks so you will not arrive But pass through, though always skirting landfall. At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill, The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable And you’re in the dark again. Now recall The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log, That rock where breakers shredded into rags, The leggy birds stilted on their own legs, Islands riding themselves out into the fog ¹⁰² The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Ormsby, 21–3.

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And drive back home, still with nothing to say Except that now you will uncode all landscapes By this: things founded clean on their own shapes, Water and ground in their extremity.¹⁰³

‘The Peninsula’ was written at a time when Heaney was becoming better acquainted with Hewitt and his work; the year it was published, he wrote a favourable review of Hewitt’s Collected Poems in Threshold. This helps explain why the poem’s landscape of hill, valley, and shoreline so closely resembles that of ‘Glenarriffe and Parkmore’ (note also how the ‘whitewashed gable’ echoes Hewitt’s ‘lime-washed walls’), and why the drive itself embodies the same mood of freedom, weightlessness, and imaginative ascent as Hewitt’s ‘rising road’. One wonders whether the poem is a response to Hewitt’s suggestion that in order to know a place—and hence the self that is a part of that place—one must engage with its landscape. Yet there are important differences between the two poems. Heaney never locates his journey in a specific place beyond ‘the peninsula’, whereas Hewitt mentions several place names. This suggests that although Heaney was influenced by Hewitt, he may also have already been experimenting with a different kind of regionalism—the kind that did not depend on allegiance to a place but rather on a profound respect for the sanctity of place itself. Whereas the purpose behind Hewitt’s speaker’s journey is ‘to know this Antrim’—to locate himself within a particular (Protestant) geographical and cultural context, the vision of Heaney’s speaker is much more universal: his hope is to ‘uncode all landscapes’. Uncoded, landscapes are free of symbolic meaning, untainted by the projection of national, aesthetic, or cultural significance. They exist independent of our desires, as ‘things founded clean on their own shapes’. Heaney alluded to this idea in a 1973 interview with Patrick Garland: ‘the landscape, for me, is image, and it’s almost an element to work with as it is an object of admiration or description.’¹⁰⁴ Landscapes are revelatory, Heaney intimates, precisely because they are inscrutable. In ‘The Peninsula’, the land is ‘without marks, so you will not arrive | But pass through, though always skirting landfall’. Heaney’s ideal landscape resists human presence. Unlike the conqueror, his speaker does not make landfall; instead he is, like the speaker in the later ‘Postscript’, ‘neither here nor there, | A hurry through which known and strange things pass’.¹⁰⁵ Here ¹⁰³ Heaney, Door into the Dark, 21. ¹⁰⁴ Patrick Garland, ‘Poets on Poetry’, interview with Seamus Heaney, Listener, 8 Nov. 1973, 629. Quoted in Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster, 173. ¹⁰⁵ Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), 82.

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man is subordinate to nature rather than the other way round. For if the landscape becomes a subject for mastery and ownership (the poet taking stock of ‘his’ territory) in ‘Glenarriffe and Parkmore’, in ‘The Peninsula’, it is the site of non-ownership, and, perhaps by extension, sectarian reconciliation. It is as if Heaney is refining Hewitt’s conception of regionalism, purifying it of its cultural assumptions and biases, offering a revised version based upon universality rather than locality, submission rather than ownership.¹⁰⁶ Despite the controversy with which Hewitt’s regionalism was sometimes received, it gave the Belfast poets a framework within which to explore their identity as Ulster writers. Perhaps even more importantly, it gave them a sense that Ulster was a place worth writing about. Heaney acknowledged as much in a 1969 Threshold article about Hewitt: his lifelong concern to question and document the relationship between art and locality has provided all subsequent Northern writers with a hinterland of reference, should they require a tradition more intimate than the broad perspectives of the English literary achievement.¹⁰⁷

Yet by 1995 Heaney would decide that although Hewitt’s regionalism was ‘original and epoch-making’, it had not fulfilled its promise of reconciling the two ‘native’ traditions. He ascribed this failure to Hewitt’s inability to ‘include the Irish dimension in anything other than an underprivileged way’ and argued that his vision was ‘slightly Nelson-eyed . . . more capable of seeing over the water than over the border’.¹⁰⁸ Mahon would also grow critical of Hewitt. Although he wrote in 1967 that ‘regionalism is no longer considered fey or irrelevant . . . It is, if anything, an advantage now’,¹⁰⁹ he would eventually voice his distaste with the way Hewitt equated regionalism with the concerns of the colonizers: ‘Why couldn’t his region be Ireland? It had to be Ulster.’¹¹⁰ Muldoon, in characteristic protean fashion, called Hewitt’s ‘The Colony’ ‘a powerful political poem’ in which the speaker ‘concludes that the colonizer and the colonist have ¹⁰⁶ Such ‘revision’ accords with Edna Longley’s claim that Heaney is constructing his (Catholic) conception of nature against an English/Protestant pastoral tradition. See Longley, Poetry and Posterity, 100. Brown also suggests, in Northern Voices, that Heaney writes of his relationship with the Irish landscape ‘in fear and trembling, in religious humility’, 176. ¹⁰⁷ Heaney, ‘The Poetry of John Hewitt’, 73. ¹⁰⁸ Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, 196. ¹⁰⁹ Mahon, ‘A Wider Measure of Recognition is Due to John Hewitt’, newspaper clipping, n.d. (1967), James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ¹¹⁰ Lucy McDiarmid, unedited interview with Derek Mahon, typed MS, 1991, Box 34, DMP. Quotation not included in published interview.

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much in common’.¹¹¹ Yet he also chose to quote Hewitt’s controversial description of the natives—‘Also they breed like flies. The danger’s there’—commenting wryly that ‘The dramatic monologue allows Hewitt to say what would otherwise be unsaid, or unsayable, in polite society.’¹¹² Muldoon hints that perhaps there is good reason why such sentiments should remain unspoken. Kirkland helps explain the reasons for such varying responses: ‘By never clearly recognizing which community he was serving or writing for, the absolute concept of Hewitt’s Ulster regionalism was always open to the misreadings and political appropriations that its ambiguity sought to foreclose.’¹¹³ Kirkland’s explanation recognizes the inherent incompatibility of Hewitt’s theory and practice—his desire to serve two communities while remaining firmly entrenched in one. (This idea also goes some way towards explaining why James Simmons would be similarly ‘misread’ during his years as Honest Ulsterman editor.) Ultimately, regionalism could not accommodate the increasingly grim realities of life in Northern Ireland, for how could the region open up a conciliatory space when that very space was contested? Yet it continued to exert a hold on the Belfast poets, particularly Longley, who was most interested in the idea of a cohesive Ulster literary community. One can detect echoes of Hewitt’s regionalism in Simmons’s Honest Ulsterman editorials, Longley’s Causeway, Mahon’s ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, and in later Field Day writings by Deane, Heaney, Brian Friel, and others. However it was, predictably, not the regionalist, but the exile whose example Heaney, Longley, Mahon, and Muldoon would eventually embrace without reservation. As Heaney wrote in ‘Frontiers of Writing’, ‘if Hewitt was the projector of a Northern Ireland that failed to develop, Louis MacNeice is the sponsor of one struggling to be born’.¹¹⁴ In 1966, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon gave a poetry reading in Glengormley, in honour of the publication of E. R. Dodds’s The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. MacNeice had been dead only three years, and the young poets were just beginning to find their voices—Heaney had published his first collection that year, while Mahon and Longley would soon follow. Though they may not have been aware of the reading’s significance, this event was the first in a sustained campaign to win back MacNeice from his position as a minor English poet overshadowed by Auden and to reclaim him as an Irish poet of major ¹¹¹ Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46. ¹¹² Ibid. ¹¹³ Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland, 30. ¹¹⁴ Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, 198.

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significance. Heaney read ‘The Dowser’ and ‘Turf-Stacks’, followed by Mahon with ‘Prayer Before Birth’ and ‘Snow’, while Longley finished with ‘The Mayfly’, ‘Carrick Revisited’, and ‘Death of an Actress’.¹¹⁵ The poets’ selections revealed, in an act of kinship and homage, MacNeice’s influence upon their own work; in hindsight, they also reveal each poet’s invented MacNeice, the various versions each would propagate individually over the next twenty-odd years even as, together, they wielded their collective literary influence to restore his reputation. This effort began, perhaps by chance, at the Glengormley reading, an event with a dual purpose: to give recognition to MacNeice as literary benefactor and, in turn, to be recognized as his heirs.¹¹⁶ The success of their efforts became evident when, two years later, James Simmons chose a photograph of MacNeice to grace the cover of the first Honest Ulsterman. His image, superimposed on to a round tower from Antrim, was clearly an allusion to Yeats and Thoor Ballylee, suggesting that Ulster had its own distinct poetic tradition, and that it need not look southward for poetic models. The North, Simmons intimated, had towering poets of its own. If, as Declan Kiberd suggests, Irish writers have invented Ireland, they have also invented each other. It was MacNeice, along with John Hewitt and, to some extent, W. R. Rodgers, who gave the Belfast poets the sense that they were working within a regional literary tradition distinct from that of Dublin or London. Nobody disputes that these poets, along with critics such as Edna Longley, Terence Brown, and Peter McDonald, have helped rescue MacNeice from Auden’s shadow. The result of their efforts is perhaps more contestable—that since the rush to repatriate MacNeice began, he is increasingly analysed as an Irish, rather than British, poet. Indeed, the body of critical work on MacNeice now emphasizes his Irishness, or ‘Anglo-Irishness’. In 1975, Terence Brown called MacNeice ‘an Anglo-Irish poet, not simply an English one’, while Edna Longley has described him as a poet ‘who is essential to Ireland if not committed to it’.¹¹⁷ Michael Longley further argued that ‘Many English critics are ¹¹⁵ See Michael Allen, ‘Louis MacNeice and Michael Longley: Some Examples of Affinity and Influence’, in Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock (eds.), Louis MacNeice and His Influence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), 99–113. ¹¹⁶ Longley recalls that after he, Heaney, and Mahon had visited MacNeice’s grave in 1964, all three had hoped to write an elegy: ‘A few weeks later, all met up in my flat in Belfast and Seamus had a poem and Mahon had a poem. Derek read his first, the now famous elegy ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’. Seamus started to read his and scrapped it because he knew Derek had written the definitive elegy for Louis MacNeice. I knew as well and decided then and there not to make the attempt.’ Reading the Future, 123. ¹¹⁷ Quoted in Allen, ‘Louis MacNeice and Michael Longley’, 105.

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clearly not attuned to some of his qualities and procedures’,¹¹⁸ and Mahon—who presented papers on MacNeice at Trinity and at the University of Western Ontario in the sixties—claimed that ‘Whoever he is, he is not an Englishman.’¹¹⁹ Even Heaney has declared, ‘MacNeice is clearly an Irish poet’.¹²⁰ Of course, emphasizing MacNeice’s Irishness, and the inherent duality and self-division which that Irishness implies, was a necessary strategy in the campaign to set him apart from the Auden gang and to identify a new set of complexities in his work. Such complexities, in turn, have led Northern Ireland’s poets to turn to MacNeice for direction. As Michael Longley wrote, ‘A new generation of poets from Northern Ireland has helped to change perspectives. They have picked up frequencies in his work which were inaudible in London or Dublin.’¹²¹ Like MacNeice, these poets did not fit into either tradition, and so they looked to the older poet who had felt himself, as they did, a product of two cultures. Clearly, their work has been enriched by the influence of an Anglo-Irish MacNeice, just as MacNeice’s reputation has benefited from their enthusiasm. As Neil Corcoran writes: The reappropriation of MacNeice has . . . been virtually coterminous with the development of the poetry of Northern Ireland since the mid-1960s; and it represents a concerted and strategically successful form of accommodation and recuperation of a kind for which I can think of no contemporary parallel.¹²²

Indeed, Mahon told Terence Brown that his generation had made MacNeice ‘part of the intellectual history of modern Ireland’.¹²³ Like Auden’s Yeats, MacNeice too has ‘become his admirers’. In ‘A Misrepresented Poet’, Longley works hard to rescue MacNeice from the ‘number of damaging prejudices’ critics had cast upon him. These included ¹¹⁸ Michael Longley (ed.), Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 97. ¹¹⁹ Derek Mahon, ‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’, Journalism (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1996), 29. ¹²⁰ Seamus Heaney, ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, Richard Ellmann lecture, delivered at Emory University, 12 Apr. 1988, Box 1, SHP, 10. ¹²¹ Michael Longley, ‘Introduction’, Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. xxiii. ¹²² Neil Corcoran, ‘Keeping the Colours New: Louis MacNeice in the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland’, in Devine and Peacock (eds.), Louis MacNeice and His Influence, 115. ¹²³ Terence Brown, ‘An Interview with Derek Mahon’, Poetry Ireland Review, 14 (1985), 19.

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the myths that ‘he was a thirties poet’ and ‘a poet-cum-journalist’.¹²⁴ Longley instead focuses his critical attention on love poems (‘Mayfly’), poems about childhood (‘Trains in the Distance’), Ireland (‘Belfast’, ‘The Closing Album’), friendship (‘Day of Returning’, ‘The Casualty’), nostalgia (‘Death of an Actress’), and ordinary people (‘The Mixer’), contending that Autumn Sequel ‘succeeds wonderfully when he writes about childhood or his friends’.¹²⁵ The essay achieves its aim of presenting a new version of MacNeice, different from the ‘poor man’s Auden’ as he was then known. Here MacNeice is ordinary, Irish, and nostalgic; according to Longley, ‘the hub of his work is his love poetry’.¹²⁶ Michael Allen has noted that Longley’s main preoccupations in this essay are MacNeice’s engagement with childhood and love, and that ‘Both propositions apply equally to . . . himself.’¹²⁷ Longley’s decision to quote the following lines from Autumn Journal in an Arts Council brochure testifies to his preoccupation with MacNeice’s—and his own—sense of rootedness: And because one feels that here at least one can Do local work which is not at the world’s mercy And that on this tiny stage with luck a man Might see the end of one particular action.¹²⁸

These lines must have resonated deeply with Longley, who stayed in Belfast and worked for the Arts Council through the Troubles. Perhaps in an act of homage, Longley edited the 1988 Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems, which veered from Auden’s edition to include more poems about Ireland. Besides consolidating MacNeice’s Irish identity, this act of reconstruction also helped Longley to understand his own poetic concerns. For example, when Longley says that the last two lines of MacNeice’s ‘Mayfly’¹²⁹ ‘disclose the nucleus of [MacNeice’s] imagination’, surely this means, in fact, that they disclose the nucleus of Longley’s own imagination.¹³⁰ As Michael Allen has observed of Longley: When he refers in 1988 to MacNeice’s obsession with ‘three conjunctions of time and place’: the North of Ireland, the West of Ireland and the South of England, ¹²⁴ Michael Longley, ‘A Misrepresented Poet’, Dublin Magazine, 6: 1 (1967), 68. ¹²⁵ Ibid. 73. ¹²⁶ Ibid. 70. ¹²⁷ Allen, ‘Louis MacNeice and Michael Longley’, 107. ¹²⁸ Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, Canto XVI, in Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. E. R. Dodds (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 133. Quoted in Arts Council Brochure, Box 73, MLP. One should note that the next lines are considerably more sceptical (‘It is self-deception of course; | There is no immunity in this island either’). ¹²⁹ ‘But when this summer is over let us die together | I want always to be near your breasts.’ ¹³⁰ Longley, ‘Introduction’, Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems, p. xxii.

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one has only to look at his later poetry to see that he has made these his own three historical and geographical conjunctions also.¹³¹

Allen supports this statement through close readings of MacNeice’s ‘Day of Returning’, ‘Leaving Barra’, and ‘Mayfly’ alongside Longley’s ‘The Hebrides’, ‘Leaving Inishmore’, and ‘The Linen Industry’, respectively. His convincing analysis shows that it is MacNeice the love poet, the poet of exile and return, and ‘the MacNeice who could momentarily envisage a return to his “roots” ’ who most appeals to Longley.¹³² Thus it comes as little surprise that Longley placed poems which Auden ignored—such as Canto XVI of Autumn Journal, ‘Belfast’, and ‘Day of Returning’—in his own edition. These poems have, in turn, become touchstones for the Belfast poets. Likewise, Mahon’s elegy to MacNeice, ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’, exhibits, as Richard York has written, many MacNeicean features: ‘relaxed rhythm delicately pointed by an elegant rhyme, the refreshing use of cliché . . . [the] orderly but flexible six-line stanza’.¹³³ This appropriation of MacNeice was noted by Edna Longley as early as 1968: ‘he is the heir and disinheritor of MacNeice—starting at the point where MacNeice leaves off.’¹³⁴ Indeed, the poem—as much as it is a stunning tribute—is also a subliminal act of disinheritance, for it presents the reader with a passive and inactive version of the poet. The repeated trope of stasis in phrases such as ‘Your ashes will not stir’, ‘Your ashes will not fly’, and ‘You lie | Past tension now’ has the curious effect of undermining MacNeice’s immortality while at the same time assuring it.¹³⁵ Bloom argues this is a typical phenomenon in which young poets ‘work to subvert the immortality of their precursor’.¹³⁶ The following lines appear to exhibit such a subversion: This plot is consecrated, for your sake, To what lies in the future tense. You lie Past tension now, and spring is coming round Igniting flowers on the peninsula.¹³⁷

MacNeice lies past tension but Mahon lies in the future tense. The image of the spring (of poetry) that will follow MacNeice’s winter implies a ¹³¹ Allen, ‘Louis MacNeice and Michael Longley’, 105. ¹³² Ibid. 106. ¹³³ Richard York, ‘Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon’, in Devine and Peacock (eds.), Louis MacNeice and His Influence, 89; 90. ¹³⁴ Edna Longley, review of Night-Crossing, by Derek Mahon, Honest Ulsterman, 8 (1968), 27–8. ¹³⁵ Derek Mahon, Night-Crossing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3. ¹³⁶ Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 151. ¹³⁷ Mahon, Night-Crossing, 3.

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further self-consecration, making the poem as much about the appropriation of legacy as legacy itself. In the end it is Mahon, rather than MacNeice, who, from the ‘bombed-out town’, brings The all-clear to the empty holes of spring, Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new.¹³⁸

Mahon’s elegy subtly cements an alliance between himself and the dead poet; ultimately it is the MacNeice of ‘Snow’ who seems to confer his mantle upon the young Mahon. By 1973, however, Mahon had distanced himself from the poem, telling Peter Orr it was ‘a poem I wish I hadn’t written . . . not a poem I have any great affection for’. He feared that it would be included in school anthologies as a state-sanctioned example of ‘respectable, formal, and accessible’ verse.¹³⁹ Perhaps by this time he had become aware, as Richard York has remarked, that ‘the display of gratitude is a little too conspicuous and that there is just a hint of an attempt to take control, to take possession of his predecessor’.¹⁴⁰ This is of course an echo of Bloom’s claim in The Anxiety of Influence that strong poets keep returning from the dead, and only through the quasi-willing mediumship of other strong poets. How they return is the decisive matter, for if they return intact, then the return impoverishes the later poets, dooming them to be remembered—if at all—as having ended in poverty, in an imaginative need they could not themselves gratify.¹⁴¹

Bloom’s notion that ‘artists create their precursors’¹⁴² was later echoed by André Lefevere, who believes that ‘rewriting’—the task undertaken by translators, editors, critics, anthologists, compilers of reference books, etc.—is a way to make the original work ‘fit in with the dominant, or one of the dominant ideological and poetological currents of their time’.¹⁴³ The Belfast poets have, perhaps quite unintentionally, engaged themselves in such a process of rewriting (or revising) MacNeice over the past decades. In an act of astonishing reversal, they have invoked MacNeice as their patron, only to eventually position themselves as his patrons—for MacNeice’s reputation has benefited greatly from their sustained attention. ¹³⁸ Mahon, Night-Crossing, 3. ¹³⁹ Peter Orr, ‘The Poet Speaks’, interview with Derek Mahon, BBC radio production, recorded 31 Jan. 1973. ¹⁴⁰ York, ‘Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon’, in Devine and Peacock (eds.), Louis MacNeice and His Influence, 89. ¹⁴¹ Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 141. ¹⁴² Ibid. ¹⁴³ André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992), 8.

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By collectively establishing MacNeice as the doyen of Northern poetry, by promoting a selective canon, and by ‘rewriting’ many of his ideological and philosophical concerns in their own work (exile, origin, transience, self-division, humanism, scepticism, and social consciousness), they have placed him at the beginning of a line of an inheritance which is, by right, theirs. Together they have achieved that fantastic literary coup suggested by Bloom, in which the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one’s own work, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one’s own advent, but rather to be indebted to one’s own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one’s greater splendour.¹⁴⁴

As Kierkegaard writes, they have given birth to their own father.¹⁴⁵ Why MacNeice? The first and most obvious answer involves issues of origin and kinship. MacNeice was born in Belfast, though his parents were from the west of Ireland; his father, a Church of Ireland minister, was a moderate nationalist. MacNeice perfectly embodies the paradox of his origins: educated in England since the age of 10 (at Sherbourne, Marlborough, and Merton College, Oxford), he none the less continued to refer to Ireland, sometimes reluctantly, as ‘my own country’.¹⁴⁶ In the 1941 Penguin New Writing, he wrote, ‘I have never really thought of myself as British; if there is one country I feel at home in, it is Eire.’¹⁴⁷ Yet he was, he admitted, ‘hopelessly Anglicised’.¹⁴⁸ Though Ireland was to become mainly a holiday destination—which is one reason he often writes of it with a foreigner’s detachment—his childhood memories of life in the Carrickfergus rectory provided the impetus for many penetrating poems. His feelings about the Hebrides, where he had visited as a journalist, give one an appreciation of his complex and ultimately unresolved relationship with Ireland: ‘I write about them therefore as a tripper who was disappointed and tantalised by the islands and seduced by them only to be reminded that on that soil he will always be an outsider.’¹⁴⁹ As both outsider and insider, possessor and dispossessed, MacNeice was a model of cultural transience and displacement for poets like ¹⁴⁴ Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 141. ¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 73. ¹⁴⁶ Louis MacNeice, ‘When I Was Twenty-One: 1928’, The Saturday Book, 21, ed. John Hadfield (1961), 230–9. Reprinted in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, 234. ¹⁴⁷ Louis MacNeice, ‘The Way We Live Now’, Penguin New Writing, 5 (Apr. 1941), 9–14. Reprinted in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, 82. ¹⁴⁸ MacNeice, ‘Traveller’s Return’, Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, 88. ¹⁴⁹ Louis MacNeice, ‘The Hebrides: A Tripper’s Commentary’, Listener, 6 Oct. 1937, 718–20. Reprinted in Selected Prose Of Louis MacNeice, 23.

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Mahon, Longley, Simmons, Muldoon, and Heaney, all raised on the literal and metaphorical frontier between England and Ireland.¹⁵⁰ MacNeice’s answer to this dilemma, to ‘acquire an attitude not yours | And become as one of your holiday visitors’,¹⁵¹ rang particularly true to James Simmons: I love that. How easily one can come to feel like a holiday visitor in one’s own country. The point is not to decide whether MacNeice betrayed himself by leaving Ireland, and lost his chance; but to consider what he has chosen to make public, the dramatic presentation of such a dilemma . . . seeing what is involved, playing the exile game, so that when our time comes we will be prepared.¹⁵²

Already in 1968 Simmons speaks of MacNeice as a literary father-figure, sagely preparing his progeny for future trials. Derek Mahon has also commented upon these famous lines from Canto XVI of Autumn Journal, writing, ‘ “A tourist in his own country,” it has been said, with the implication that this is somehow discreditable; but of what sensitive person is the same not true?’¹⁵³ MacNeice’s transience provided a further model for Northern poets: not only by making good overseas, but, as Simmons said, by dramatizing the dilemma of his migrations in his poetry. Obviously Joyce had set a precedent for this, but MacNeice went one step further than Stephen Dedalus by voicing the impulse to return as well as the imperative to flee: I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed, The woven figure cannot undo its thread.¹⁵⁴

If, in the minds of the Northern poets, MacNeice provided a more amiable model than Southern giants like Joyce and Yeats, it was because he was closer to home and memory. Yeats and Joyce were concepts as much as they were writers; MacNeice, on the other hand, was more approachable: Mahon had met him at McDaid’s, and Heaney had heard him read at Queen’s in the early sixties. Compared to the sometimes haughty and pretentious Yeats, MacNeice was a man of the red brick and the gantries, with The hard cold fire of the northerner Frozen into his blood . . .¹⁵⁵ ¹⁵⁰ See Seamus Heaney, ‘Something to Write Home About’, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2000 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 48–58. ¹⁵¹ Louis MacNeice, ‘Valediction’, Collected Poems, 53. ¹⁵² James Simmons, ‘Reflections on the Poetry of Louis MacNeice’, Honest Ulsterman, 1 (1968), 40. ¹⁵³ Mahon, ‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’, 25. ¹⁵⁴ MacNeice, ‘Valediction’, Collected Poems, 53. ¹⁵⁵ MacNeice, ‘Belfast’, Collected Poems, 17.

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Like them, he had experienced first hand a Belfast ‘Where hammers clang murderously’¹⁵⁶ and where the unemployed spent their days ‘standing at the corners, coughing’.¹⁵⁷ His claim that ordinary, provincial virtues made the poet must have come as a fulfilling manifesto for his young peers, struggling in the shadow of Yeats: I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions . . .¹⁵⁸

Longley quoted this passage in his introduction to MacNeice’s Selected Poems as an affirmation of ‘the poet as all-rounder’.¹⁵⁹ As further proof, he cited Larkin’s obituary for MacNeice, which read: When we were young . . . his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting. . . . We were grateful to him for having found a place in poetry for these properties.¹⁶⁰

If MacNeice found a place for the ordinary in English poetry, Larkin would eventually secure it. But it was the former poet who brought the ‘incorrigibly plural’ world of home and street into the English lyric, revealing, as Longley said, that the ‘urban demotic’ was ‘an imaginative resource’.¹⁶¹ MacNeice’s celebrated lyric provincialism appealed not only to Larkin, but to a later generation of Belfast poets who found, in the mundane details of MacNeice’s small days, a refreshing contrast to Yeats’s magisterial world order: . . . the grinding gears, the change from day to day, The creaks of the familiar room, the smile Of the cruel clock, the bills upon the file, The excess of books and cushions, the high heels That walk the street, the news, the newsboys’ yells . . .¹⁶²

MacNeice’s experience as a Classics lecturer in industrial Birmingham likely influenced the development of this ‘urban demotic’—a perfect mode for expressing what Mahon called ‘the existential tingle of the passing minute’, that sense of flux which characterizes his most enduring ¹⁵⁶ Ibid. ¹⁵⁷ MacNeice, Autumn Journal, Canto XVI, Collected Poems, 133. ¹⁵⁸ Louis MacNeice, Modern Poets: A Personal Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 198. ¹⁵⁹ Longley, ‘Introduction’, Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, p. xix. ¹⁶⁰ Quoted ibid., p. xviii. ¹⁶¹ Ibid., p. xix. ¹⁶² MacNeice, ‘Letter to Graham and Anna’, Collected Poems, 63.

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work.¹⁶³ As Jon Stallworthy writes, ‘Birmingham had brought MacNeice closer to the workers—in sympathy and understanding—than it would ever bring Auden, closer than London would bring Blunt, Day Lewis, or Spender’.¹⁶⁴ MacNeice’s 1933 poem ‘Birmingham’, with its sullen but empathetic invocation of urban working-class life, bears out this observation. Yet as A. Alvarez has noted, there was a less demotic side to MacNeice: When most himself he was a reflective poet and—this was least fashionable— unpretentious. Things, situations, ideas interested him more than his own casebook. He was sensitive, not nervy. Hence the success of ‘Snow’, ‘August’ and ‘Morning Sun’ and the nostalgic, though rather vague concern of Autumn Journal. That was his own voice. The other voice was that of the Oxford man, smart, irreverent, quick with his cultured references, one of the Auden gang. It did not ring so true.¹⁶⁵

The younger generation of Northern Irish poets also spoke in two voices—those of the local pub and of the Academy. Longley, as noted earlier, admitted to developing these two voices from a young age, affecting a harsh Belfast accent in order to survive on the street, then lapsing into something milder to please his parents and teachers.¹⁶⁶ Heaney also alludes to a similar linguistic collusion with his mother in the fourth sonnet of ‘Clearances’: I’d naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.¹⁶⁷

Both mother and son seek to create a shelter for the ‘hampered and inadequate’ rural dialect from the ‘well-adjusted’ urban mode. MacNeice’s class predicament was not so extreme—he grew up in a Church of Ireland rectory, after all—none the less, his sense of duality provided yet another example of kinship for the Ulster poets. Heaney’s reaction to MacNeice’s poetry over the course of several decades provides a good example of the way living writers frequently have the power to shape the legacy of the dead; it is also an indication of how ¹⁶³ Mahon, ‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’, 27. ¹⁶⁴ Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 219. ¹⁶⁵ Quoted ibid. 411. ¹⁶⁶ McSweeney, unedited interview with Michael Longley, typed MS, 1991, Box 43, MLP. For a more extensive treatment of the parallel between these ‘two voices’ as they manifest themselves in MacNeice and Longley, see Allen’s ‘Louis MacNeice and Michael Longley’. ¹⁶⁷ Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 28.

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MacNeice has been reclaimed as an Irish rather than English poet. In ‘The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh’ (1988), Heaney wrote: MacNeice did not throw the switch which sends writing energy sizzling into a hitherto unwriting system. When I opened his book, I still came up against the window-pane of literature. His poems arose from a mind-stuff and existed in a cultural setting which were at one remove from me and what I came from. . . . I envied them but I was not taken over by them the way I was taken over by Kavanagh.¹⁶⁸

It was the Oxbridge voice that had put Heaney off. But the MacNeice we encounter in ‘Frontiers of Writing’ (1995) has superseded Kavanagh, if not in influence, then as symbol of cultural harmony (as Heaney himself would perhaps like to be remembered). Here, MacNeice is the poet struggling to find a home and a voice in two cultures, permanently displaced, permanently transient. Thus the perennial cycle of exile and nostalgia explored in ‘Carrick Revisited’ is, for Heaney, a way to reconcile his own feelings of displacement and imbue (as MacNeice does) his childhood sensibilities with his adult sense. For Heaney, it is Carrickfergus Castle that completes the quincunx of Irish literary tradition he describes in ‘Frontiers of Writing’, with MacNeice ‘looking down’ on Spenser, Yeats, and Joyce. According to him, MacNeice is an amalgam of all three, yet he is the only one who ‘offers a way in and a way out’ of the English and Irish imagination.¹⁶⁹ The reader, of course, discerns an alliance between the two poets, particularly given the fact that Heaney has included MacNeice in the quincunx at the expense of Patrick Kavanagh.¹⁷⁰ MacNeice is no longer a minor (English) poet who kept himself at a remove, but a kindred Irishman whose verse gives hope to a new era of tolerance: It may be that there is not yet a political structure to reflect this poetic diagram [the quincunx], but the admission of MacNeice in this way within the symbolic ordering of Ireland also admits a hope for the evolution of a political order, one tolerant of difference and capable of metamorphoses within all the multivalent possibilities of Irishness, Britishness, Europeanness . . .¹⁷¹

In Heaney’s 1988 essay, Kavanagh is the dispossessed, while MacNeice is the possessor of territory, language, and literary tradition. In ‘The Frontiers of Writing’, however, they have exchanged places. It is now ¹⁶⁸ Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 8. ¹⁶⁹ Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, 200. ¹⁷⁰ See Corcoran’s ‘Keeping the Colours New’ for further discussion. ¹⁷¹ Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, 200.

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MacNeice who is the more worthy representative of a ‘native’, inclusive tradition that is both Protestant and Catholic, while Kavanagh, by focusing on the singular experience of rural Irish Catholic life, ironically seems exclusivist—certainly not a poet whose work and life offer a model for social harmony in Northern Ireland. MacNeice, however, was able to ‘straddle his areas of self-division’ in a way Heaney hoped to emulate; thus his Anglo-Irishness is now seen as the key, rather than the foil, to an integrated literary tradition.¹⁷² Corcoran argues that this change of heart was a result of Heaney’s ‘painful re-orientation and re-alignment’ from parochial poet to international luminary; indeed, Heaney’s later engagement with Russian and Eastern European writers reveals a cosmopolitanism not found in Preoccupations, which is largely concerned with Irish writers.¹⁷³ As Heaney journeys further away from his geographic and literary origins and becomes more comfortable with his position as a ‘world’ poet, MacNeice no longer seems to be on the other side of ‘the windowpane of literature’ but becomes, ironically, closer to home and memory.¹⁷⁴ Where Heaney, Longley, and Mahon find resonance with MacNeice’s self-divided Ulster psyche, Muldoon finds an enabling example of distance and scepticism. He made this explicit in his introduction to the Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, which he edited in 1986; there, he presented part of a 1939 BBC radio broadcast between MacNeice and F. R. Higgins in which the two debate the question of race and poetry. The debate is worth quoting at length: HIGGINS.

Present day Irish poets are believers—heretical believers, maybe—but they have the spiritual buoyancy of a belief in something. The sort of belief I see in Ireland is a belief emanating from life, from nature, from revealed religion, and from the nation. A sort of dream that produced a sense of magic. Reading through the anthologies made from contemporary English poets I would say that there is little sign of such magic; indeed there are few signs of the awful sense of respect for words which poetry demands. . . . I am afraid, Mr MacNeice, you, as an Irishman cannot escape from your blood, nor from our blood-music that brings the racial character to mind. Irish poetry remains a creation happily, fundamentally rooted in rural civilization, yet aware of and in touch with the elementals of the future. MACNEICE. I have the feeling that you have side-tracked me into an Ireland versus England match. I am so little used to thinking of poetry in terms of race-consciousness that no doubt this was very good for me. However, I am still unconverted. I think one may have such a thing as one’s racial blood-music, but ¹⁷² Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, 198. ¹⁷³ Corcoran, ‘Keeping the Colours New’, 120. ¹⁷⁴ Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, 8.

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that, like one’s unconscious, it may be left to take care of itself. Compared with you, I take a rather common-sense view of poetry. I think that the poet is a sensitive instrument designed to record anything which interests his mind or affects his emotions. If a gasometer, for instance, affects his emotions, or if the Marxian dialectic, let us say, interests his mind, then let them come into his poetry. He will be fulfilling his function as a poet if he records these things with integrity and with as much music as he can compass or as is appropriate to the subject.¹⁷⁵

Muldoon’s implication is, obviously, that MacNeice is the more enlightened of the two; Higgins’s ideas about ‘racial character’ sound almost fascist in hindsight. Because Muldoon has consistently approached the Troubles through distance and irony—as Heaney says, his ‘swerves away from any form of po-faced solidarity with the political programmes of the Northern Catholic minority from which he hails have kept him so much on his poetic toes that he has practically achieved the poetic equivalent of walking on air’—he finds solidarity in MacNeice’s scepticism towards the unifying power of ‘blood music’.¹⁷⁶ This strategic method of rewriting is particularly successful in the ‘Louis’ section of Muldoon’s ‘7 Middagh St.’ Here, MacNeice literally speaks through Muldoon, whose own distaste for Higgins’s prerogative is clear: In dreams begin responsibilities; it was on account of just such an allegory that Lorca was riddled with bullets and lay mouth-down in the fickle shadow of his own blood.¹⁷⁷

A form of the line, ‘In dreams begins responsibility’—placed at the beginning of Yeats’s Responsibilities—is here used to parody Yeats’s (and Higgins’s) ideas surrounding the validity of poetic ‘bloodmusic’. The result, Muldoon implies, is a dead poet lying ‘in the shadow of his own blood’, perhaps a reference to the Irish Civil War and the role the Revivalists played in fanning the flames of sectarianism.¹⁷⁸ ¹⁷⁵ F. R. Higgins and Louis MacNeice, ‘Tendencies in Modern Poetry’, Listener, 27 July 1939. ¹⁷⁶ Heaney, ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, Box 1, SHP, 23. ¹⁷⁷ Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 58–9. ¹⁷⁸ For more detailed discussions of ‘7 Middagh Street’, see Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1996), 124–30, Corcoran, ‘Keeping the Colours New’, in Devine and Peacock (eds.), Louis MacNeice and His Influence, and Brian Cliff, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Community on the Cusp: Auden and MacNeice in the Manuscripts for “7, Middagh Street” ’, in Contemporary Literature, 74: 4 (2003), 613–35.

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But then Muldoon seems to contradict himself (and Auden), insisting, . . . poetry can make things happen— not only can, but must— and the very painting of that oyster is in itself a political gesture.¹⁷⁹

Muldoon’s ‘Louis’ had earlier referred to Auden as ‘a Dutch master | intent on painting an oyster | or lemon’, intimating that the British poet had retreated into pure aestheticism. Yet for MacNeice as for Muldoon, the act of painting an oyster becomes political precisely because it is so inherently apolitical. By offering such oblique codes, Muldoon denies the efficacy of Heaney’s use of historical metaphor in North, lends authority to his poetic stance, and commandeers MacNeice to aid his own ‘political programme’. Heaney got the hint. In a 1988 lecture delivered at Emory University, he quoted the broadcast and questioned Muldoon’s dismissal of Higgins: ‘however elegantly we may wish to quarantine the sophistication and double-understandings of the poetic imagination from the solidarities and antagonism of politics, these latter troublesome complexities keep nagging at MacNeice and at Muldoon also, in an imaginatively rewarding way.’¹⁸⁰ He goes on to quote MacNeice’s ‘Suite for Recorders’ and ‘Carrick Revisited’, claiming they are both a product of MacNeice’s necessary engagement with political, even racial questions. In a sense, he challenges Muldoon’s version of MacNeice with his own: By acknowledging the drag back into the demeaning actualities of Ulster, MacNeice’s poetry remains more problematically burdened than his rather brisk critical pronouncements would suggest; it is certainly not partisan, not what we would dare call ‘Unionist poetry’ or ‘Nationalist poetry’, yet it engages the ‘particular historic complex’ upon which these caricatured poetic divisions are predicated.¹⁸¹

Heaney offers further examples of such engagement from Mahon (‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’), Longley (‘The Linen Workers’), and Muldoon himself (‘Immram’). Through close-readings of these poems, he defends Higgins’s remarks, and implies that Muldoon has either misread MacNeice, or has arrived at his own conclusions too swiftly: I am suggesting that Higgins’s proposition that a poem be somehow responsive to ‘the nation’ to which the poet belongs, which was in turn a vulgarization of the ¹⁷⁹ Muldoon, Meeting the British, 59. ¹⁸⁰ Heaney, ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, Box 1, SHP, 11. ¹⁸¹ Ibid. 15.

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Yeatsian demand that the Irish poet cast his mind on other days and maintain a continuum of identity, I am suggesting that these commitments, discredited for the reasons I outlined at the beginning of the lecture, may not so much have disappeared from poetry as refined their means.¹⁸²

MacNeice’s ‘Carrick Revisited’ assures Heaney that the Carrickfergus poet is not so sceptical about his own cultural identity as Muldoon would claim; the poem is, for Heaney, nothing less than a testimony to ‘the whole parallelogram of cultural and ancestral forces operating in MacNeice’s life’.¹⁸³ Yet throughout the essay Heaney continually praises Muldoon even as he subtly undermines his argument; he also praises the work of Longley (‘stunningly original and unpredictable’) and Mahon (‘the Stephen Dedalus of Belfast’).¹⁸⁴ The deftly handled lecture becomes, in the end, a way for Heaney to redress Muldoon’s ‘misreadings’ of Higgins—and, by extension, himself—by citing instances of ancestral sympathy in MacNeice, Muldoon, Mahon, and Longley. It is also yet another way for Heaney to claim lineage from MacNeice and to situate further the Belfast coterie within an Ulster poetic tradition. MacNeice died in 1963, just as the poets were beginning to find their voices. Yet he still remained, in many senses, a fellow collaborator: as Mahon said, he was ‘a familiar voice whispering in my ear’.¹⁸⁵ His pervasive influence suggests a commonalty of literary heritage and an agreement upon a shared poetic influence that, in retrospect, defines the Belfast poets as a group apart from their British and Irish peers. In their own work, they spoke for him and through him as they allowed his perspectives to shape their own: ‘7 Middagh St.’, ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain’, ‘The Frontiers of Writing’, ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’, ‘A Misrepresented Poet’, the 1988 Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems, and the introduction to the 1986 Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry all provide examples of how these poets used MacNeice, over the years, to understand, develop, and advance their own ideas about poetry and politics. These acts of canonization surely bespeak a mutual influence and collective alliance with the older poet who, like them, defied easy categorization. The fact that he has featured so prominently in their work reveals the extent to which these poets were, early on, struggling with the same set of questions. MacNeice and Hewitt provided some of the answers; the rest they would search for themselves. ¹⁸² Ibid. 20. ¹⁸³ Ibid. 13. ¹⁸⁴ Ibid. 21; 18. ¹⁸⁵ Brown, ‘An Interview with Derek Mahon’, 18.

5 ‘MacSimmittoon’ The Ulster Renaissance is ultimately best understood through the wheels that set it in motion—not through the exaggerations of British or Irish journalists, but through the Belfast Group workshop, the Belfast Festival, the Northern Review, Festival poetry pamphlets, the Honest Ulsterman, poetry tours, first publications, successful reviews, and literary awards. It was not the Dublin or London reviewers who imposed the ‘Belfast Group’ identity upon the poets from on high; journalists could only publicize what the poets themselves had achieved. That identity was, to a large degree, invented and sustained by the poets themselves. Their achievements gave them the confidence to conceive of Ulster poetry as a distinct category, and to engage in a dialogue among themselves, as well as with the London and Dublin literati, about what shape that poetry ought to take. By the 1970s, the tone of the conversation would change as the term ‘Ulster poetry’ bore new burdens, yet it is important to recognize that the poets had already established a viable Northern identity— one centred around the idea of a local literary community which shared aesthetic principles and claimed kinship with Ulster poetic fatherfigures—before the onset of violence. In ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’ (1970), Mahon advanced claims about Northern Irish poetry deeply at odds with those he would make throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In this article, he called Hobsbaum’s Group (which he later claimed ‘didn’t do anybody any good’) ‘probably the first to crystalise the sense of a new Northern poetry’.¹ He went on to confirm the birth of a movement: There has been some talk in recent years of a new Northern Irish group of poets. From the English point of view this is sufficiently remarkable in that, until two years ago, not many were aware of a place called Northern Ireland, let alone that it might produce poets. From the Irish, i.e. Southern Irish, point of view, the ¹ Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (1970), 91.

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development has been followed with mixed emotions varying from amused surprise (since the North is traditionally philistine) to the distaste of literary chauvinists.²

Mahon’s defensive tone suggests that promoting an Ulster coterie was a way to empower the literature and the writers of his troubled province. He even listed the members of this new group of Northern poets in the first paragraph, along with the year they were born: John Montague (b. 1929), James Simmons (b. 1935), Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), Michael Longley (b. 1939), myself I suppose (b. 1941), and a number of younger fellows like Michael Foley, Frank Ormsby, Paul Muldoon, and Wes Magee. Perhaps Seamus Deane (b. 1940) and Stewart Parker (b. 1941) should be included, although their preoccupations are not primarily with poetry.³

This gesture seems highly self-conscious—evidence that Mahon, despite his later tirades against the label ‘Ulster poetry’ and ‘Belfast Group’, sought to include himself and his peers in an historical and literary moment. It was Longley, however, who promoted the new Ulster poetry most consistently. In Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (1971), he spoke about the ‘surge of creativity’ that had marked the sixties and the ‘artistic efflorescence’ that preceded the political explosion.⁴ He also told how Harry Chambers was ‘among the first to advertise in his magazine, Phoenix, the new poetic flowering’, and how the 1965 Festival Publications series of pamphlets ‘inaugurated a new phase’.⁵ As noted earlier, he even went so far as to claim that one of James Simmons’s biggest achievements was to have ‘inaugurated what might almost be termed The Honest Ulsterman School of Poets’.⁶ The following comments reveal that by 1971 Longley had been persuaded (and sought to persuade others) that a renaissance was indeed taking place: although it may merely be a coincidence, it is surely significant that recent years have seen not only the publication of hardback collections by Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, James Simmons, and others, but also the long-awaited arrival of John Hewitt’s Collected Poems . . . Ulster poets seem at the moment willing to stay at home, to work and write here.⁷

Longley’s appointment as Assistant Director of Literature and Education at the Northern Ireland Arts Council in 1970 was crucial to ² Ibid. 89. ³ Ibid. ⁴ Michael Longley (ed.), Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 8. ⁵ Ibid. 96; 95. ⁶ Ibid. 96. ⁷ Ibid.

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the vitality of Ulster poetry, and in many ways he became that poetry’s driving force. His conscious and consistent efforts to understand the confluence of factors that had set the poetry revival in motion appear in pages of notes among his papers at Emory. For example, in a handwritten manuscript regarding the phenomenon of contemporary Ulster poetry, he listed several explanations for the local renaissance: (a) simply a coincidence of talent (b) the energies released by a confluence of cultures—Irish, Scots, English (c) if as much good writing were issuing from Scotland or Wales, it probably wouldn’t get as much attention from the media; but whether or not the media is a stimulus, a distraction, a dampener or all three is difficult to say (d) the extraordinary and welcome popularity of such a fine poet as Seamus Heaney has cast a bright, if distorting, beam of light on other Northern Irish writing (e) it does not seem odd—as it would have some twenty years ago—to write here (f ) nothing succeeds like success (g) safety in numbers (h) Hobsbaum was the first, and remains the most important, spokesperson of the new writing in the province; but friendship between the various talents was and is the main catalyst (i) the Arts Council had no programme for literature prior to my advent in July 1970.⁸

Longley’s first idea, that the revival is simply a ‘coincidence of talent’, is immediately undermined by the subsequent factors he lists, particularly ‘safety in numbers’ and ‘friendship between the various talents’. His final remark hints at the significance of his own work for the Arts Council to the promotion of Ulster poetry. The Arts Council’s funding of literary magazines, especially the Honest Ulsterman, was an important contribution to the formation of a Belfast literary coterie, for without this financial injection, Northern Irish poets would have had to look further afield to publish. Ultimately they did this anyway, publishing their collections with English presses, but local literary magazines gave them a voice, a forum, and a sense of collective identity and achievement. It was largely through Longley’s efforts that Ulster writers such as Mahon, Montague, Simmons, Robert Greacen, Stewart Parker, and Sam Hanna Bell were awarded grants during the early seventies, for it was his feeling that ⁸ Michael Longley, untitled handwritten MS regarding his personal background and the phenomenon of contemporary Ulster poetry, beginning, ‘1) Interest in Writing’, n.d., Box 37, MLP.

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‘Official recognition . . . helps to ensure that the labours of solitude percolate through to the public, and encourages the muse to prolong her stay’.⁹ Such official backing instilled both individual and regional confidence in the poets, thus creating a cycle in which Arts Council recognition increased poetic output, and output increased recognition. Longley’s campaign to finance Northern artists may in fact have been prompted by a lesson from the past. In a 1953 Rann article, Howard Sergeant blamed Ulster poets’ relative anonymity (at that time) on the lack of a supportive literary coterie: One of the most interesting features about Ulster regionalism in recent years is that it has produced a number of individual poets like Louis MacNeice, W. R. Rodgers, Roy McFadden, Robert Greacen and John Hewitt, without fostering a special movement. . . . It is partly because there is no specific ‘school’ . . . that their work has not been given the attention it deserves.¹⁰

Longley expressed similar feelings eighteen years later in Causeway. One of the problems with the fifties, he wrote, was that the poets and writers were not ‘involved in the sort of local coterie or group which, whatever the originality of its individuals, can inspire its different members and help to extend the imaginative estate of the community to which it belongs. This applies all the more if that community is, like Ulster, small, defined and comparatively isolated.’¹¹ Longley’s testimony suggests that he regarded the formation of a coterie not only as a way to ‘extend the imaginative estate of the community’, but also as a way to extend one’s audience. Longley’s desire to promote Ulster poetry at the official level went hand in hand with his interest in solidifying an informal but supportive literary community. As he wrote to Marie Heaney in 1976, his second book was in part an attempt to invent an artistic community through ‘sodality of imagination’.¹² He even devised the words ‘Maheanley’ and ‘MacSimmittoon’—invoking ⁹ Longley (ed.), Causeway, 97. The Arts Council began funding the literary sector in 1965, but did not give bursaries to individual writers until around 1970. The lucky recipients included Derek Mahon and John Montague (1969–70); Stewart Parker (1970–1); Robert Greacen and Sam Hanna Bell (1971–2); Maurice Leitch, James Simmons, Anthony Weir (1972–3); John Boyd (1973–4); Ciaran Carson, Robert Greacen, and Michael Foley (1974–5). The Arts Council likewise gave funding to local literary magazines like Threshold and the Northern Review (1965–6); the Honest Ulsterman (1969–70); Soundings (1971–2), Caret and Irish Booklore (1972–3); and Lines Review (1973–4). See Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), 82. ¹⁰ Howard Sergeant, ‘Ulster Regionalism’, Rann, 20 (1953), 3. ¹¹ Longley (ed.), Causeway, 95. ¹² Longley to Marie Heaney, 2 Nov. 1976, Box 1, MLP.

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Mahon, Heaney, Simmons, Muldoon, Hewitt, and MacNeice—as shorthand for the coterie.¹³ Though he was ostensibly mocking the MacSpaunday label, there was also a real desire to emulate the imaginary cohesion of the thirties generation, for Longley saw himself and his peers as a group that possessed a common time, place, and preoccupation, if not always a common voice. This is most clear in his verse letters to Heaney, Simmons, and Mahon in An Exploded View, which show him grappling with his identity as an artist in a time of civil strife, attempting to understand that identity through his peers. For example, in an early draft of the verse introduction to An Exploded View (eventually entitled ‘For Derek, Seamus & Jimmy’), he wrote: Like the child who cries in the dark, The lover who utters obscenities In his passion, or the condemned man Who makes a last-minute confession, I am taking myself seriously And, I insist, meaning what I say.

However, he later crossed out the last two lines and substituted ‘we’ for ‘I’: We are trying to make ourselves heard And, I insist, to mean what we say.¹⁴

In this version, the collective voice takes sudden precedence over the individual; the fact that Longley is able to express his frustration better with a plural pronoun than with a singular one suggests that the poetic endeavour is a shared one. He eventually revised the poem to read: We are trying to make ourselves heard Like the lover who mouths obscenities In his passion, like the condemned man Who makes a last-minute confession, Like the child who cries out in the dark.¹⁵

In this final version, which appeared on the dedicatory page of An Exploded View (and which shares certain imagery with the earlier ‘Birthmarks’), the first line is no longer a simile, but a declaration of ¹³ Michael Longley, untitled typed MS regarding Northern Irish poetry, n.d., Box 37, MLP. ¹⁴ Michael Longley, ‘For Derek, Seamus, & Jimmy’, poem, handwritten MS, n.d., Box 17, MLP. ¹⁵ Michael Longley, An Exploded View (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), dedicatory page.

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shared purpose. Additionally, the first word of the poem, and hence the entire book, is ‘we’, signalling to the reader that the poems inside are somehow the product of shared deliberation representing a unified poetic front. When asked in 2003 about ‘the strong “we” ’ in his poetry, Longley responded: Belfast has been called ‘the armpit of Europe’, ‘a cultural Siberia’: not somewhere you would expect a flurry of poetry. Perhaps ‘we’ registers the relief of embattled aesthetes who have come through. ‘We’ also implies that imagination and creativity dissolve what is called here ‘the sectarian divide.’ ‘We’ embraces Catholic and Protestant. ‘We’ acknowledges friendly rivalry.¹⁶

In ‘For Derek, Seamus, & Jimmy’, however, the ‘we’ is not nearly so sure of itself, for it has not yet ‘come through’. Here ‘we’ acknowledges a shared suffering, frustration, and confusion over how to respond to the violence. Yet the poem itself is not easily interpreted: like the four-part ‘Letters’, which comes later in the book, it is to be read as both a private and public statement. On the one hand, it excludes its audience: because the poem addresses specific people by their first names, it brings to mind a personal letter meant only for its recipients. Thus the poet creates the illusion, in the mind of the reader, that he or she is reading something private which has accidentally made its way on to the printed page. Yet the poem is public—it appears in a book distributed not only to Mahon, Heaney, and Simmons, but to the world at large.¹⁷ Thus, the reader inevitably wonders to whom these poems are truly addressed: is Longley speaking to his fellow poets, or is he speaking for them? The answer is most likely both— Longley assumes the poets share his desire to ‘be heard’, yet at the same time imagines them as his recipients. Indeed, the entire premiss of this poem and the following ‘Letters’ (‘To James Simmons’, ‘To Derek Mahon’, ‘To Seamus Heaney’) is one of shared sympathies and endeavours. Though Longley complains in ‘To Seamus Heaney’, ‘Ulster poet our Union title’, ‘Letters’ self-consciously casts himself, Heaney, Mahon, and Simmons as mutually supportive members of a coterie struggling with the efficacy of art and, in the process, their identity as Ulstermen. ¹⁶ Jody Allen Randolph, ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003), 299. ¹⁷ Douglas Dunn notes that ‘the formal ploy of “Letters” [octosyllabic couplets] associates it with public poetry’ and goes on to cite examples of poems by Yeats, Lowell, Auden, MacNeice, Jonson, Marvell, Milton, Burns, and Pope which share the same formal structure. Douglas Dunn, ‘Longley’s Metric’, The Poetry of Michael Longley (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000), 21.

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Edna Longley likewise played with the idea of friendship, rivalry, and coterie in her satiric ‘Ten Cliquey Clerihews’, published in the Honest Ulsterman in 1974. In the poem, she identifies the members of the Northern ‘clique’, framing each against the others as friend, rival, and, ultimately, ‘Ulster poet’—the very title Michael Longley complained of in his verse letter to Heaney. Ironically, the poem legitimates what it seeks to mock: JOHN HEWITT

If he only knew it Is that rare entity Without problems of identity. JOHN MONTAGUE

When given less than his due Would lecture his coterie In global poetry. Since SEAMUS HEANEY Identifies with Sweeney He was probably right To take flight. MICHAEL LONGLEY

Is inclined to feel strongly About being less famous Than Seamus. THE ULSTER POET

Is never off the set Explaining his scruples About exploiting the Troubles. DEREK MAHON

Is doing all he can To rid his imagination Of the Northern Irish situation. Even PAUL MULDOON Can scarcely remain immune: It’s not the hour Of the Ivory Tower. JIMMY SIMMONS

When involved with women Would kiss and tell And publish as well. MICHAEL FOLEY

Takes a less than holy

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Attitude to the genius Of his literary seniors. THE ULSTERMAN EDITOR

Has delighted his creditors And added a savour To exclusion from Faber.¹⁸

Like Edna Longley, Muldoon also mocked the idea of a Northern coterie in ‘Caprice des Dieux’, in which he compared the Ulster poets to fine cheeses. Yet in the very act of differentiation he too draws attention to what the poets have in common: Our trolley groaning under the weight of Roquefort Hewitt, a Port Salut from Mont-Aigu, Heaney’s monumental Emmenthal, Mahon wrapped in vine-leaves or au poivre, Longley’s Brie of Bessie Smith’s L.P.’s, the remains of Simmons, the warmly-remembered Camembert of Carson, Ormsby’s sane Bondaroy au Foin. St-Paulin, his own man, the silk of McGuckian’s ewe’s-milk. I give them all. I give them all their due. For myself? A little Caprice des Dieux.¹⁹

Although the poem mocks the idea of coterie (intimating, perhaps, that the poetry itself has become commodified by the haute bourgeosie), the ¹⁸ Edna Longley, ‘Ten Cliquey Clerihews’, Honest Ulsterman, 42/43 (1974), 29–30. ¹⁹ Paul Muldoon, ‘Caprice des Dieux’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 May 1984, 516. Neil Corcoran speculates that the poem ‘may be a dig at those upwardly socially mobile meals eaten in several contemporary Ulster poems [such as Muldoon’s ‘Paris’ and Heaney’s ‘Oysters’] . . . in which the expensive restaurant becomes the scene of primal guilt’. ‘ “A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59: 3 (1998), 559–61.

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playful tone nevertheless self-consciously identifies the members of the Northern Ireland poetry circle, who is ‘in’ and who is conspicuously ‘out’ (such as James Simmons). The poem was published in the TLS but never collected, perhaps because Muldoon thought better of identifying a Northern coterie (an idea he has resisted in interviews) for posterity. The poets made public declarations of friendship not only through their verse, but through the BBC. In 1970, Heaney, Mahon, and Longley read for a BBC Northern Ireland series called ‘Books, Plays, Poems’, broadcast on the Schools network. Because teachers comprised an influential local audience, the programmes provided the three young poets with an excellent avenue for both group and self-promotion. Heaney was the narrator, offering anecdotes and explaining poems read by Longley or Mahon, while David Hammond sang folk songs at intervals. Over the course of the three short programmes, the poets read their own work as well as poems by Yeats, Frost, Larkin, and MacDiarmid, among others.²⁰ Perhaps because the inter-faith line-up offered an example of Catholic/ Protestant cooperation, the poets felt it was important to introduce themselves as friends: during the first programme, Heaney announced, ‘We’ve met today in the BBC studio in Belfast, although we’ve known one another for a long time before today.’²¹ By this time, public readings and Festival appearances had made the Heaney-Longley-Mahon-Hammond configuration a familiar one around literary Belfast. Yet it still seemed important to emphasize their friendships to the radio audience, to maintain a matey tone throughout the programme, and to give an overall impression of cooperation and mutual encouragement. That year, Heaney and Longley again took part in a BBC radio programme entitled ‘Soundings’, in which both bantered amiably about Frost, Graves, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas, and discussed their feelings about reading poetry aloud to an audience. Both agreed that having the other present at poetry readings made the experience more relaxing and pleasant—particularly in cities where one of them had, in Longley’s words, a ‘head start’. As Longley told Maurice Leitch, ‘I have been nervous reading in Derry and been supported by Seamus, whereas he’s ²⁰ Heaney read ‘Digging’, ‘Thatcher’, and ‘Follower’; Mahon, ‘My Wicked Uncle’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, ‘Day Trip to Donegal’ and ‘Grandfather’; Longley, ‘In Memoriam’, ‘Emily Dickinson’, ‘Christopher at Birth’, and ‘Elegy to Fats Waller’. ²¹ Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and David Hammond, script of BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4 (Schools) programme entitled ‘Books, Plays, Poems, Part I’, recorded in Belfast, broadcast Feb. 1970, Box 39, MLP, 1.

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been nervous reading in Dublin and been supported by me.’²² Clearly, mutual support contributed to their public performances. ‘Soundings’ must have strengthened the public perception of these poets not only as friends, but as spokesmen for one another.²³ The idea of an Ulster literary community was also taking shape in the book pages and review sections of English and Irish periodicals. From the mid-sixties onward, Irish, English, and Northern Irish reviewers seemed determined to group these poets together; even when they were reviewed individually, there were inevitable comparisons with other members of the coterie.²⁴ This pattern was both a cause and effect of the poets’ group promotion. It is also important to note that the Belfast poets frequently reviewed each other. To cite one example out of many, it was none other than Longley who gave Mahon’s debut Night-Crossing a glowing review in the Irish Times.²⁵ Longley wrote that Mahon was ‘among the finest poets now writing anywhere’—an accurate statement today, but perhaps hyperbolic in 1968. Longley linked Mahon with his native Ulster, writing, ‘The bleak complexities of Belfast have had to wait all this time for their laureate. What Seamus Heaney has done for the rural hinterland of Ulster, Mahon does for the shipyards and backstreets.’²⁶ Here Longley defines Mahon against Heaney while at the same time emphasizing their shared role as Ulster poets. Longley himself completes the trio by explaining that he knew Mahon at Trinity: ‘As someone who benefited from the extraordinary fireworks display of his juvenilia, I don’t think that my being one of the dedicatees of this volume should prevent me from saluting ²² Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, unedited script of BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4 programme entitled ‘Soundings’, broadcast 5 Feb. 1970, Box 39, MLP, 6. This quotation was omitted from the final version of the programme. ²³ There was more radio publicity in Apr. 1971 with ‘New Writing in Ireland’, produced by Sam Hanna Bell and broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4. Muldoon, Mahon, and Ormsby each read one of their poems, while Longley read a prose piece he had written about MacNeice. Sam Hanna Bell et al., ‘New Writing in Ireland’, Apr. 1971, Box 39, MLP. ²⁴ See Mike Wagstaff, ‘Poetry: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon’, newspaper clipping, 1966, Box 1, MLP; Douglas Sealy, ‘Irish Poets of the Sixties—2,’ Irish Times, 25 Jan. 1966; Padraic Fiacc, ‘Ulster Happening’, Hibernia, 14 Feb.; Edna Longley, ‘Recent Northern Irish Poetry’, Irish Times, 15 Jan. 1975; Douglas Dunn, ‘Everything is Susceptible’, London Review of Books, 20 Mar. 1980; Martin Dodsworth, ‘Not at Home’, Guardian, 31 Jan. 1980; Peter Porter, ‘The Luck of the Irish’, Observer, 19 Dec. 1982; John Banville, ‘Slouching Toward Bethlehem’, New York Times Book Review, 30 May 1991, 37–9; Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Being Kind to Belfast’, review of The Belfast Anthology, by Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement, 3 Dec. 1999, 23. ²⁵ Night-Crossing was the Poetry Society Book Choice for autumn 1968. ²⁶ Michael Longley, ‘A Poet of Power’, review of Night-Crossing, by Derek Mahon, Irish Times, 1 Dec. 1968.

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after so many years its arrival.’²⁷ Edna Longley (the other dedicatee) also reviewed Night-Crossing in the Honest Ulsterman, writing, ‘The scope of its vision and the subtle brilliance of its rhetoric . . . make most recent poetry on both sides of the Atlantic look one-dimensional.’²⁸ The next year, Longley also gave high marks to Simmons’s In the Wilderness in Hibernia; Muldoon, Boland, Heaney, Mahon, and Simmons would, in turn, go on to review Michael Longley.²⁹ As the image of these poets as a group took shape and solidified, it is little wonder that critics, reviewers, and the reading public began to think of them as a clique. Indeed, the reviews of Muldoon’s first book, New Weather, reveal how well the Northern coterie had established themselves by 1973; nearly every reviewer compared Muldoon to either Heaney, Mahon, or Longley.³⁰ The TLS noted, ‘He has much of the panache, if not the rigour, of his fellow Northern Irishmen, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, but his characteristic tone is altogether dreamier, more intuitively lyrical’, while Peter Porter wrote in the Observer, ‘Muldoon is carrying on that Ulster stylishness already polished smooth by Seamus Heaney.’³¹ Even when the reviewers protested against such comparisons—as did Paul Durcan reviewing Longley’s The Echo Gate—they could not help but make them: Because Longley is a contemporary and friend of Heaney and Mahon, he has been lumped together with them. However, just as Auden’s verse has little in common with MacNeice and Spender, so Longley’s work is an utterly different kind of poetry to Heaney and Mahon. At the Mountain Mine of Poetry, Longley works at a very deep seam of the Unconscious whereas Mahon operates by Remote Control. Heaney I see standing at the pithead whispering instructions to the Unconscious seam as well as to the Conscious seam, both of which in him are closer knit than in Longley or Mahon.³² ²⁷ Michael Longley, ‘A Poet of Power’, review of Night-Crossing, by Derek Mahon, Irish Times, 1 Dec. 1968. ²⁸ Longley, review of Night-Crossing, by Derek Mahon, 27. ²⁹ Michael Longley, ‘The Wounded Badger’, review of In the Wilderness, by James Simmons, Hibernia, Nov. 1969, 14. Longley wrote that the collection placed Simmons ‘securely among the best of the younger Irish writers’. ³⁰ See, for example, Edna Longley, ‘First Blood’, Irish Times, 14 Apr. 1973; John Boland, ‘Enchanting Emptiness’, Hibernia, 27 Apr. 1973; Alan Brownjohn, ‘Forebodings’, New Statesman, 16 Mar. 1973; Peter Porter, ‘Back to Stylishness’, Observer, 15 Apr. 1973; Alasdair MacLean, ‘Highland Guide’, Listener, 16 Aug. 1973; Derek Stanford, ‘Poet of Parts’, Irish Press, 24 Mar. 1973; Roger Conover, review of New Weather, by Paul Muldoon, Eire-Ireland, 10: 2 (1975), 127–33; Anon., ‘Vaguely Nouvelle’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 Apr. 1973, 442; John Feeney, ‘Watched Poets Not on the Boil’, Catholic Herald, 16 Mar. 1973. ³¹ See Anon., ‘Vaguely nouvelle’, and Porter, ‘Back to Sylishness’. ³² Paul Durcan, ‘Poetry and Truth’, review of The Echo Gate, by Michael Longley, clipping, 1979, Box 52, MLP.

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This review shows how difficult it had become, by 1979, to interpret the work of a Northern Irish poet without constantly comparing his poems to those of his peers. A sense of opposition and even outright hostility towards the Dublin literary establishment also bound the coterie together during this time. The term ‘literati’ was used vaguely, and specific names were rarely mentioned (perhaps due to shifting allegiances), yet there was always the intimation that literary life in Dublin was phony. Regional hubris was nothing new in Northern Ireland—it had attracted members of the Protestant intelligentsia during the forties and fifties, and still had a certain appeal for poets in the sixties. Simmons, in fact, had admitted that the Honest Ulsterman, where many of the anti-Dublin attacks were launched, was founded as a regionalist magazine; Longley and Mahon, despite their later dismissals of the term ‘Ulster poetry’, were also involved at this time in a quasi-regionalist debate in which the North was cast as the present and future cradle of Irish poetry. The defensive rhetoric was, presumably, aimed at the Dublin literati, who assumed a more sophisticated air. Although there was much cross-border cooperation with the Ulster-friendly Hibernia, as well as encouragement from Boland and Kennelly, Northerners expressed resentment towards Southern condescension. John Montague, for example, remembered his Southern counterparts being ‘uncomprehending’ of a literary movement in the North, remarking, ‘Even a friendly father figure like O Faolain found my Northern twang a little ridiculous.’³³ Mahon and Longley set out to make that Northern twang a trademark of high rather than low culture: in the late sixties and early seventies, both claimed that the Northern poets were engaging with a more complex set of cultural questions than their Southern peers. In a 1972 essay published in the Review, Longley addressed the issue: As a citizen I find it gratifying that at least the poets here are trying honestly to reflect in their work the tragic complexities. The Irish psyche is being redefined in Ulster, and the poems are born—inevitably, one might say—out of a lively tension between the Irish and English traditions.³⁴

³³ John Montague, ‘The Figure in the Cave: A Chapter of Autobiography’, Irish University Review, 19: 1 (1989), 79. It must be said, however, that O Faolain encouraged Northern writing in The Bell. ³⁴ ‘Michael Longley’, in ‘The State of Poetry: A Symposium’, the Review, 29–30 (1972), 47.

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Later in the essay, however, his decorous tone shifts to one of outright resentment towards the Dublin literati: In an area once considered something of a cultural Siberia regular contact with writers one respects is heartening—and it’s all pretty aequo animo, with little of the bitchiness that characterises the Dublin literary scene. Indeed I would claim that most of the best contemporary Irish poetry is being written North of the Border. And when it deals either directly or obliquely with the Irish question, this poetry tends to focus more on Ulster than on the island as a whole; an indication that politically and culturally the situation is more complex than the one explored by Yeats and O’ Casey (something they don’t yet realise in the Republic).³⁵

In ‘Poetry and Northern Ireland’, Mahon too insisted upon a separate tradition for the North: the Northern poet, surrounded as he is by the Greek gifts of modern industry and what Ferlinghetti called ‘the hollering monsters of the imagination of disaster’ . . . must, to be true to his imagination, insist upon a different court of appeal from that which sits in the South.³⁶

Here Mahon turns the idea of industry, with its pejorative associations, into something poetically enabling, just as Hart Crane had done in ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’: ‘Reading Hart Crane’s “All afternoon the cloud-flown gantries turn | Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still”, it was possible to endow the shipyards of Belfast with an immanence of poetic life they had never had before.’³⁷ He further claims that the religious and political tension in Northern Ireland helped give the Ulster poets ‘a texture their Southern counterparts do not have’, and that Montague and Heaney, by reason of their Northerness, have avoided (Dublin literati please note) the narcissistic provincialism in which ‘Irish’ literature is currently sinking, and have found, each for himself, a voice which, whilst remaining true to the ancient intonations, has something to say beyond the shores of Ireland.³⁸

Here, Mahon both subverts and invokes Hewitt’s regionalism, claiming that the Ulster writer, by virtue of his complicated cultural heritage, possesses a more cosmopolitan voice than the Dubliner. Edna Longley would echo Mahon in a 1985 Crane Bag essay, writing, ‘Northern Catholics and Protestants . . . differ from their Southern counterparts, ³⁵ ‘Michael Longley’, in ‘The State of Poetry: A Symposium’, the Review, 29–30 (1972), 47. ³⁶ Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, 90. ³⁷ Ibid. 91. (Mahon misquoted Crane, substituting ‘gantries’ for ‘derricks’.) He would later reject this idea and claim that ‘The fruits of industrialism are ruination and waste, ugliness.’ Terence Brown, ‘An Interview with Derek Mahon’, Poetry Ireland Review, 14 (1985), 13. ³⁸ Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, 92.

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and the overall assumptive worlds of North and South have drifted apart since Partition. Hence the much greater formal similarity . . . between Heaney’s poetry and that of his Northern Protestant contemporaries, than between any of their work and the methods of Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan.’³⁹ Not surprisingly, Simmons joined the regionalist chorus; in a 1973 Fortnight article he wrote, ‘We tend to speak dismissively of Southern Irish poets in the North, being, quite reasonably, so pleased with ourselves . . . There is a tendency in Dublin to overvalue poetry, and for those who write poetry to feel they have some special right to despise other people. . . . It is not a matter of speaking salutary and bitter truths, but of initiating a sort of literary gang-warfare.’⁴⁰ In a similar vein, Edna Longley wrote in 1972: In their editing and poetry, Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley evidently value plain craftsmanship, a directness, even bluntness, of expression and vision. Negatively, they reject rhetoric, vagueness, bardic postures and gestures, perhaps implicitly the literary dishonesties of Dublin.⁴¹

There seems to be a religious subtext here, in which the Northern aesthetic is characterized by sober Protestant virtues while Dublin writing relies upon ‘postures and gestures’ to attract its audience. The attacks degenerated to the point where Michael Longley wrote to one of his Latin professors at Trinity of ‘the treacheries of the Dublin literary scene where there are temptations to become inbred and avoid facing up to the best of what is happening across the Irish sea’.⁴² Jude the Obscure, an anonymous columnist for the Honest Ulsterman, went even farther: Literary society in Dublin, with its misogyny and its sentimental male friendships, perhaps, even in its snobbery (the Dublin sickness), its alcoholism and its churchiness, has traits that may be associated with a homosexual community.⁴³

Kirkland rightly sees such language as an ‘attempt to provincialise Dublin from the cultural metropolis of Belfast, a conscious act of ³⁹ Edna Longley, ‘A Reply’, Crane Bag, 9: 1 (1985), 121. ⁴⁰ James Simmons, ‘New Talent’, review of Selected Poems, by Michael Hartnett, Fortnight, 22 June 1973, 18. ⁴¹ Edna Longley, ‘Poemical’, Fortnight, 11 May 1972, 16. In 1998 Edna Longley called Dublin ‘a jealous literary capital’ in ‘An ABC of Reading Contemporary Irish Poetry’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59: 3 (1998), 522. ⁴² Michael Longley to Dr and Mrs Wormell, 11 Oct. 1969, Box 1, MLP. ⁴³ Anon. (‘Jude the Obscure’), ‘HU Business Section’, Honest Ulsterman, 32 (1972), 28. Quoted in Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 74.

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redefinition’.⁴⁴ Indeed, the Belfast–Dublin rivalry shows just how successfully the Northern poets had promoted themselves as a group, and, in so doing, had provoked ‘a subtle mixture of bewilderment, condescension and denial’ from the Dublin literary establishment: says Kirkland, ‘To acknowledge that Northern Ireland operated under a different political and social regime than the rest of the island was one aspect of the argument, but to suggest that such difference in turn created a distinct literature of its own was (at least for Hibernia) unacceptable.’⁴⁵ Indeed, the only criticism the Northern poets seemed to care about, initially, was each other’s. By the time the group had become the Group, Dublin critics could only respond to, rather than shape, its existence. Just as the Irish Literary Revival had succeeded in creating and promoting a distinctly Irish literature in English, the Ulster Renaissance was fuelled by a similar desire to validate a regional identity in opposition to the marginalizing forces of both Britain and Ireland. Though this new regionalism was influenced by Hewitt, it was more inclusive. At its simplest, it sought to bring pride to a society made to believe it was backward, provincial, and self-destructive; at its most complex, the new regionalism was a way to deal with language, historiography, and cultural identity through a distinct Northern literature. By the eighties, the tide of revisionism would divide Northern writers, but in the late sixties and early seventies, this oppositional regionalism was one of the defining factors that propelled the local revival. Most importantly, it was a way for a colonized society to demand some degree of cultural and artistic autonomy through a rediscovered (or reinvented) literary tradition.⁴⁶ The hostile jabs at the Dublin literati are particularly revealing of the need for such autonomy, as was Longley’s response to a nasty review in the Spectator labelling him, Tom Paulin, Heaney, Mahon, and Muldoon ‘indifferent versifiers’ whose work was marred by ‘embarrassing fake solemnity’. In the margin he wrote, ‘Wake up England. The wogs and the white niggers from Ireland might be taking over.’⁴⁷ To what extent did the poets turn to each other during this time for ideas, support, and corroboration? Muldoon provides an answer: I think I’ve been influenced by many many people, starting off with Heaney and the people who were writing just as I was starting off and I met them . . . having ⁴⁴ Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 74. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 65; 75. ⁴⁶ This self-defining regionalism was, of course, complicated by the fact that publishing in London was essential to gaining a reputation. ⁴⁷ A. N. Wilson, ‘A Bloodless Miss’, review of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ed. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, Spectator, 27 Nov. 1982, Box 32, MLP.

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Plate 6. Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley met those people was very important to me. More influenced by the idea of them than from line to line. . . . Though, mind you, I think sometimes there are poems lurking around you wouldn’t be sure who wrote them. But that’s not a bad thing; I myself wouldn’t want to be able to recognise it.⁴⁸

Though many commentators pounced upon the Heaneyesque note Muldoon struck in New Weather, the ‘Irish Rimbaud’ would soon challenge his peers to dizzying poetic heights. Longley, for one, was so impressed with New Weather that he wrote Muldoon a congratulatory letter soon after its publication, asking if he would meet to ‘jar and jaw’ over An Exploded View.⁴⁹ The two would eventually become close friends. Heaney’s Muldoonian experimentation (in ‘Widgeon’, for example) hints at the informal artistic interaction that took place within the coterie, as does Muldoon’s claim that ‘there are several poems lurking around you wouldn’t be sure who wrote them’. Longley, for example, says that some of his 1960s poetry influenced Heaney: ‘I would suggest that Heaney’s move from big blocks to the shapely quatrains of “Follower” and ⁴⁸ Niall McGrath, interview with Paul Muldoon at the John Hewitt International Festival, Co. Antrim, typed MS, 29 July 1994, Box 34, PMP. ⁴⁹ Longley to Muldoon, 4 Dec. 1972, Box 3, PMP.

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“Personal Helicon” was prompted by Mahon and me. And he once told me that he had learned a lot from the noises I made in poems like “Circe” and “Persephone”.’⁵⁰ Heaney has also suggested that Longley’s ‘shapely quatrains’ compelled him to re-examine his own aesthetic: I have so much rebuked the lyric in myself that I have been shy of such riches, but there is still a tide in the affairs of verse too, and I find myself surrendering to this new work of yours with much pleasure. It is indeed important that we are all working—something of the old capillary action between the tap roots is under way again perhaps.⁵¹

Such claims lend support to McGann’s contention that ‘Literary production is not an autonomous and self-reflexive activity; it is a social and an institutional event.’⁵² Indeed, there are a number of poems ‘lurking around’ that seem to be the product of ‘multiple authorship’, a process which Heaney has described as ‘committee work’: I suppose there’s more camaraderie and give-and-take and sportiveness with others like Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon. When I was in Belfast, we almost did committee work on each other’s poems; they were circulated in manuscript and sat upon, and before you had a book out your poems had been graduated and the canon was settled.⁵³

Although Heaney may overstate the case somewhat, his description of the final stage of the writing process as collaborative indicates the extent to which members of the coterie valued each other’s approval. Indeed, the social function of such ‘committee work’ may have been as important as its aesthetic function—with the ‘committee’ serving to solidify the literary community in the wake of Hobsbaum’s departure. Even the most cursory glance through the collections of Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and Muldoon reveal poems that are, in Longley words, ‘different variations on an urgent theme’.⁵⁴ Many read as parts of a poetic conversation in which the poets are deliberately and self-consciously responding to one another, engaging in a dialogue regarding identity. As Mahon has said, writing poetry is ‘a private act for friends in the first ⁵⁰ Letter to author, 27 Jan. 2002. ⁵¹ Heaney to Longley, 15 Nov. 1977, Box 1, MLP. ⁵² Quoted in Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 199. ⁵³ John Haffenden, ‘Meeting Seamus Heaney’, London Magazine, 19: 3 (1979), 28. ⁵⁴ Michael Longley, ‘Leaving Inishmore’, No Continuing City (London: Macmillan, 1969), 52.

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instance . . . it’s a coterie activity, really . . . a coterie business’.⁵⁵ Epistolary evidence suggests that Longley and Mahon, in particular, each had a hand in settling the other’s canon; in fact, Longley has admitted that without his friendship with Mahon, his ‘first collection would have been much less ambitious’.⁵⁶ In the sixties, these two were constantly exchanging and arguing over poems, ensuring that each was intimately familiar with the other’s style and preoccupations. Mahon’s ‘Girls in Their Seasons’ and Longley’s ‘No Continuing City’ provide an early example of such mutual influence. Edna Longley had taught ‘Girls in Their Seasons’ to her English students at Queen’s while Longley had sent ‘No Continuing City’ to Mahon in Canada (though it is not clear who saw which poem first). Both poems address the poets’ old lovers, the ‘ghosts’ of young girls who appear in unlikely places and attempt, siren-like, to draw the speakers back to memories of their shared past. In ‘No Continuing City’, Longley realizes he must forsake these girls and devote all his attention to his new bride. It is the season for ‘spring cleaning’, time to chase the ghosts from the poet’s mind before he marries his ‘last girl’: Into the open I bring Girls who linger still in photostat (For whom I was so many different boys)— I explode their myths before it is too late, Their promises I detonate— There is quite a lot that I can do . . . I leave them—are they six or seven, two or three?— Locked in their small geographies.⁵⁷

The motif of seasons—suggesting the cyclical nature of time passing, measured through lives left behind—also features in Mahon’s poem. He writes: Girls in their seasons. Solstice and equinox, This year, make reincarnate Spry ghosts I had consigned to fate, Left soaking at the ends of bars, Pasted in dying calendars Or locked in clocks.⁵⁸

In both poems, the images of the girls are ‘locked’, but the poets recognize the danger that these sirens may in turn ‘lock’ their psyches in the ⁵⁵ Peter Orr, ‘The Poet Speaks’, interview with Derek Mahon, BBC radio production, recorded 31 Jan. 1973. ⁵⁶ Letter to author, 27 Jan. 2002. ⁵⁷ Longley, No Continuing City, 32. Longley’s ellipsis. ⁵⁸ Derek Mahon, Night-Crossing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1.

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past. And so they travel forward. When the images of the girls follow, Longley’s speaker resists, refusing to stay ‘locked’ in the restrictive worlds of these haunting figures who represent his own abandoned selves; rather he becomes, in a sense, their jailer, locking them out of his present life. Military metaphors—‘explode’, ‘detonate’—suggest the urgency and defiance of his coup. Yet Mahon’s speaker welcomes the intrusion: Their ghosts go with me as I hurtle north Into the night, Gathering momentum, age, Know-how, experience (I travel light)— Girls, you are welcome to my luggage For what it is worth.⁵⁹

This poem marks the transition to adulthood, and the journeys to follow. Longley’s poem also emphasizes the new responsibilities facing the bridegroom, while acknowledging that his former lovers still serve as muses. Yet he now is the one who exerts confidence and control: ‘I am their medium | And I take the words out of their mouths’.⁶⁰ In both poems, a literal journey serves to represent the metaphorical journey from adolescent scribbler to adult poet: in ‘No Continuing City’ Longley’s speaker watches, as if from a train window, while the girls recede ‘acre by acre’. Mahon’s speaker, sitting comfortably on an express train, ‘passes all the stations’. Where Longley’s poem ends with the words ‘house and home’—an acknowledgement of stability (and, perhaps, confinement),⁶¹ Mahon is instead headed for ‘several destinations’, ‘the land of nevernever’, perhaps writing against Longley, taking off as his friend settles down. These poems serve as early examples of the way Mahon and Longley used each other to explore their poetic selves—a process which would continue for many years. Both poems are early efforts in self-definition which, in hindsight, uncannily predicted the courses both the poets’ lives would take: Longley would stay married to Edna in Belfast, while Mahon would divorce and move restlessly through Ireland, England, and America. Signs of mutual influence also surface in the poets’ treatment of the Aran Islands, which Heaney, Mahon, and Longley all addressed in their first collections. Because Yeats and Synge had implied that the islands were the last vestiges of ‘real’ Ireland, and because the islanders still spoke ⁵⁹ Derek Mahon, Night-Crossing, 1. ⁶⁰ Longley, No Continuing City, 33. ⁶¹ Heaney also develops images of confinement in love poems such as ‘Poem’ and ‘Scaffolding’.

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Irish, they were inextricably linked to an authentic Irishness that was literally out of the mainlanders’ reach. Thus poems about the Aran Islands (and ‘Celtic’ islands more generally) are a way to examine—or subvert—what it means to be Irish. ‘Rathlin’, ‘In the Aran Islands’ (Mahon), ‘Leaving Inishmore’, ‘Letter to Derek Mahon’, ‘The Hebrides’, ‘The Island’ (Longley), ‘Synge on Aran’, ‘Lovers on Aran’, ‘Storm on the Island’, and ‘Shore Woman’ (Heaney) were, in part, responses to the Revivalists’ obsession with the Arans, as well as to MacNeice’s homages to Scottish islands in ‘The Hebrides’ and ‘Leaving Barra’. The poets, however, might have been influenced by each other—during Hobsbaum’s workshops, Heaney presented ‘Lovers on Aran’, ‘Synge on Aran’, ‘Shore Woman’, and ‘Storm on the Island’, while Longley offered ‘Leaving Inishmore’, ‘The Island’, and ‘The Hebrides’ for criticism. Mahon too included several island poems in Night-Crossing. It seems that the poets quickly realized that to meditate upon one’s relationship with a Celtic island was in effect to ponder one’s relationship to Irish history and identity. Hence these poets’ island poems provide a case study of how a common theme was transformed and made anew as it passed from poet to poet. In Death of a Naturalist, Heaney included three poems inspired by the Aran Islands: ‘Lovers on Aran’, ‘Storm on the Island’, and ‘Synge on Aran’. His vision in these poems is deeply romantic—the island is sublime, ‘timeless’, a preserver of memory, a restorer of authentic identity. Unlike Longley and Mahon, who use island settings to explore the idea of belonging, Heaney feels no need to investigate his relationship with the island or its inhabitants. There is no Yeatsian ‘quarrel with the self ’ in these poems, for his connection is secure and need not be questioned. As a Catholic, he is able to approach the island not as alien, exile, or colonizer, as Synge, Mahon, and Longley would, but as inheritor and descendant. In ‘Lovers on Aran’, the union of ocean and island becomes a metaphor of perfect sexual union in which neither partner possesses the other: Did sea define the land or land the sea? Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision. Sea broke on land to full identity.⁶²

The poem is a pre-colonial precursor of ‘Act of Union’, published nine years later in North, in which Heaney employs a similar metaphor comparing geographic and sexual union. Yet in the latter poem, the ⁶² Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 47.

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metaphor is overwhelmingly political: the union between Britain and Ireland is a forced one which will produce a bastard colony. ‘Lovers on Aran’, in comparison, is set before the colonial fall, when encountering one’s ‘full identity’ (as opposed to hybrid illegitimacy) was still possible. The union is natural rather than man-made, suggesting that the island itself is pure, untainted by political will. Thus Aran becomes the dreamlike repository of the poet’s own ‘full identity’, his entitlement to which is never questioned. This entitlement is also evident in ‘Storm on the Island’, in which the poet takes on the persona of an islander describing the ravages of an island storm. The poem is heavily influenced by Ted Hughes’s ‘Wind’, published nine years earlier in The Hawk in the Rain; Heaney transports Hughes’s scene to an Irish island and narrates the poem from an islander’s perspective: We just sit tight while wind dives And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo, We are bombarded by the empty air. Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.⁶³

The islander seems at home in this dangerous environment, sitting calmly with his family as he waits for the storm to end. By taking on the voice of an island native, Heaney suggests his entitlement to a powerful cultural inheritance: as he writes in ‘Shore Woman’, a more successful exploration of the island voice, ‘I have rights on this fallow avenue’.⁶⁴ Although Longley’s own island poems are indebted to MacNeice, who wrote poetry and prose about his journey to the Hebrides, he may also have been influenced by Heaney. As noted earlier, Heaney had workshopped ‘Lovers on Aran’, ‘Synge on Aran’, ‘Shore Woman’, and ‘Storm on the Island’ at the Belfast Group, where Longley also workshopped ‘The Island’, ‘Dr Johnson on the Hebrides’, ‘Leaving Inishmore’, and ‘The Hebrides’. It is possible Heaney’s explorations of Irishness vis-à-vis the Aran Islands prompted Longley to similar investigations (or vice versa). Yet Longley approached island settings with a much more sceptical eye than Heaney; where Heaney experiences belonging and inheritance, Longley feels only alienation. Dawe has written that for Longley, ‘the west of Ireland is seen as an embodiment of some kind of alternative life, a fictional life that compensates for certain values and attitudes missing in the real, given, historical world’; he has also called the west of ⁶³ Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, 51. ⁶⁴ Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 67.

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Ireland ‘redemptive’ in Longley’s work.⁶⁵ Although this may be true in certain poems, such as ‘Carrigskeewaun’, ‘The West’, and ‘Lore’, Longley’s island poems generally do not exemplify the idea of salvation through nature. Even in ‘The Island’, the one island poem in which Longley takes on the persona of a Catholic native—an experiment perhaps prompted by Heaney’s ‘Storm on the Island’—the mood is punctuated by isolation, abandonment, and loneliness. Longley’s island is a place where the only visitors are linguists, sociologists, and a mainland priest who journeys to the island every second Sunday. The speaker’s claim that he can tell time by ‘the shadow | Of a doorpost inching across the floor’ further hints that the island is a place of boredom and backwardness, rather than a slowpaced refuge from modernity. In the last stanza, notes Peter McDonald, the island slips ‘out of view altogether’:⁶⁶ In the thatch blackbirds rummaging for worms And our dead submerged beneath the dunes. We count ourselves historians of sorts And chronicle all such comings and goings. We can walk in a day around the island. We shall reach the horizon and disappear.⁶⁷

The image of the dead beneath the dunes suggests suffocation, as does the island’s short perimeter. The ironic reference to the islanders as ‘historians’ brings to mind the departed linguists and sociologists of the first stanza; the speaker implies that the islanders, too, will eventually depart, though that departure will go unrecorded, and perhaps unnoticed. Although one might argue that Longley is referring in the last line to an impending age of mass emigration, the point seems less historically specific. Instead, the plight of Northern Ireland comes to mind, ‘islanded’ from the dominant cultures that produced it, visited only by analysts and religious figures, confined within its perimeter. Thus the final prophecy suggests oblivion and eclipse, and conjures Mahon’s vision of a Protestant ‘lost tribe’ in ‘Nostalgias’.⁶⁸ Like the fictional islanders, Longley may be suggesting that his own community, too, will eventually ‘disappear’ if it remains equally isolated, perched on its ‘desolate headland’.⁶⁹ ⁶⁵ Gerald Dawe, ‘ “Icon and Lares”: Derek Mahon and Michael Longley’, in Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley (eds.), Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985), 230; 223. ⁶⁶ Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 122. ⁶⁷ Longley, An Exploded View, 48. ⁶⁸ Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1999), 75. ⁶⁹ Ibid.

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Longley’s ‘Leaving Inishmore’, published in No Continuing City, also connects the idea of an island to the displaced and dislocated self. The title is significant—the poet is not setting forth upon a journey to the island but departing (the title also points to MacNeice’s ‘Leaving Barra’). The word ‘Inishmore’ is freighted with associations of Synge and the Revival, suggesting that Longley is commenting on the Revivalist idea that a visit to Inishmore is in effect a return to the source, to an Ireland uncorrupted by colonialism and materialism—an idea Heaney seems to espouse in ‘Lovers on Aran’. The fact that Longley’s poem is about a departure rather than an arrival hints that he will question this logic, and suggest an alternative ‘source’ for an authentic vision of Irish community. The speaker’s backward glances, along with his feeling that ‘we left too soon’, imply he has enjoyed his time on the island but, as a Protestant of English descent, he has remained an outsider (a point Longley also emphasizes in ‘To Derek Mahon’).⁷⁰ Longley focuses his powers of description not upon the island itself, but on the space in-between Inishmore and the County Galway mainland; this in-between space is introduced in the first line— ‘Rain and sunlight and the boat between them’—suggesting that the poem’s purpose is to pay homage not to the island, as Heaney does, but to the corridor where there are ‘folk on the move between shore and shore’.⁷¹ This is a shared space of ship and sea where islanders and mainlanders move comfortably among one another; it is also a shared cultural space where tourists and locals exchange talk and songs. The speaker feels more at home suspended between the ports of arrival and departure than he does on the island itself. It is, as Longley writes in ‘Alibis’, like ‘being in two places at the one time’.⁷² This is the ‘in-between’ or ‘beyond’ space of the colonized or formerly colonized which Homi Bhabha addresses in The Location of Culture: Being in the ‘beyond’, then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell you. But to dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also . . . to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality.⁷³ ⁷⁰ Longley, No Continuing City, 52. ⁷¹ Ibid. ⁷² Longley, An Exploded View, 59. Brearton notes this tendency in ‘The Hebrides’, writing that Longley covets ‘a kind of schizophrenia, being in two minds and two places, balanced and unbalanced’. ‘ “The privilege | Of vertigo”: Reading Michael Longley in the 1960s’, Colby Quarterly, 39: 3 (2003), 209. See this article for a full discussion of ‘The Hebrides’. ⁷³ Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 7.

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In Longley’s case, the space in-between is an expression of alienation from both the colonizer and the colonized; the Protestant poet does not belong in either category. Yet it also represents, as Bhabha suggests, a site of the ‘historic commonality’ where cultures may merge and share the same space. Though ‘Leaving Inishmore’ finds the speaker inhabiting ‘the point of no return’, there is an underlying sense of relief at having reached that point. It is not the island itself that Longley’s speaker will remember as the seasons pass, but rather the voyage home: Summer and solstice as the seasons turn Anchor our boat in a perfect standstill, The harbour wall of Inishmore astern Where the Atlantic waters overspill— I shall name this the point of no return . . .⁷⁴

Longley again stresses his metaphor: the point of no return exists inbetween the point of departure and arrival—this is the moment Longley’s speaker returns to in his memory, a point in-between past and future, island and mainland, and, perhaps, Ireland and England. Such an idea accords with Longley’s feeling that Ulster ‘poems are born . . . out of a lively tension between the Irish and the English traditions’.⁷⁵ Here the speaker has found a more authentic vision of community, harmony (remember the singing tourists), and perhaps even reconciliation than what he found upon Inishmore. The phrase ‘point of no return’ suggests that he will not return to the island, for it is the border-crossing tourists on the ferry who interest him more than the stationary islanders.⁷⁶ This is the vision of harmonious community he will bring back to Belfast, where hearts are ‘icebound’ and the speaker and his brethren are ‘past cure’ and ‘sick at heart’.⁷⁷ It is, notably, a community he did not find on Inishmore. ‘Leaving Inishmore’ likely alludes to a trip Longley, Edna, and Mahon had taken to the Aran Islands in 1965 during a summer spent hitchhiking through Connemara and Clare.⁷⁸ It is possible Mahon invokes the same trip in ‘In the Aran Islands’, in which he too rejects the possibility of ⁷⁴ Longley, No Continuing City, 52. ⁷⁵ Longley, ‘The State of Poetry: A Symposium’, 47. ⁷⁶ Longley has discussed his interest in such cultures of plurality with Jody Allen Randolph, saying, ‘I would hate to be considered anything other than an Irish poet, but at the same time I remain true to my Brittanic side. (Why be confined to just one cultural allegiance?)’. ‘Interview: Michael Longley and Jody Allen Randolph’, 294. ⁷⁷ Longley, No Continuing City, 52. ⁷⁸ Longley recalls, ‘We sailed to Inishmore and were drenched in sunshowers’. ‘A Boat on the River’, in Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (eds.), Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), 141.

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finding community on the island. In ‘In the Aran Islands’ the speaker emerges from a local pub, exhilarated by the inspired song of an islander whom he describes as ‘Singing darkness into the light’.⁷⁹ The speaker admires the islander for his talent, and also because he is ‘earthed to his girl’. The use of the word ‘earthed’ as a verb conveys what the speaker perceives as the islander’s rootedness and sets up a major tension in the poem between the ‘earthed’ and the unearthly. Though the speaker clearly admires the singing islander—‘God, that was the way to do it, | Hand-clasping, echo-prolonging poet’—he nevertheless chooses solitude over fraternity, preferring to close the door on the scene and turn his back upon the communal harmony embodied by the singer.⁸⁰ He notices a gull circling overhead, whose ‘hoarse inchoate | Screaming’ is, presumably, the antithesis of the human singer’s melodic strains, just as the unearthly gull itself is the antithesis of the ‘earthed’ islander.⁸¹ Yet Mahon does not necessarily advocate the gull’s screech over human song, as Eamonn Hughes has suggested.⁸² On the contrary, the speaker spends the entire second stanza fantasizing about joining the island community: Scorched with a fearful admiration, Walking over the nacreous sand, I dream myself to that tradition Fifty winters off the land— One hand to an ear for the vibration, The far wires, the reverberation Down light-years of the imagination And, in the other hand, your hand.⁸³

Importantly, the speaker also imagines himself as ‘earthed’, part of the community, longing for a hand in his. This stanza’s echoing rhymes— admiration, tradition, vibration, reverberation, imagination—give it an almost incantatory quality, which emphasizes that the speaker is daydreaming. Yet at the very point where he might pursue his vision, he takes a step back (just as he stepped away from the warmth of the pub) and again invokes the image of the gull, the ‘crack-voiced rock-marauder, scavenger, fierce | Friend to no slant fields or the sea either’.⁸⁴ The gull appears whenever the speaker considers the possibility of belonging, ⁷⁹ Derek Mahon, Lives (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 5. ⁸⁰ Ibid. ⁸¹ Ibid. ⁸² Eamonn Hughes, ‘ “Weird/Haecceceity”: Place in Derek Mahon’s Poetry’, in Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002), 100. ⁸³ Mahon, Lives, 5. ⁸⁴ Ibid.

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reminding him that he will remain apart. Like the speaker, the gull is not ‘rooted’ to any specific community. Instead, it hovers above the earth, suspended in air, distancing itself from what lies below. The gull, as a symbol of distance, apartness, and aloofness, appeals to Mahon’s alienated sensibility; its presence in both the first and last stanzas suggests that while the speaker may ‘dream’ himself a part of the island community, he knows he will follow the gull’s course. Yet one gets the sense that this knowledge does not bring the speaker any closer to wholeness, that in fact he would like to be ‘earthed’ to this community, which is free of the small-minded and puritanical Protestantism Mahon disdains. As Patricia Horton writes, ‘Communal ties may threaten Mahon’s individual liberty, his sovereign sense of self, yet without them he feels cast out, alone in the void.’⁸⁵ This idea certainly rings true in ‘In the Aran Islands’, where ‘the song goes out’ when the speaker leaves the pub to find solitude; the possibility of harmonious communion of people and place, embodied in the singing islander, is simply out of reach. Longley’s ‘To Derek Mahon’, part of the ‘Letters’ sequence in An Exploded View, almost reads as a companion piece to Mahon’s ‘In the Aran Islands’, published the year before. Like Mahon’s poem, Longley’s is characterized by what Terence Brown, referring to MacNeice’s exploration of island settings, has called ‘a dream-fantasy of community and belonging’.⁸⁶ This wish is particularly clear when the poet, recalling a trip he and Mahon took to the Aran Islands on ‘Good Friday years ago’,⁸⁷ writes of the ‘Dank blankets making up our Lent | Till, islanders ourselves, we bent | Our knees and cut the watery sod’.⁸⁸ Yet Longley eventually realizes that the dream of belonging is just that. Instead of participating in the rituals of island life, he and Mahon are excluded from the community’s Catholic, Gaelic culture. They are no more than ‘Eavesdroppers on conversations | With a Jesus who spoke Irish— | . . . strangers in that parish’.⁸⁹ Theirs is a different inheritance, that of the ‘stereophonic nightmare | Of the Shankill and the Falls’.⁹⁰ Ultimately the speaker, having failed to find what he was looking for, leaves the island spiritually unfulfilled. Longley sets this idea into relief against a religious backdrop of suffering—Good Friday and Easter—telling us that the island’s God was one they ‘couldn’t count among our friends’.⁹¹ He ⁸⁵ Patricia Horton, ‘Degree Zero: Language, Subjectivity and Apocalypse in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, Irish Studies Review, 8: 3 (2000), 357. ⁸⁶ Terence Brown, ‘MacNeice’s Ireland, MacNeice’s Islands’, in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (eds.), Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 233. ⁸⁷ Longley, An Exploded View, 37. ⁸⁸ Ibid. ⁸⁹ Ibid. 36–7. ⁹⁰ Ibid. 36. ⁹¹ Ibid. 37.

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further hints that this is not the place where he and Mahon might reconcile their Irishness with their Protestantism when he writes of ‘Moonlight glossing the confusions | Of its each bilingual wave’.⁹² Indeed, confusion lies at the heart of this poem—confusion as to whether the Troubles marked a turning point in the two poets’ artistic development (‘And did we come into our own | When, minus muse and lexicon, | We traced in August sixty-nine | Our imaginary Peace Line’⁹³), and whether it is possible to find freedom from a rigid cultural identity outside the North’s borders. The fact that ‘To Derek Mahon’ moves from Belfast to Inisheer suggests a political as well as geographical trajectory: the journey to the island symbolizes an attempt to refute the narrow cultural confines of the Protestant community in Belfast and to embrace a more fluid identity, free from sectarianism. Yet, despite the desire to linger, Longley finds that he and Mahon are shut out. The poem ends with a departure from the island, an acknowledgement of the futility of the quest and the necessary return home. Longley and Mahon might feel more ‘lost and unhappy’ in Belfast, but the journey to the Aran Islands— where they feel alienated to an extreme degree—has taught them that the ‘city of guns and long knives’ is, for better or for worse, their rightful community. Like Longley, Heaney and Muldoon also used the occasion of Good Friday to meditate upon cultural identity. In ‘Westering’, Heaney contemplates the west of Ireland from his vantage point ‘Six thousand miles away’ in California.⁹⁴ The poem hints at the sense of release and weightlessness Heaney experienced in Berkeley, where it was written. Yet the verb ‘weighing’ lends a heaviness to its last line and indeed to the tone of the poem itself, which is as much about the pull of community as it is about shedding that community for a new frontier. In the poem, Heaney recalls his final journey through ‘The empty amphitheatre | Of the west’ on Good Friday, and the palpable sense of release—‘A loosening gravity’—as he drives past sombre parishioners and still, solemn towns on his way to the airport. As in ‘The Peninsula’ and ‘Postscript’, motion symbolizes freedom. But the fact that Heaney begins his westward journey on Good Friday lends a weight and a sorrow to the poem which tempers the weightlessness invoked by the images of the moon. The poet subverts the restrictive pieties of his faith through a calculated transgression—he does not stop to observe the religious holiday, but travels on—and crosses both ⁹² Longley, An Exploded View, 37. ⁹⁴ Heaney, Wintering Out, 80.

⁹³ Ibid. 36

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a literal and a metaphorical boundary on his way to America. The poem brings to mind Donne’s ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, yet Heaney’s message undermines Donne’s own guilt in the face of Christ’s sacrifice. Like Stephen Dedalus, he expresses a non serviam to the faith he grew up in, yet the poem itself is a site of nostalgia, a testament to the endurance of an Irish Catholic identity. Heaney’s poem (along with Donne’s) was surely the inspiration for Muldoon’s ‘Good Friday, 1971. Driving Westward’ (which also owes imagery to Heaney’s ‘Honeymoon Flight’). Like Heaney, Muldoon uses his poem to subvert the Catholic culture of guilt and self-admonishment. He too drives through Donegal, where he picks up a young woman who berates him for killing a small animal on the road; when they stop for lunch at a local pub, she stands up and, writes Muldoon, ‘announced that she and I were to blame | For something killed along the way we came.’⁹⁵ Yet her attempt to shame the poet is undermined by her drunkenness, which suggests not only that figures of religious authority are drunk with power, but that the religious guilt encouraged by the Catholic church is itself a kind of opiate of the people. Tim Kendall claims that ‘Despite the girl’s histrionic confession, Muldoon’s speaker refuses to be burdened by any feelings of guilt or responsibility’, yet there is little evidence of this.⁹⁶ The poet does not react to the young woman’s words at all. Instead, he immediately shifts his (and our) gaze to the flustered, embarrassed parents who tell their children that it is ‘rude to stare’.⁹⁷ These same words are also implicitly addressed to the reader—don’t look at us, the poet seems to say, as he directs our attention away from him. The fact that he does not respond to the young woman’s rant does not mean that her accusation has had no impact—surely the poem itself is evidence that it has. Seen from this angle, the poem, like Heaney’s, delivers conflicting messages: though both imaginatively address ‘a loosening gravity’—the refusal to bear the burdens of Catholic guilt—both end on a note of ambiguity rather than ambivalence. Although the poets have questioned the core beliefs of their Irish Catholic identities, the poems themselves reflexively question the authenticity of these subversions by acknowledging the ‘pull’ of tribal loyalty. This idea is perfectly encapsulated in Heaney’s imaginative desire for ‘loosening gravity’, which, as the poet well knows, is a physical impossibility. These words are a sly acknowledgement of his ⁹⁵ Paul Muldoon, New Weather (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 33. ⁹⁶ Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1996), 30. ⁹⁷ Muldoon, New Weather, 33.

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own complicity in the very rituals he questions, for gravity never loosens, it only keeps us anchored. It can hardly be a coincidence that Heaney, Longley, and Muldoon all published poems set on Good Friday in 1972–3. These poems, as well as the many island poems by Heaney, Mahon, and Longley published during 1966–73, suggest the poets were exploring profound feelings of alienation and self-division in a dialogue propelled by the desire to understand the complexities of their Northern cultural identity. During this time, they also looked to each other for direction concerning the appropriate uses of poetic language in a time of violence. Longley, Heaney, and Mahon, for example, engaged in such a dialogue in poems which employed similar themes of muteness and confinement. Longley’s ‘Birthmarks’ (originally entitled ‘To Derek Mahon’) uses both ideas to describe stillborn poems, the dark space where language fails the poet: Idiot children in the dark Whom we shall never bring to light, Criminals in their prison cells— These are the poems we cannot write.⁹⁸

‘Birthmarks’ was published in 1968, during a time of political instability but before the violence escalated. Still, it is tempting to read it as a manifesto regarding the expression of politics in poetry; the ‘poems we cannot write’ suggests a double entendre—poets cannot ‘right’ the political situation through poetry any more than they can get a political poem ‘right’. Furthermore, they will never bring these unwritten poems ‘to light’ because they risk ‘making light’ of death and violence. The ‘idiot children in the dark’ stand not only for unwritten poems, then, but for the poets themselves—trapped in a void where language is unable to console, assuage, or explicate. As poets they are mutes, idiots, fumbling in darkness, ‘locked out from rhyme and lexicon’, confined to a world where pain cannot be transcribed. Heaney enters this world in ‘Bye-Child’, introduced with the lines, ‘He was discovered in the henhouse | where she had confined him. He was | incapable of saying anything.’⁹⁹ The poem tenderly describes a young boy imprisoned in a world of darkness, solitude, and silence, in language—‘Little henhouse boy’, ‘Little moon man’—that foreshadows the description of the ‘Little adulteress’ in ‘Punishment’. The mute boy can communicate the horror he has endured only through a ‘remote mime’—the ‘gaping wordless proof’ ⁹⁸ Longley, No Continuing City, 55.

⁹⁹ Heaney, Wintering Out, 71–2.

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of his torture. His silence is ostensibly more powerful than verbal (or written) expression. This was the first of many Heaney poems that would both expose and subvert the inadequacy of language in the face of violence.¹⁰⁰ On the one hand, the poet agrees with Adorno that language cannot accurately translate the experience of atrocity; on the other, he continually attempts to do so through language that seeks to offer consolation through beauty. ‘Bye-Child’ is a perfect example of such reflexivity: the child’s silence has authority over the poet’s language, yet the child ‘speaks’ through the poet. Hence, language can achieve, or attempt to achieve, a sympathetic representation of suffering. Longley’s dictum in ‘Birthmarks’, that ‘These are the poems we cannot write’, seems to accord with Adorno, yet Heaney has taken his images of ‘idiot children in the dark’ and ‘criminals in their prison cells’ and used them to contradictory ends. His own poem about an idiot child fumbling in a dark cell may be a response to Longley, and a testament that poems of suffering can, and should, be written. Like Heaney’s ‘Bye-Child’, Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ develops themes of darkness and confinement.¹⁰¹ Just as Heaney’s trapped, mute child strains his eyes to the light (‘When the lamp glowed, | A yolk of light | In their back window, | The child in the outhouse | Put his eye to a chink—’¹⁰²), so Mahon’s mushrooms in the abandoned hotel ‘crowd to a keyhole’ in an effort to escape darkness.¹⁰³ Like the child, who has learned to endure ‘something beyond patience’, the mushrooms (which symbolize the ‘lost people’ of the earth) ‘have learnt patience and silence’. Both live in hidden, forlorn shelters—a backyard henhouse, a burnt-out hotel—where they have been imprisoned for years. The henhouse is littered with ‘cobwebs, old droppings’ while the mushrooms share their environment with spiders and ‘flies dusted to mildew’. Mahon and Heaney even use the same words to describe their prisoners: the child is a ‘little moon man’ who gapes with ‘wordless proof ’; the mushrooms too are ‘moonmen’ who beg ‘in their wordless way’ not to be abandoned by their liberators.¹⁰⁴ It is possible Mahon borrowed his dark, forgotten ¹⁰⁰ Others include ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, ‘The Loaning’, ‘Station Island’, ‘Punishment’, and ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’. ¹⁰¹ Brearton claims that the child in ‘Bye-Child’ is ‘Heaney’s rather more self-reflexive conception of embryo poet transformed by Mahon into ethically questioning prototype mushroom’, but does not elaborate further on the relationship between the two poems. The Great War in Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210. ¹⁰² Heaney, Wintering Out, 71. ¹⁰³ Derek Mahon, Poems 1962–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 79. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid. 80.

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setting from Heaney, and that both were inspired by Longley’s ‘idiot children in the dark’—provoked by his assertion that ‘These are the poems we cannot write’. These three poems are interconnected and self-consciously cross-referential in ways that have not been fully recognized: all suggest there can be little doubt that language, specifically poetic language, is as powerful a representation of suffering as the ‘wordless gaping proof ’ of silence. These comparisons, confined to the late sixties and early seventies, comprise only a brief exploration of an ongoing poetic dialogue which awaits further study. Yet even this cursory glance shows that a process of exchange provided an opportunity for the poets to strengthen their individual, autonomous voices by recognizing not only their similarities, but their differences. The Belfast coterie provided a space for the poets to advance from and retreat back to, and gave a sense of cohesion and direction to a fragmented literary community. It also provided them with a communal sounding board with which to test ideas relating to complex issues of cultural inheritance and artistic responsibility. Yet the camaraderie could not last: the sense of inclusion that had nurtured the young poets would inevitably give way to confinement as they matured. Soon, the coterie—like Northern Ireland itself—would splinter.

6 Separate Selves The poets did not have much cause to celebrate the new year in 1969— not after the People’s Democracy New Year’s March from Belfast to Derry erupted in violence and ushered in a new era of fear. Loyalist bombings, the Battle of the Bogside, and Terence O’Neill’s resignation followed in the march’s wake; in August, Britain deployed troops in Northern Ireland, and in January of 1970, Sinn Fein split into Official and Provisional wings. Seven months later Westminster would introduce internment without trial. Though the poets knew their home had been built on a slipshod foundation, they were nevertheless unprepared for its quick erosion. The Protestant poets were caught particularly off guard. As Longley said in 1970, ‘as a middle-class Protestant I’d always thought this sort of thing could never happen, and here it was—it had happened’.¹ Mahon too said the crisis took him ‘by surprise’: ‘At that time, Protestants like James Simmons, Michael Longley, myself could think that this was not our quarrel—our peculiar upbringing as middle-class, grammar-schooleducated, liberal, ironical Protestants allowed us to think of ourselves as somehow not implicated.’² Mahon expressed this same sentiment, though with greater urgency, to Longley in a private verse letter that year: Way back in nineteen sixty-six who besides Seamus would have dreamed the past more wakeful than it seemed?’ and who, ‘all ancient tricks unlearned’ Was not amazed when Derry burned . . .³

¹ Eavan Boland, ‘The Northern Writers’ Crisis of Conscience—2: Crisis’, Irish Times, 13 Aug. 1970, 12. ² Eamon Grennan, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXII’, interview with Derek Mahon, Paris Review, 154 (2000), 163; 164–5. ³ Derek Mahon, untitled verse letter to Michael Longley, n.d. (1970), typed MS, Box 18, MLP.

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The rapidly deteriorating political climate contributed to the increasing tension among the Belfast poets, but the story is more complicated than that. As Heaney has said of this time, there was ‘a connection at a deep level perhaps between the public demons and the private demons that were possessing people’.⁴ Initially, the ‘Northern crisis’ had the effect of uniting the poets. In 1969, they began taking stock of the violence in the pages of Hibernia, Threshold, the Honest Ulsterman, the Irish Times, and the Listener, writing articles in which they often referred to each other. As Longley wrote in Hibernia in November 1969, ‘When I am asked to write or talk about myself I quite naturally mention Mahon and Heaney, not because they are colleagues and close friends, but because, as Ulstermen, we share a complex and confusing culture: they help me to define myself.’⁵ That autumn, Simmons wrote of the connection between ‘Riots and Writing’, in which he too mentioned the reactions of his fellow Ulster poets: ‘Seamus Heaney wrote a ballad about police brutality but chose not to publish it (fair enough) because he had been tempted into oversimplifying. Longley and Mahon have toured the Falls road, and signs of it might appear in future poems.’⁶ The poets also presented a united front in a three-part series for the Irish Times entitled, ‘The Northern Writers’ Crisis of Conscience’, written by Eavan Boland in the summer of 1970. The articles present Heaney, Mahon, and Longley as uneasy spokesmen for the Northern situation, but firm in their conviction (unlike the thirties generation, Boland noted) that poetry need not ‘serve social commitment’.⁷ Heaney and Mahon described the need to approach the violence indirectly, through analogy and metaphor, while Longley claimed that to write poetry ‘directly out of the situation’ would ‘be just producing versified journalism’.⁸ In this article, Heaney admitted feeling anger towards Protestants, but told Boland, ‘I have been educated gradually into a notion of all the goodness, the positive energies on either side of the division. So I cannot take up a line of poetry and generalize about Protestants when I think of all the Protestants I have known that it’s untrue about.’⁹ One guesses Heaney was thinking specifically of ⁴ James Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Ploughshares, 5: 3 (1979), 10. ⁵ Michael Longley, ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’, Hibernia, 7 Nov. 1969, 11. ⁶ James Simmons, ‘Riots and Writing’, Hibernia, 10 Oct. 1969, 16. ⁷ Eavan Boland, ‘The Northern Writers’ Crisis of Conscience—3: Creativity’, Irish Times, 14 Aug. 1970, 12. ⁸ Ibid. Longley, however, qualified his statements somewhat, describing himself as feeling ‘shamed’ by Yeats and Owen, ‘who, in the front line, just sat down and wrote poems’. He wondered if direct engagement with the crisis was not, after all, the morally superior course: ‘I’m not saying that something I might write might save lives, but there’s always a chance that it will.’ ⁹ Ibid.

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Simmons, Mahon, and Longley, his closest Protestant friends. Clearly the poets were making every effort, at this point, not to take sides. Maintaining objectivity would become more difficult as the violence worsened in 1972; the Bloody Sunday shootings and the institution of Direct Rule from Westminster marked the end of moderation and a political point of no return. Longley and Heaney walked together in a civil rights march in Newry after Bloody Sunday, but they must have felt increasingly anxious—as poets and friends—about the directions in which events were pulling them. Still, rivalry played as big a role in the break-up of the coterie as did politics. By the early seventies, the group could no longer happily accommodate its varied talents in the space of one small city: where the poets had once found confirmation, they now felt confined. Indeed, after 1972, it became harder for the poets to maintain the close relationships they had developed during the sixties, particularly when they were on opposite sides of the sectarian divide. The poetry did not suffer—indeed, it flourished—but the old sense of coherence and camaraderie would never again match the height of the Ulster Renaissance. Shedding the ‘Belfast Group’ identity, however, was a necessary step towards autonomy. By the late sixties, those who felt they were on the fringes of the poetry coterie frequently denounced its writing workshop in the pages of local literary magazines. Michael Foley, for example, was quick to satirize the Group workshop in the Honest Ulsterman: Good God, the depths to which we stoop! Let’s now describe the Writer’s Group My poem’s no good, should one suggest Dear no, dear no, cry all the rest Your piece has value we agree It’s just there’s this—dichotomy And so they fondle, never strike And can’t prefer much less dislike Imagine how wee Pope would sneer At manners, coffee, biscuits, fear. Young men attend to learn the game Six poems will do to make a name . . . . . Obsessed with failure, talking shop, I can’t progress. Am I a flop? But duty calls, they will not shirk So out the missus goes to work And back they go to try again

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By setting himself apart and adopting a populist sensibility (like Simmons), Foley elevates himself above his fellow poets as someone who does not need the support of a group—though surely if there are veins bulging in anyone’s pen here, it is Foley’s. Honest Ulsterman writer Donal O’Kane also satirized the Ulster poetry clique in an article about the 1969 Queen’s Festival. In the article, he told how the Aran Islands had been removed ‘sod by sod’ and transported to Belfast, where ‘the cream of Ulster’s poets’ gave ‘demonstrations of thatching and water-divining’.¹¹ He also wrote an acrimonious account of a fictional concert given at the Festival by ‘Shameless King Size Heeny’, ‘Michael Longlip’, and ‘James Semens’: ‘It is only fitting,’ he [Heaney] said, ‘after such a pleasant start to the evening, that myself and my colleagues should hog the rest of the show and give you all, if not room, then ample opportunity to writhe. To start the ball rolling I give you . . . Michael Longlip.’ Longlip, dressed with care for the act of poetry, presented his modest contribution to this cordial soirée. For his opening gambit, he sang the ‘Sheik of Araby’ and clocked up a very respectable score on the writherectre (almost achieving a treble hysteria-nausea) then, straightfaced and unblushing . . . made the startling revelation to an openmouthed, gasping audience that a poem was full of words. The tea-cup rattling was nothing normal for a full fifteen minutes after this performance.¹²

Both this piece and Foley’s poem suggest the existence of a unified, privileged group of successful Belfast poets, and reveal the extent to which Heaney and Longley were objects of jealousy within the Northern Ireland literary community as early as 1969. Simmons, though part of Hobsbaum’s Group, also found fault with some of his more successful contemporaries. Heaney was a target from the beginning: as early as 1966, Simmons told the Belfast Telegraph that he ¹⁰ Michael Foley, ‘The Poetry Circus’, Honest Ulsterman, 24 (1970), 29–30. ¹¹ Donal O’Kane, ‘Festival ’69: A Mild Exercise in Spleen’, Honest Ulsterman, 13 (1969), 11–12. ¹² Ibid. 13.

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was ‘perhaps overpraised and I feel that Derek Mahon and Michael Longley are equally good’.¹³ Simmons joined these three at the 1967 Queen’s Festival, where he was afforded an opportunity to take stock of his rivals. As he wrote to a friend that year: Montague wasn’t much of a lecturer, though very charming, and nice to meet and drink with. . . . Heaney I remain suspicious of. Longley and Mahon were excellent companions, good quoters and joke tellers over bottles, though Longley is liable to silly arguments and posturing, and Mahon a bit naive in his belief that we were the four best poets in Ireland (Britain?).¹⁴

A newspaper photograph from that year’s Festival, captioned ‘Poets Corner’, shows Simmons sitting amiably alongside Longley and Heaney at a poetry reading. Unfortunately, he was identified as Derek Mahon rather than James Simmons, an uncanny error that prophesied his increasingly peripheral status within the coterie.¹⁵ The incident perhaps contributed to his feeling, which he admitted to the News Letter in 1968, that he was ‘the most neglected poet and singer in the Province’.¹⁶ Perhaps no one encouraged Simmons’s burgeoning sense of alienation from the Belfast poetry scene more than Michael Foley. Simmons’s reputation became something of a cause célèbre for Foley, who also felt disenfranchised by the coterie, and regarded it as a poetic conspiracy: Simmons has had obscurity forced upon him for he believes in working wonders with an audience and would mount the rostrum given half a chance. He has failed in this (and the poetry gained conversely) because the only largish audience is the phoney poetry establishment which regards him as a complete cod. (His pamphlet ‘No Ties’, for instance was reviewed in Hibernia as ‘No Flies’, the sort of cheap joke that no one would dare try on Heaney.)¹⁷

Foley’s strategy was to elevate Simmons by disparaging those poets who had gained a substantial reputation (and thus ‘sold out’). Simmons’s willingness to take risks, he claimed, ‘sets him apart from the Heaney-MahonLongley Tight Assed Trio’.¹⁸ Foley also ridiculed the Group poets in his letters to Simmons; in fact, he went so far as to claim that if Simmons ¹³ James Simmons, clipping, Belfast Telegraph, 1966, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ¹⁴ Simmons to James Michie, 2 Dec. 1967, Box 1, JSP. Simmons probably took Mahon’s claim too seriously. ¹⁵ Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. ¹⁶ Ralph Bossence, ‘Poet Ignored’, News Letter, 24 Jan. 1968. ¹⁷ Michael Foley, ‘This Thing Could Rule the World’, Fortnight, 3 Sept. 1971, 20. ¹⁸ Michael Foley, review of Energy to Burn, by James Simmons, Honest Ulsterman, 29 (1971), 40–1.

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died, he would have an edge over Heaney.¹⁹ But Simmons chastised him, claiming that he ‘heartily disagreed’ with Foley’s low estimation of Heaney, and that his obsessive grumbling was immature and embarrassing.²⁰ In the end, Foley agreed, and vowed to stop comparing Simmons to Mahon, Longley, and especially Heaney.²¹ Foley also reacted against the way Ulster poetry, once provocative, had become, in his eyes, a mainstream venture. In Fortnight, he accused the poets of pandering to an Arts Council-manufactured audience, the result of which was unmerited popularity and eventual emigration to the Republic, America, or England. (Heaney provided a perfect case-study.) The once innovative Ulster poetry scene had become part of the establishment; the inevitable result was ‘death by incorporation’: It’s amazing how the idea of an audience has taken root. I was recently asked in public if I thought I’d been nourished by an artistic community in Derry. I stuttered and stammered to a halt. Afterwards I thought, ‘An artistic community? In Derry?’ and then ‘God maybe there is’, followed finally by ‘If there is I never want to know about it.’ For it occurred to me that when I go home and meet old nonliterary friends I am thoroughly embarrassed by the idea of writing. And it’s well to hold on to embarrassment at a time when poetry suffers from too much respect rather than too little.²²

For Foley, ‘artistic community’ embodied smug, middle-class pretension more characteristic of Dublin (whose literati he had scorned in the pages of the Honest Ulsterman) than Derry. His words are not so different in tone and character from John Boyd’s feelings, voiced nearly twenty years before, concerning literary schools: Ulster writers ‘don’t form literary cliques’ he wrote, because they ‘prefer to go their own way’.²³ Both comments suggest that ‘real’ writers do not need or court the support of others, and that those who do find themselves out of step with their inherited literary culture. Yet Foley’s comment was surely inspired by begrudgery as much as it was by ‘embarrassment’. Like Simmons, he sought to cultivate alienation, and, by doing so, shift the hierarchies of Belfast poetry. Simmons, for his part, chastised his fellow Belfast poets for leaving the city. In ‘Flight of the Earls Now Leaving’, he presents the poets as a ¹⁹ Foley to Simmons, n.d. (c.1970–2), Box 1, JSP; Foley to Simmons, 17 Apr. 1970, Box 1, JSP. ²⁰ Simmons to Foley, 16 Apr. 1968, Box 1, JSP. ²¹ Foley to Simmons, 17 Apr. 1970, Box 1, JSP. ²² Foley, ‘This Thing Could Rule the World’, 20. ²³ John Boyd, ‘The Ulster Novel’, Rann, 20 (1953), 35.

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once-united front now scattered to the wind, in the tradition of the Wild Geese: I hear that Ormsby will be leaving soon. That only leaves me, Longley and Muldoon. Such pillars of establishment, we three: New University, Arts Council, B.B.C. The famous nest of singing birds has flown across the border or across the foam. Mahon was too fastidious for Belfast, he fled to Dublin, but that didn’t last, onward and upward, the ambitious rogue rests now in London, on the staff of Vogue. And Heaney’s skulking in some quaint street in Wicklow or at large in Baggot Street, talking with editors in Dublin bars far from his students and his seminars. . . . . . . John Montague has been away so long we hardly miss him. Did he, once, belong? America, then Paris, and now Cork, where the tired Muse is hen-pecked by the Stork. God, I forgot one, and I knew I’d do it— the daddy of us all, good old John Hewitt who left before, his reasons being the best, and came back in retirement to unrest. . . . . . . . Bards drive, with good success, across the border where all agree the stout’s in better order. How can I blame them, how can I defend our quixotry who stick it to the end comparing their good fortune being away with their sad impotence if they should stay? Yet in their going we have lost a host of men that muddled Ulster needed most. Daily there grows about us the sad rout of men that any land could do without. . . . . . . . We four still cherish novels, poems and plays— outside mad dogs infest the public ways.²⁴

²⁴ James Simmons, ‘Flight of the Earls Now Leaving’, Irish Times, 4 June 1974.

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Like Foley, Simmons sought to elevate his own status by denigrating those who had left. He undermines the émigrés’ success by accusing them of frivolity: Heaney attends to pints rather than students, while Mahon has ‘fled’ to London to write for a women’s magazine. He, Longley, Muldoon, and Hewitt (‘we four’), on the other hand, have remained; they are the martyrs who will protect Ulster from the ‘mad dogs’ who seek to destroy all vestiges of civilization and culture. Though the poem is self-congratulatory, it reveals, like Foley’s article, the sense of loss and even abandonment which Heaney’s 1972 departure from Belfast had provoked. Still, the fact that Simmons tried to capitalize on this ‘abandonment’ to strengthen his own reputation was predictable in light of his perceived (and cultivated) sense of alienation within the Belfast poetry circle. Now that Heaney and Mahon were gone, he could resume his former position as a poet of influence—someone the younger generation would look up to, as Muldoon once had. Yet, several years later, he alluded to this poem when he spoke about the poets as a cooperative unit: ‘We feel each other’s presence and absence, we read each other’s work, we run magazines or publishing firms or record companies, trying to push the country, ourselves, each other.’²⁵ Simmons had also become involved in a more personal feud with Michael Longley. In July 1970, the Longleys spent a weekend in Portrush with the Simmonses, where they enjoyed some sailing and a day out in Ballycastle. However, after a long Saturday night spent drinking, an alcohol-fuelled row erupted between the two poets. Longley had apparently implied that Simmons’s poetry was clumsy, and his morals—particularly his laissez-faire attitude to marital fidelity—shoddy. Simmons argued that there was nothing wrong with publishing a confessional poem about an affair, but Longley, Edna, and Simmons’s wife Laura all disagreed. Furious, he stormed off to bed. Edna and Michael left Portrush the next morning, wondering if they would ever be invited back. Longley was deeply troubled by the argument, and wrote Simmons a humble letter of apology almost immediately upon his return to Belfast. He explained that he had only wanted to discuss ‘purely critical considerations of poetry in general, yours in particular, style and content, ethics of publishing’.²⁶ His sincerity suggests he was genuinely afraid of losing Simmons’s friendship. Simmons, however, was unmoved by this show of emotion. His reply was curt and wounded. ²⁵ James Simmons, ‘An Anthology of Irish Poetry’, Pembroke Magazine, 19 (1987), 66. ²⁶ Longley to Simmons, 20 July 1970, Box 1, JSP.

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It was obvious, Simmons wrote, that Longley held his philosophies in contempt, and had rushed to arrogant judgements. He then took the opportunity to voice an old grievance: When I came home from Nigeria I was pleased at the prospect of finding friends among the Ulster poets; but I really haven’t seen enough of any of you. Perhaps we all assumed too hopefully that we were on the same side and in the same boat . . . anyway your letter has certainly not made matters worse, and, if I have misunderstood you perhaps this row may help us to get to know each other better.²⁷

For Simmons, the feud was not a harmless drunken row (as Longley thought) but evidence of the contempt in which he was secretly held by his fellow Belfast poets. Longley, frustrated by Simmons’s answer, replied two days later. ‘You just couldn’t be further from the truth when you claim I had a real hostility to you’, he wrote. Though he pleaded with Simmons to forget what had been said, his tone was less apologetic: You have always been pleasingly frank about my poetry. To be frank in turn, I found much of the material you showed me that week badly marred by a Hobsbaumiam coarseness and crudity—not the subject matter so much as the treatment, perhaps both. I hasten to add that I still hold in the highest esteem your best work: it’s an important part of my life both as a poet and a man.²⁸

Longley also denied the accusation that he and the others had deliberately excluded Simmons from the poetry community: Do you really think that this small group of Northern Irish poets ‘all assumed too hopefully that we were on the same side’? If I’m not on your side, I’m lost, going nowhere. It’s unlikely, though, that we’re all ‘in the same boat’.²⁹

Longley’s answer sums up the complex relationship between the Belfast poets perfectly. He acknowledges the sense of solidarity among them—a solidarity that was clearly important to him as a writer—yet he recognizes their different aesthetic approaches. Without his fellow poets, Longley admitted, he was ‘lost’—a comment that reveals just how much these poets served as guides for each other. Nevertheless, Simmons maintained that the group was not cohesive enough, and that Longley, Heaney, and Mahon had pushed him to the periphery. Though the four poets had christened themselves the future of ²⁷ Simmons to Longley, 22 July 1970, Box 1, JSP. ²⁸ Longley to Simmons, 24 July 1970, Box 1, JSP.

²⁹ Ibid.

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Irish poetry when they met at the ’67 Belfast Festival, they had failed, in Simmons’s view, to work together in order to achieve this goal: Yes, I think there was a glibness about the way we met as total strangers, and were saying, five minutes later, ‘Here are the four best Irish poets.’ It wasn’t only facetious. Not that I think it is all that important . . . we may yet be the best of friends; but so far we hardly know each other as individuals, nor have we worked together in any significant projects. When I was editor of The Ulsterman I valued your poem and your essay on Billie Holiday; but had we been closer together artistically how much more you could have done, not only contributing, but discussing, moulding, selling. Similarly and to a lesser extent Seamus. Not that anyone OUGHT to have got involved, but had we been closer the thing would have happened automatically. There has been nothing concerted about our approach to the B.B.C. or the general public or publications abroad. I am more conscious of lost opportunities than a sense of solidarity, and, when I think about it all I feel that my invitations to read in Belfast or Dublin have been very hole-in-corner affairs. I can’t emphasise too much that there are no obligations; but had we all been on the same side things might have been different.³⁰

Simmons was wrong when he claimed the poets had not worked together and hardly knew each other—Heaney, Mahon, and Longley were close by this time and had given several readings as a trio. He was angry, of course, that they had not included him. This ‘exclusion’ was probably not deliberate—at least not during this time—but it was convenient for Simmons to believe otherwise. There is no evidence these poets sought to exclude him from readings. On the contrary, Heaney graciously complimented his work, the young Muldoon looked up to him as an important editor, and Longley used his Arts Council connections to help him get a recording contract. Simmons set himself apart. The fact that a feud over infidelity and the ethics of publishing quickly turned into an argument about the cohesiveness of the group suggests the extent to which rivalry (as well as admiration) shaped these poets’ relationships with one another, and reveals how personal grievances were becoming increasingly disruptive to the stability of the coterie.³¹ ³⁰ Simmons to Longley, 30 July 1970, Box 1, JSP. ³¹ Heaney, Mahon, and Longley were not Simmons’s only rivals. In 1975, he accused Seamus Deane of slighting him by not mentioning his name in an article he had written about contemporary Irish writing. Deane, in a four-page reply, politely apologized for the omission, then gave Simmons a summary of his work’s flaws. Nevertheless, he promised to mention Simmons the next time he wrote about Northern poets. His honest appraisal of Simmons’s work most likely embittered the poet—he was, after all, deeply suspicious of academics—and perhaps increased his sense of alienation from the circle to which Deane, via Heaney, was linked. Deane to Simmons, 20 Jan. 1974, Box 1, JSP.

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Relations between Mahon and Longley, the oldest friends in the group, were also becoming strained. The feud was, ironically, provoked by Longley’s public declarations of friendship to Heaney, Mahon, and Simmons in the ‘Letters’ series of An Exploded View. These poems were as much an attempt to solidify the sense of a mutually supportive poetic community as they were a probing of Longley’s own aesthetic response to civil strife. He hints as much when he writes to Simmons, ‘I have your lines by heart’, and alludes to the way Each gives the other’s lines a twist Over supper, dinner, breakfast To make a sort of Moebius Band, Eternal but quotidian. . . .³²

Longley’s ‘letter’ to Derek Mahon addresses the importance of such interconnectedness more intently than the others. It is the most urgent poem of the four, the one in which Longley seems most clearly to be writing to himself. Yet this poem is the only one that was actually sent to its recipient, for Longley and Mahon had been writing verse letters to each other well before ‘To Derek Mahon’ appeared in print. The correspondence was for Longley’s benefit: in the winter of 1970 he had moved to Wicklow in hopes of conquering a debilitating writing block, but instead found that solitude only made matters worse. Mahon came to the rescue—‘the one bright moment’ Longley remembers, ‘of my snowy solitude’—and proposed a verse correspondence in ‘Marvellian octosyllabic rhyming couplets’.³³ The formal demands of the letters ultimately helped jump-start Longley’s imagination; writing in this way, he said, ‘really got me flowing’.³⁴ Mahon sent the first instalment: Now that the postal strike is over lover writes again to lover, lost to the found and I to you since my first ten lines are due, remembering the two-way bet decided on when last we met— a bottle of whiskey from the one who, for whatever reason or none, ³² Michael Longley, An Exploded View (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 34. Longley’s ellipsis. ³³ Michael Longley, letter to Gavin Drummond, 28 Oct. 1999, quoted in Gavin Drummond, ‘The Difficulty of We: The Epistolary Poems of Michael Longley and Derek Mahon’, Yearbook of English Studies, 35 (2005), 36–7. ³⁴ Ibid. 37.

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Here Auden and MacNeice’s friendship stands parallel to that between Longley and Mahon, while the collaborative effort that produced Letters from Iceland is invoked as a productive model. The poem itself is a kind of collaboration, the result of their mutual wager, in which the first poet to go a week without writing a poem owed the other a bottle of whiskey. Mahon continued: But, to get on, I wonder why we felt the impulse, you and I, to start on this verse-dialogue of tail-chasing and dog-feed-dog. A ten-year friendship, rain or shine, calls for something else, a crying need in that dark cave which is indeed the heart of the artistic life unfilled by mistress or by wife, a need for being on the trot while standing still at the same spot, imaginatively at least, demands we move on from the settled lands, prospecting where the poems lie in mud beneath a racing sky . . .³⁶

Mahon prospects for poetic truth by probing the depths of poetic friendship: the old friend, rather than the lover, becomes the muse. Yet, as Gavin Drummond notes, ‘Mahon’s poem intimates that their real subject is a reassessment of their poetics, of their very modes of writing.’³⁷ However, Mahon’s desire to ‘move on from the settled lands’—to venture further away from the security of both Longley’s friendship and the Belfast ³⁵ Derek Mahon, untitled verse letter to Longley, typed MS, n.d., Box 18, MLP. ³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ Drummond, ‘The Difficulty of We: The Epistolary Poems of Michael Longley and Derek Mahon’, 37.

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coterie—appears not to have struck a chord in Longley, who focused upon the poets’ relationships as secular Protestants, rather than poets, in his response: And did we come into our own When, minus muse and lexicon, We traced in August sixty-nine Our imaginary Peace Line Around the burnt-out houses of The Catholics we scarcely loved, Two Sisyphuses come to budge The sticks and stones of an old grudge, Two poetic conservatives In the city of guns and long knives, Our ears receiving then and there The stereophonic nightmare Of the Shankill and the Falls, Our matches struck on crumbling walls To light us as we moved at last Through the back alleys of Belfast?³⁸

Here Longley uses Mahon to meditate upon his own role in the crisis; his question, addressed to Mahon, is in fact an act of self-interrogation in which he ponders the extent to which his poetic development has been shaped by the Troubles.³⁹ But Mahon was disappointed with ‘To Three Irish Poets’, calling it ‘stilted and derivative’.⁴⁰ Even Simmons—normally a proponent of literary solidarity—expressed dismay towards all four ‘Letters’, writing ‘there is no whisper of our radical evasions and follies, no sense of real knowledge of himself or us that would fall naturally in even a prose letter’.⁴¹ Longley’s ‘letter’ would inspire an epistolary reply from Mahon, but not the kind he had anticipated. When Longley published ‘To Derek ³⁸ Longley, An Exploded View, 36. ³⁹ Drummond writes, ‘The deep sense of personal and communal importance Longley attached to these letters, in fact, is revealed in a manuscript note found in his archive: he scribbles, in some notes for a public reading, that these letters are attempts ‘to define my Irishness’. ‘The Difficulty of We: The Epistolary Poems of Michael Longley and Derek Mahon’, 36. ⁴⁰ Derek Mahon, ‘Mother Tongue’, review of The Faber Book of Irish Verse, ed. John Montague, New Statesman, 29 Mar. 1974, 452. ⁴¹ James Simmons, review of An Exploded View, by Michael Longley, Honest Ulsterman, 42/43 (1974), 80.

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Mahon’ in the New Statesman, Mahon wrote to the magazine denying any association with the poem: Sir— A casual reader of ‘Two Letters’, by my friend Michael Longley (NS, 3 December), might be forgiven for drawing one or two erroneous conclusions. Mr Longley, with the best will in the world, appears to attribute to me attitudes to which I do not, in fact, subscribe. I refer to lines 6 and 9 of ‘To Derek Mahon’— ‘The Catholics we scarcely loved’ and ‘Two poetic conservatives’. The implications of line 6, as it stands, are frankly untrue, not to say damaging, and the overtones of line 9 tendentious and misleading. No-one likes to see his view misrepresented, however innocently. Mr Longley may speak for himself; he doesn’t necessarily speak for me.⁴²

Longley was hurt by Mahon’s reaction, particularly since the poem was supposed to stand as a testimony to their friendship. He accused Mahon of censoring his imagination, to which Mahon responded with a firm but amicable letter imploring his friend to change the line in question. ‘This is not a matter of censorship,’ he wrote. ‘Seamus, here last week, put it like this: by dedicating a poem to someone you make him in a sense co-author of the poem, thus giving him some measure of, yes, proprietary right. . . . So let’s change the lines, like a good man: it’s the only just solution.’⁴³ Such was the intimacy between these two poets that, though Mahon had not collaborated on the poem with his friend, he still felt as if the poem would be read as a collaboration. He felt, also, that as a character in the poem—and in the life of Michael Longley—he was owed a voice in its final composition.⁴⁴ In this letter, he gave a frank estimation of both Longley’s recent work and the state of their friendship; as always, the two were irrevocably intertwined: What’s all this about censoring your imagination? On political grounds and with regard to subject-matter, you say. Come now, since when did friendly criticism rate as censorship? You may (by all means do) write about whatever you want: how can I possibly ‘censor’ you? Nor am I censoring you politically with regard to ‘To DM’; you must say what you think under your own name. . . . Perhaps the recent abrasiveness between us (wasn’t it Michael Allen who said our relationship was ‘charged’?—between individualists, so close in so many ways, how could it ⁴² Derek Mahon, ‘Letter to the Editor’, New Statesman, 10 Dec. 1971, 821. ⁴³ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Dec. 1971), Box 1, MLP. ‘Let’s be quite clear about the letter/poem business.’ ⁴⁴ As Drummond mentions, Mahon even suggested alternate lines: ‘Catholics we’d never loved enough’, ‘Two poets writing for their lives’. Mahon to Longley, n.d. (c.1971), Box 13, MLP.

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not be?) derives, on my side, from a feeling (right or wrong) that your own poetic growth has not (yet) been as rich and distinctive as it should. If I am to be completely honest I must confess to impatience, on your behalf, with what I diagnose, perhaps mistakenly, as the ‘hang-ups’ (aesthetic not personal) that betray a great talent into academicism, obscurantism, coyness and, I fear, mimicry. God, this is rough. I don’t mean that you haven’t written good poems in recent years—you have. But I don’t recognise what I did in the early days—a unique and compelling poetic personality going about its own unmistakable business. Something has gone wrong momentarily, I feel. I don’t want to feel this, I don’t enjoy it, God knows; I’m just trying to clear things up between us. . . . We are, after all, friends (I hope!), and anything I say is said in love and concern, not with a view to scoring points. . . . You say ‘we seem to be feeling differently and going, for a while, our separate ways’. Well of course we are, with the proviso that one knows where the heart lies. If we felt the same at every point and went the same way we’d be the same person and write the same poems. Poetically, the only ways are separate ways.⁴⁵

It appears Mahon had attempted, at some level, to ‘break’ with Longley in order to pursue a more independent poetic path, and that the formerly sustaining relationship was evolving into something different. Indeed, at this time Mahon was becoming more critical of the idea of a Northern renaissance, and more resistant to the claim that the best poetry in Ireland was being written north of the border. This was the year he edited The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry, in which he included a plea for a more inclusive all-Ireland context for Irish poetry, writing, ‘Whatever we mean by “the Irish situation”, the shipyards of Belfast are no less a part of it than a country town in the Gaeltacht.’⁴⁶ It is possible that Longley, who was deeply interested in the formation of a non-sectarian Northern poetic community, took Mahon’s derisive comments regarding such a formation personally. At any rate, Longley appears to have been upset by the fact that they had begun to go their ‘separate ways’; Mahon’s criticisms may well have increased his sense of indignation, and, perhaps, strengthened his resolve to ignore Mahon’s plea to change the controversial line. In the ⁴⁵ Mahon to Longley, n.d. (Dec. 1971), Box 1, MLP. ‘Let’s be quite clear about the letter/poem business.’ ⁴⁶ Derek Mahon, ‘Introduction’, in Derek Mahon (ed.), The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry (London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1972), 14. The introduction was written in 1971. Mahon would continue to undermine the idea of a superior Northern ‘tradition’ again in 1974, writing, ‘There is a belief, not discouraged in the North, that the North is where the most important Irish poetry is now being written. This is a convenient piece of journalism, a simplification’. (Mahon, ‘Mother Tongue’, 452.) These comments foreshadow the polemical introduction to the Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990), which he co-edited with Peter Fallon.

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end, one of the lines was in fact changed to read, ‘The Catholics we’d scarcely loved’, though this was hardly a concession. There were other signs the coterie was breaking up. In 1970, Heaney left Belfast for Berkeley, California, where he took up a position as a visiting lecturer in the English Department. He could not have picked a more explosive place to teach than Berkeley, a mecca for radicals and an epicentre of the anti-Vietnam movement. There, he would have been continually exposed to the black and Hispanic civil rights campaigns, peace marches, sit-ins, and war protests. Michael Parker notes that during Heaney’s year in America, the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, accused of killing 200 Vietnamese at My Lai, was one of the top news stories, while in 1970, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published. ‘Such attempts’, writes Parker, ‘throughout the American cultural scene to weigh in against the dominant discourse, to counter its representations, would have struck deep chords in Heaney.’⁴⁷ In a sense, he had travelled out of the frying pan and into the fire; ironically, his ‘escape’ to California brought him closer to the realities of life in Belfast. After a mere four months in America, he was forced to concede in a Listener article that its struggles were being fought out as viciously and violently as those in Northern Ireland. He was appalled, for example, by the rhetoric of the Black Panthers, who instructed their followers, ‘Every door the fascists attempt to kick down will put them deeper into the pit of death. Shoot to kill.’⁴⁸ He found this language ‘shocking . . . grotesquely violent’, and observed that the IRA paper The United Irishman had ‘an old-world restraint to it’ in comparison: ‘In contrast to the revolutionary language of America, the revolutionary voice of Ireland still keeps a civil tongue in its head.’⁴⁹ Heaney did not befriend any of the West Coast poets, but he did hear Gary Snyder and Robert Bly read. From these two—both vehemently opposed to the Vietnam war—he gained a sense that poetry was ‘a force, almost a mode of power, certainly a mode of resistance’.⁵⁰ Snyder and Bly had exchanged the intellectual for the mythological, a move, he said, that meshed with my own concerns for I could see a close connection between the political and cultural assertions being made at that time by the minority in the north of Ireland and the protests and consciousness-raising that were going on in the Bay Area. . . . this mythological approach that Snyder and Bly were advancing . . . it suggested new ways of handling parts of my own experience.⁵¹ ⁴⁷ Michael Parker, ‘Changing Skies: The Roles of Native and American Narratives in the Politicisation of Seamus Heaney’s Early Poetry’, Symbiosis, 6: 2 (2002), 149. ⁴⁸ Seamus Heaney, ‘Views’, Listener, 31 Dec. 1970, 903. ⁴⁹ Ibid. ⁵⁰ Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 20. ⁵¹ Ibid.

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Heaney had come upon P. V. Glob’s The Bog People in 1969; it seems his interaction with the West Coast poets, as well as his exposure to the civil rights movement in America, led him further into the interior of Glob’s world. ‘The Tollund Man’, written at Berkeley and published in the Summer 1970 issue of Threshold, would be the first of many poems weaving myth, history, violence, and sacrifice. In a sense, Heaney needed to go west before he could go to Aarhus—if the latter brought him closer to Ireland’s past, the former gave him deeper insight into its present. When Heaney returned to Northern Ireland in September 1971, he found it in an altered state: by the end of the year, over 1,500 people would be interned without trial and 144 would be dead. An eerie silence settled over the deserted city centre each evening as people returned home and shut themselves inside, half-waiting for a bomb blast or the sound of gunfire to pierce the stillness. It was too much for Heaney, who wrote in 1971 that ‘Fear has begun to tingle through the place’.⁵² In a Listener piece that Christmas, he spoke of martial law, soldiers, road blocks, and bomb scares. That January, the crisis worsened: on 30 January, the RUC called in the British army to quell any riots which might be sparked by a civil rights parade in Derry; by the end of the day, the paratroopers had shot dead thirteen protesters and wounded twelve more. Bloody Sunday sparked a wave of mass protest in the Republic; three days later, rioters in Dublin burnt the British Embassy. Although both Heaney and Longley marched in a civil rights parade in Newry the following week, Heaney was becoming less tolerant of the Unionist position: A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish would take some of the twists out of the minority. Even at this time it is difficult to extend full sympathy to the predicament of that million among us who would ask the other half-million to exalt themselves by being humbled.⁵³

Longley, recalling his early reactions to the violence in a 1985 interview, hinted at the competing loyalties pulling the writers in opposite directions at this time: In the beginning I didn’t feel that I belonged profoundly enough to Ireland or to Ulster. Also, and I shared this feeling with the other poets that I was friendly with at the time, it was a burgeoning nightmare and we didn’t have the equipment as lyric poets to deal with it. Then there was a proper reluctance to cash in on the Troubles, and also the fact that we ourselves represented, or our families came from, one side or the other.⁵⁴ ⁵² Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 31. ⁵³ Ibid. 32. ⁵⁴ Fintan O’Toole, ‘Making Some Kind of Sense’, Sunday Tribune, 17 Mar. 1985.

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Heaney was more explicit about the undertow that pulled him towards a passive nationalism in a series of Listener articles written during the late sixties and early seventies, in which he supported the burgeoning civil rights movement and attempted to justify Catholic grievances. These articles present a more impassioned, less diplomatic side of the poet, as do his later comments to Seamus Deane in a 1979 New York Times interview. Although he referred to Mahon, Longley, Simmons, Hewitt, and Muldoon as ‘a very necessary and self-sustaining group’ during the sixties, he admitted that the Troubles heightened his awareness of cultural and religious divisions within the coterie: the lot of what we may call the Protestant writer is radically different from that of his Catholic counterpart. For the Protestant sensibility, the Troubles were an interruption and a disruption of the ‘status quo.’ I don’t think the Protestant writer had to change his vision. He could deal with the challenge to the established order in liberal or in reactionary terms. Eventually, somewhere in the blueprint of his thinking it would be predicted that normality would return. So I don’t think that imaginatively he had to change his action. For the Catholic writer, I think the Troubles were a critical moment, a turning point, possibly a vision of some kind of fulfillment. The blueprint in the Catholic writer’s head predicted that a history would fulfill itself in a United Ireland or in something. These are very fundamental blueprints.⁵⁵

This testimony, published in the wake of the North controversy, reveals the extent to which Heaney was constructing his identity against that of ‘the Protestant writer’—undoubtedly a reference to Mahon, Longley, and Simmons. Thus the violence threatened to wreck not only the burgeoning unity of the province, but the fragile coherence of the literary community. In the wake of the Bloody Sunday shootings and the chaos that erupted afterwards, Britain imposed Direct Rule from Westminster. Fearing for the safety of his family, which by this time included two young sons, Heaney quit his post at Queen’s in April 1972. He considered moving to rural County Derry, where he hoped to make a living as a freelance writer, but when Ann Saddlemyer offered him the use of her cottage in County Wicklow, he moved instead to the Republic. There, as a working artist, he would neither have to pay income tax on his creative work nor endure the daily torments of life in a semi-militarized state. Later, he would acknowledge that the move was also a political statement: The crossing of the border had a political edge to it because we were opting to go into the Republic. But I was quite content in a way to accept and undergo that ⁵⁵ Seamus Deane, ‘A Talk with Seamus Heaney’, New York Times Review, 2 Dec. 1979, 47.

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political dimension because I had never considered myself British. If I’d gone to London, there wouldn’t have been a murmur about it—at least among my Ulster contemporaries. I had no doubt about the rightness of the move itself but I was bothered by some of its consequences, such as seeming to break ranks with my friends there.⁵⁶

The political and symbolic dimensions of the move were made manifest in the Irish press, which was quick to seize upon the news. The front page of the Irish Times triumphantly announced ‘Ulster Poet Moves South’, while the Protestant Telegraph bade good-riddance to the ‘papish propagandist’.⁵⁷ Yet there was also a non-political dimension to Heaney’s departure: he was tired of the ‘committee atmosphere’ of Belfast, and needed to distance himself from the insularity of the city. As he told John Haffenden, ‘I finally, I think, wanted to escape that, partly because I wanted to get to a situation where I was thinking for myself about my own poems. It’s partly a matter of development within the group too.’⁵⁸ Not only was the political culture of division in Northern Ireland stifling the poet, but the literary culture of collaboration was as well. In 1971, Heaney confided these feelings to Simmons in an epistolary poem regarding a proposed ‘Ulster poets night’ at the Mermaid Theatre in London. A few years before, Heaney would have welcomed the publicity, but now his own voice was in danger of being drowned out by the chorus of his peers. To Simmons he wrote: I’ve written also to Sir Bernard Miles To half-say no to an Ulster Poetry Circus For I believe that all our different styles, Angles, vanities, small lies—what makes us And what marks us as performers Is always a bit cramped at quartered sessions Before a crowd of hippies and reformers I’d trim the sails of postures and of passions Because of you boys, not because of them. Either we’d have to fit into some pattern Or undercut, like an unstitching hem, The effect of the ensemble. What in Hell’s name am I talking about? You’ll know, I know, who stand well on your own. ⁵⁶ Randall, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, 8. ⁵⁷ Quoted in Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1993), 120. ⁵⁸ John Haffenden, ‘Meeting Seamus Heaney’, London Magazine, 19: 3 (1979), 28.

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It is not entirely clear whether Heaney’s feelings in the verse letter are due to a sense of confinement within the coterie or dissatisfaction with how the coterie had come to be defined in the public eye. He hints that he might have agreed to read with Longley, Mahon, and Simmons had the evening not been marketed as an ‘Ulster poets’ night’. Yet his desire for a ‘solo run’ seems to weigh more heavily than his frustration with an audience that expects the poets to ‘fit into some pattern’. Heaney’s decision to send this epistle to Simmons, rather than to Longley or Mahon, suggests that he was uncomfortable voicing these concerns to the poets with whom he was repeatedly linked and compared. Simmons, however, stood apart from the coterie, and was therefore less likely to be offended by Heaney’s personal ambition. Yet if Simmons ‘stood alone’, it was, ironically, because he felt snubbed by Heaney himself. Whether or not Heaney realized this, he felt he could confide to Simmons that the group was no longer the supportive ‘ensemble’ it had been; instead he now felt ‘cramped’, ‘quartered’. Simmons was flattered by Heaney’s letter, but he did not empathize with his fellow poet’s need to break free from a confining group identity. Instead he was pleased that, along with several other Ulster poets, he had been asked to read at the Mermaid. Unlike Heaney, he needed the publicity, and admitted as much in his epistolary reply: All that you say about the Mermaid ‘do’ is true enough; but I’m inclined to go. The other arguments are just as true. If Miles took only one it would be you. The mighty Lowell was accompanied by [?], Fuller, Alvarez and Thwaite; Jon Silkin had a bunch, and I’m afraid if I don’t take these terms I’ll have to wait. So, why not go together, yet agree to be our separate selves, to sell not an ensemble, but variety, (I’d like the two of us, but what the hell!)⁶⁰ ⁵⁹ Heaney to Simmons, n.d. (c.1971), Box 15a, JSP. ⁶⁰ Simmons to Heaney, n.d. (c.1971), Box 15a, JSP.

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Plate 7. James Simmons at the Robert Frost Museum, Franconia, New Hampshire, 1984

Simmons was painfully aware of the fact that his own reputation would benefit from association with Heaney; ironically, the man who had cultivated aloofness was now only too happy to be included in the ‘Ulster circus’. Heaney, however, was tired of the act.⁶¹ The founding of Atlantis by Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Hugh Maxton, Augustine Martin, and Michael Gill in March 1970 marked yet another retreat from a group identity. It is likely Atlantis meant to undermine the Honest Ulsterman when it declared in its first editorial, ‘we claim that we will not be, of all things, parochial’, and continued: Part of our aim is to see Ireland in an international perspective, to lift its drowsy eyelids and disturb it into a sense of relationship and awareness. How many have heard of Yves Bonnefoy, Jerry Rubin, Elias Canetti? . . . Adorno died last August. Who cares?⁶² ⁶¹ Twenty years later Simmons would publish a highly critical essay on Heaney’s poetry entitled, ‘The Trouble with Seamus’, in which he accused the poet of ‘commonplace ideas, timid moral postures and shallow metaphysics’. Elmer Andrews (ed.), Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1992), 39. ⁶² Seamus Deane et al., ‘Editorial’, Atlantis, 1 (1970), 1. The magazine was a sounding board for ideas that would later be explored in Crane Bag and through Field Day.

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Where Simmons was trying to widen access to literature and direct the community’s gaze inward, Deane and Mahon chose instead to write for an upscale readership who equated cosmopolitanism with internationalism.⁶³ Although the Honest Ulsterman had provoked the competition, Atlantis became a source of anxiety. As Michael Foley wrote in the Honest Ulsterman in 1970: An interesting example of a polished coffin is Dublin’s latest literary mag, Atlantis. The first issue is on sale now but it has such a tired respectable look that it could have been going for the last thirty years.⁶⁴

Interestingly, it was not the content of Atlantis that inspired Foley’s defensive derision, but its material production, its ‘look’. Though the Honest Ulsterman could match the quality of Atlantis in content—publishing Heaney, Muldoon, Montague, Kennelly, Longley, Harrison, Ewart, Simmons, and sometimes Deane—it could not match its material sophistication, which included fine paper, a standardized fount, and a bound spine. In order to upstage its rival, the Honest Ulsterman clung even more tenaciously to its provocative, cutting-edge image. Thus, in Foley’s review, the word ‘respectable’ becomes pejorative, as does Dublin itself. When one critic complained about the Honest Ulsterman’s frequent misspellings, columnist ‘Jude the Obscure’ responded, ‘if the HU was a magazine that concerned itself greatly with missing umlauts I should not care to contribute to it: perhaps Mr de Weir thinks I am a Dublin writer?’⁶⁵ The publication of North in 1975 was a watershed in Northern Ireland literary relations, the point at which poetry moved into the political arena and contesting factions began to voice their views in the pages of the Honest Ulsterman, Crane Bag, and Fortnight. It is important to note that the initial divisions were not determined by political persuasion; Ciaran Carson, an Irish speaker raised in West Belfast, wrote the first hostile review of North, in which he called Heaney a ‘laureate of violence’ and castigated the poet for his indiscriminate use of myth as a conciliatory balm. The book was, he wrote, ‘a messy historical and religious surmise— a kind of Golden Bough activity, in which the real differences between our society and that of Jutland in some vague past are glossed over for the sake of the parallels of ritual’.⁶⁶ In this oft-quoted review, which was ⁶³ The somewhat pretentious editorial tone was matched by frequent advertisements for Waterford Crystal. ⁶⁴ Michael Foley, ‘Seriously, Though’, Honest Ulsterman, 24 (1970), 3. ⁶⁵ Anon. (Jude the Obscure), ‘HU Business Section’, Honest Ulsterman, 37 (1973), 25. ⁶⁶ Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?’, review of North, by Seamus Heaney, Honest Ulsterman, 50 (1975), 183; 184.

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rumoured to have greatly upset Heaney, Carson touched upon many points which other critics (among them Edna Longley, Conor Cruise O’Brien, David Lloyd, Maurice Harmon, Blake Morrison, and George Watson) would later take up: particularly Heaney’s willingness—as they saw it—to excuse atrocity as ritual, to aestheticize violence, and, ultimately, to take sides. Edna Longley accused North of leading to ‘imaginative dead ends’,⁶⁷ and even George Watson lamented ‘how few poems from this enormously sympathetic imagination deal with “the other side” ’.⁶⁸ Watson also agreed with Edna Longley about the danger inherent in mythologizing atrocity: ‘the urge to assuage the pain . . . in an imaginative appropriation of the ceremonies of mythic ritual . . . dignify the killing and give it a disturbing sense of affirmatory (“our slow triumph”) inevitability.’⁶⁹ Edna Longley’s hostility to North strained the Longley–Heaney friendship. A few years earlier, in 1971, Heaney had written to Longley from Berkeley, asking him to thank Edna for her generous review of Door into the Dark. It was, he said, deep and heartwarming and a confirmation of some of the things I’ve been slipping towards here—the elements as self, secret rather than public poems, a return to D of N territory though not the manner: there’s so much in that old terrain that for so many reasons went untouched. I think Door into the Dark was a necessary self-conscious brake, bulwark, whatever you want to call it. Whatever it was, it was almost never vulnerable. I want more and more to risk the open self, or to find a manner of saying that blends discipline and disarms disciplinarians, if you know what I mean.⁷⁰

The letter reveals that Heaney was still on intimate terms with the Longleys, that he valued their critical advice and trusted them enough to confide his poetic ambitions. Clearly, he also used Longley as a sounding board for new ideas. But by 1976, the relationship was more tense. Things came to a head one night during a drunken row at the Hammonds’ home when Longley belligerently claimed Mahon was a better poet than Heaney.⁷¹ The next morning, after calling David Hammond to find out exactly what he had said, he wrote an achingly sincere six-page letter of ⁶⁷ Edna Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, Crane Bag, 9: 1 (1985), 27. (See also Edna Longley’s ‘ “Inner Émigré” or “Artful Voyeur”? Seamus Heaney’s North’ in Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986), 140–69). ⁶⁸ George Watson, ‘The Narrow Ground: Northern Poets and the Northern Ireland Crisis’, in Masaru Sekine (ed.), Irish Writers and Society at Large (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1985), 210. ⁶⁹ Ibid. 213. ⁷⁰ Heaney to Longley, 26 Apr. 1971, Box 15a, MLP. ⁷¹ Longley to Marie Heaney, n.d. (c.1976), Box 13, MLP.

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apology to Marie Heaney in which he castigated himself for his stormy, offensive behaviour. He was envious of Heaney’s fame, he admitted, but knew he also enjoyed it ‘by proxy’.⁷² He was annoyed people assumed his admiration of Mahon equalled a criticism of Heaney, though he also felt Heaney did not deserve more attention. He said his resentment had been building for years—revealingly, Edna had not awakened him when Heaney called to say Faber had accepted Death of a Naturalist—and was further provoked by the endless comparisons entertained by critics and reviewers. He admitted that even the most innocent comments stirred his anger, such as the time he told an acquaintance about his newborn daughter Sarah. ‘Keeping up with the Heaneys?’ the acquaintance replied.⁷³ Longley felt that, despite his many ‘warm advances’ through the years, Heaney had neglected their friendship. The letter to Marie is in part an attempt to justify these feelings of neglect, and, at the same time, temper them with admiration and remorse. ‘I thought it very important to display very openly the love and goodwill which are the foundation of my feelings for you and Seamus, if not always the edifice,’ he wrote.⁷⁴ He went on to explain that the friendships he had forged with Heaney and Mahon were extremely important to his life and work. ‘That’s what my second book was all about,’ he said. ‘It explored the notion of an artistic community, a poetic sodality.’ Yet he had been disappointed by the lack of response—‘there didn’t seem to me to be any takers’.⁷⁵ The result was ‘friendship lifted up into the imagination’—an eloquent but abstract phrase, the kind he often used when speaking of his relationships with other Belfast poets. Tellingly, the letter was not addressed to Heaney himself, but to his wife. Nor was it ever sent.⁷⁶ In the letter, Longley presents himself as the member of the trio with the most to learn. As he told Marie, ‘my talent is not so homogenous as theirs: I have to borrow roots!’ This made him, at times, depressed and insecure. He called himself ‘a tiring friend and colleague . . . vulnerable to disappointments at the ordinary quotidian levels of friendly intercourse. All of me is at stake too often and too unreasonably.’⁷⁷ By this time, the friends saw one another so infrequently that each encounter became more awkward and stilted; drinking—at least in this case—seemed to exacerbate rather than dispel the strangeness. Longley admitted to a time in the ⁷² ⁷⁴ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷

Longley to Marie Heaney, n.d. (c.1976), Box 13, MLP. Ibid. ⁷⁵ Ibid. E-mail from Longley to author, 12 Jan. 2002. Longley to Marie Heaney, n.d. (c.1976), Box 13, MLP.

⁷³ Ibid.

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recent past when he and Edna ‘had allowed a long sequence of disappointments to manoeuvre us into unreasonableness and paranoia, and had been behaving meanly’, but hoped that time was over.⁷⁸ The goodwill continued through the next year: Longley recalled meeting Heaney at the railway station in Belfast in 1977, whereupon they immediately ducked inside a pub and began reciting poems to each other— ‘The Linen Industry’ and ‘The Harvest Bow’. As Longley characterized the occasion, ‘One is looking for approval, which is a kind of stimulus, and a certain amount of jousting goes on; the subtext is, “Cap that if you can!” ’.⁷⁹ Heaney’s staunchest allies at this time were the Southern intellectuals and Northern Catholics associated with the Crane Bag magazine, a cultural journal founded in 1977 by Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney, and with Field Day, a theatre company started in 1980 by Brian Friel, David Hammond, and Stephen Rea, and later joined by Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, Thomas Kilroy, and Heaney himself. Field Day and Crane Bag championed the notion of a ‘fifth province of the mind’—in Hederman’s words, a place ‘beyond any geographical or political dimension which forms a place of poetry, transcending any bigotted or partisan connections’.⁸⁰ The men associated with these ventures insisted that the crisis in Northern Ireland was, in Deane’s words, ‘a colonial crisis’, demanding exploration and analysis as such.⁸¹ As Deane put it, Field Day was ‘like the Abbey in its origin in that it has within it the idea of a culture which has not yet come to be in political terms. It is unlike the Abbey in that it can no longer subscribe to a simple nationalism as the basis for its existence.’⁸² In its effort to modernize and shift the boundaries of Irish cultural identity, Field Day looked critically upon the writers of the Revival and tried to undermine their romantic attitude towards revolution and sacrifice; it also attempted to expose the Revivalists’ superficial characterizations of the Irish peasantry and the Catholic bourgeoisie. Yet Field Day supported a united Ireland—a ⁷⁸ Ibid. ⁷⁹ Mike Murphy, ‘Michael Longley’, in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 123. ⁸⁰ Mark Patrick Hederman, ‘Poetry and the Fifth Province’, Crane Bag, 9: 1 (1985), 114. ⁸¹ Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 6. ⁸² Seamus Deane, ‘What is Field Day?’, programme note for 1981 Field Day production of Three Sisters. Quoted in Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 110.

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political position that alarmed Northern intellectuals like Edna Longley who, under the veil of objectivity, glimpsed a modern version of the very nationalism Field Day sought to deconstruct. She and Conor Cruise O’Brien felt strongly that poetry and politics should exist in separate spheres, but Field Day and Crane Bag disagreed. One of Deane’s main qualms about revisionism was its belief ‘in the autonomy of cultural artifacts . . . that the work of art that most successfully disengages itself from the particularities of its origin and production is, by virtue of that “disengagement,” most fully and purely itself ’.⁸³ This is surely a criticism of Edna Longley, who complained that Mark Hederman spoke ‘of poetry as something divorced from poems, from their linguistic and formal DNA. If he considers that I split poetry from life, I consider that he splits poetry itself.’⁸⁴ But like Deane, Hederman felt it was irresponsible to view art in anything other than in a social, political, and national context: My fear is that Edna Longley and Conor Cruise O’Brien, in their very understandable attempt to remove art from the dangerous liaison which it, of course, can have with nationalistic or fascist politics, are attempting to cordon it off into an anodine, detached and insulated cocoon where it loses all essential meaning and force and becomes no more than an aesthetic appendix . . . the fifth province is always attached to the real provinces in which we live and move and have our being. It is not a detached and self-contained realm of its own.⁸⁵

Thus Field Day plays, such as Brian Friel’s Translations, dealt with the legacy of cultural and linguistic dispossession, while pamphlets by Deane, Tom Paulin, and Edward Said argued for post-colonial readings of Irish literature. Yet the programme’s united Ireland bias came increasingly to look like what Eavan Boland called ‘green nationalism and divided culture’,⁸⁶ particularly when Brian Friel announced, ‘There will be no solution until the British leave this island.’⁸⁷ The Field Day intellectuals looked to Heaney, as Hederman said, to ‘lead us through that psychic hinterland which we shall have to chart before we can emerge from the Northern crisis’.⁸⁸ Edna Longley, however, accused them of using Heaney ‘to bolster a sophisticated version of ⁸³ Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 7. ⁸⁴ Edna Longley, ‘ A Reply’, Crane Bag, 9: 1 (1985), 120. ⁸⁵ Hederman, ‘Poetry and the Fifth Province’, 112; 114. ⁸⁶ Irish Times review of Heaney’s Open Letter, quoted in Gerald Dawe, False Faces: Poetry, Politics & Place (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1994), 53. ⁸⁷ Paddy Agnew, ‘Talking to Ourselves’, interview with Brian Friel, Magill (Dec. 1980), 60–1. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 37. ⁸⁸ Hederman, ‘Poetry and the Fifth Province’, 118.

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Plate 8. Edna Longley in Belfast

nationalist ideology’ hidden behind the jargon of honest intellectual and critical debate.⁸⁹ Hederman came to Heaney’s defence, attacking Edna Longley in words that belied academic disinterestedness and suggested a more personal feud: Her superior attitude, stentorian tone and relentless survey of every word [Heaney] writes can only be interpreted as a kind of fastidious fury at ‘those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain’ which are ‘walking, by God, over the fine lawns of elocution’, of which she must appear as the self-appointed custodian.⁹⁰

Her response to Hederman’s essay struck a clean blow: ‘How many workers line up to read Crane Bag?’⁹¹ Field Day’s cultivation of an American audience, along with Heaney’s enormous success there, further frustrated those who disagreed with Deane’s ideas. America’s Irish-Catholic population—many of whom were willing to view the IRA as freedom fighters rather than terrorists— comprised a wealthy, sympathetic audience which often responded ⁸⁹ Quoted ibid.

⁹⁰ Ibid. 118.

⁹¹ Longley, ‘A Reply’, 120.

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naively to the political dimensions of Field Day plays. In 1981, for example, the Irish-American Cultural Institute awarded Friel a prize for Translations, in recognition of the way it spoke to ‘the diverse peoples of this planet who are suffering a rape of their traditions’.⁹² The Institute’s propagandist rhetoric must be read in its historical context, for, at this time, Republican hunger strikers were dying in Northern Ireland’s prisons. Yet because many Irish-Americans took their cue from such institutions, pro-Republican sentiments among the Irish bars of Boston and New York were taken for granted. Heaney’s appointment as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard in 1982, partly made possible by the strong support of Helen (née Hennessy) Vendler, may have helped increase sympathy in academe for a united Ireland. There was also much sympathy for Heaney’s 1983 Open Letter to the editors of the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, particularly in the wake of Said’s Orientalism, which helped to open up the field of post-colonial studies. In this heady atmosphere, Mahon and Longley were bound to lose— Protestant identity in Northern Ireland became irrelevant to the many Irish-Americans who watched Bobby Sands die. The Belfast novelist Robert McLiam Wilson made this point explicit in a letter to Edna Longley, in which he complained that visiting American writers were interested only in listening to Catholic grievances.⁹³ Gerald Dawe voiced a similar frustration in a 1992 essay on Field Day, stating, ‘ “Protestants” are considered “unionists” . . . unless they publicly declare to the contrary and seek asylum in “Irish Literature”.’⁹⁴ Yet, as Marilynn Richtarik has shown, Field Day at least attempted to bridge the sectarian gap. On its opening night in Derry, Translations— performed in the Unionist Guildhall—received a standing ovation initiated by a Unionist MP. The Irish Press reported that it was ‘a unique occasion, with loyalists and nationalists, Unionists and SDLP, Northerners and Southerners laying aside their differences to join together in applauding a play by a fellow Derryman’.⁹⁵ In a sense, the Field Day endeavour was yet another manifestation of Hewitt’s regionalist vision of the 1940s, as Brian Friel made clear: apart from Synge, all our dramatists have pitched their voice for English acceptance and recognition. . . . However I think that for the first time this is stopping, ⁹² John Boland, ‘Artcetera’, Evening Press, 17 Jan. 1981, 6. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 58. ⁹³ Wilson to Edna Longley, 10 Sept. 1990, Box 78, ELP. ⁹⁴ Dawe, False Faces: Poetry, Politics and Place, 60. ⁹⁵ Anon., ‘Friel’s Winner’, editorial, Irish Press, 26 Sept. 1980. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 26.

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that there is some kind of confidence, some kind of coming together of Irish dramatists who are not concerned with this, who have no interest in the English Stage. We are talking to ourselves as we must and if we are overheard in America, or England, so much the better.⁹⁶

Forty years after Hewitt, Northern regionalism was alive and well—as much a force for social and political change as it had ever been. The difference this time, however, lay in the fact that it was the Catholic rather than Protestant intelligentsia who had harnessed that force. Just as Hewitt had denied accusations of literary Unionism, these writers inevitably found themselves untangling their vision of a united Ireland from oldfashioned nationalist ideology. Though Friel claimed they were ‘talking to themselves’, Field Day, like its regionalist predecessors, deliberately cultivated a foreign audience even as it publicly eschewed foreign patronage. North American English departments sought manifestos in pamphlet form by Deane and Paulin, while Edward Said and Frederic Jameson were invited to write pamphlets on colonialism and literature. Field Day was one in a tradition of Northern Irish coteries that had enjoined their fellow artists to cultivate their own garden—this had been the early philosophy of the Northern Review and Honest Ulsterman in the sixties, as well as that of Michael Longley in his role as Arts Council Literature Director throughout the seventies. The hunger strikes of the early eighties had galvanized Northern Irish artists once again: there was a new urgency to the rhetoric, but the ideas were old ones. In the postNorth collapse of Northern literary solidarity, Field Day was yet another cultural experiment in a line of similar regionalist ventures that sought to build a tolerant and enlightened non-sectarian state through art. As Friel remarked, ‘I think it should lead to a cultural state, not a political state. And I think out of that cultural state, a possibility of a political state follows.’⁹⁷ An editorial in the Irish Times sounded like an echo of the previous decade: ‘Don’t bother with anybody but the people in our own corner of Ireland’ is the new desperate cry from the heart. . . . It may be only a concert, a debate, a dance, a lecture or an exhibition of some kind, but it does suggest a liveliness, a community needing to exert itself.⁹⁸ ⁹⁶ Agnew, ‘Talking to Ourselves’, interview with Brian Friel, 60. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 12. ⁹⁷ Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Man From God Knows Where’, interview with Brian Friel, In Dublin, 28 Oct. 1982, 23. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 137. ⁹⁸ Anon., ‘Self-help’, editorial, Irish Times, 11 Oct. 1980. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 12.

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Stephen Rea’s feeling that ‘the energy of Ireland at this moment in time is coming from the North’⁹⁹ brings to mind Mahon’s statement, made eleven years before, that ‘the poet from the North had a new thing to say, a new kind of sound to make, a new texture to create’.¹⁰⁰ Like the Northern regionalists before them, Field Day turned away from the Republic as well as England. ‘We were very conscious that we wanted to be quite independent of the British influence exercised through Belfast and the equally strong cultural hegemony of Dublin’, Heaney said.¹⁰¹ Friel agreed that the Field Day writers’ ‘spiritual exile gave them a sharp sense of alienation from both the Republic and the United Kingdom’.¹⁰² These statements are strikingly similar to feelings voiced by the BBC radio producer, John Boyd, about the ‘sense of alienation’ experienced by Ulster writers during the 1940s: as he said, ‘Writers in the North, distanced politically and culturally from the south by the border, and isolated from England by the sea, felt denied, at least in part, their identity.’¹⁰³ That these same concerns—forging an independent ‘Northern’ identity apart from Britain and the Republic—should be voiced forty years apart suggests that the Belfast writers had come full circle. Yet there had been much progress in between: where Boyd, Hewitt, Greacen, Rodgers, and MacNeice had struggled to invent, define, and develop an Ulster identity, Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and Simmons had achieved exactly that. The construction of this regional, group identity was integral to their later development as autonomous writers; as Heaney hinted in his verse letter to Simmons, it provoked them to develop their own distinct voices. In this light, Field Day can be seen as a splinter coterie struggling to define itself against the collective ethos of the once liberating, now confining Belfast Group. Mahon attempted to stay out of the various feuds, telling the Sunday Independent in 1984, ‘I try not to do too much Northern stuff. I may be from the North, but I consider myself an Irishman, an inhabitant of what Conor Cruise O’Brien calls “this archipelago.” I try not to get drawn into Northern identity in any sort of confining way.’¹⁰⁴ But even he was ⁹⁹ Christie Hickman, ‘Stephen Rea, Fringe Actor Par Excellence’, Drama (Autumn 1983), 25. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 86. ¹⁰⁰ Brown, ‘An Interview with Derek Mahon’, 12–13. ¹⁰¹ Mary Holland, ‘A Field Day for Irish Theatre’, Observer Magazine, 30 Oct. 1988, 65. Quoted in Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 68. ¹⁰² Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 108. ¹⁰³ John Boyd, The Middle of My Journey (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990), 102. ¹⁰⁴ Ciaran Carty, ‘The Right Mahon for a Farce’, Sunday Independent, 30 Sept. 1984.

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compelled to partake in the general climate of disaffection when he reviewed Muldoon’s 1986 edition of the Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. In an Irish Times review, Mahon wrote, ‘Has Muldoon, whom I have always considered someone of the highest intelligence and sensitivity, as well as a remarkable poet, taken leave of his reason?’¹⁰⁵ What bothered him most was the fact that the book would mislead thousands of American and British readers into believing that nobody wrote poetry south of the border: We can pick up this anthology, see at a glance that it is weirdly unrepresentative, and smile indulgently. But it will sell in Britain and further afield—providing, wherever it goes, a shamefully partial account of contemporary Irish verse.¹⁰⁶

Throughout the aggrieved review Mahon goes out of his way to make many disclaimers on Muldoon’s behalf, stressing his normally reliable judgement, and suggesting ‘we all make mistakes’.¹⁰⁷ In 1990, however, he would challenge Muldoon’s Faber Book with an edition of his own, the Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, in which he wrote that the edition’s ‘polemical purpose’ was ‘to dispel the illusion that Irish poetry has been written exclusively by persons of Northern provenance’.¹⁰⁸ Despite Muldoon’s Northern bias in the Faber Book, his Catholic heritage, and his ties to Heaney, he deliberately steered clear of Field Day. His close friendship with the Longleys may have influenced this stance, but most likely it was a result of his deep scepticism towards any collusion between poetry and politics—which he made clear in his introduction to the Faber Book. There, as I discussed previously, he included a BBC radio transcript of a conversation between Louis MacNeice and F. R. Higgins in which Higgins argues for a distinctive Irish poetry shaped by race and history as MacNeice (clearly the more enlightened) resists. Always a step ahead, Edna Longley chose to interpret this as a comment upon living writers rather than dead ones, writing to Muldoon after a writers’ conference in 1988 that Heaney would quickly realize he was to be identified with Higgins, Muldoon with MacNeice.¹⁰⁹ Edna Longley felt Muldoon was self-consciously fashioning himself against the (nationalist) Heaney of Field Day and North; where Heaney ¹⁰⁵ Derek Mahon, ‘The Sheep and the Goats’, review of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Paul Muldoon, Irish Times, 7 June 1986. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid. ¹⁰⁸ Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon (eds.), ‘Introduction’, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Penguin, 1990), p. xx. ¹⁰⁹ Edna Longley to Muldoon, 21 June 1988, Box 3, PMP.

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employed the language of myth, she suggested, ‘Muldoon blows the whistle on the conspiracy between myth and cliche’.¹¹⁰ Whether or not this was true, these two poets came to share an increasingly uneasy relationship after the publication of North (which, notably, Muldoon all but ignored in his Faber Book). Indeed, several Muldoon poems parody their Heaney counterparts, such as the following stanza of ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’: Gallogly lies down in the sheugh to munch through a Beauty of Bath. He repeats himself, Bath, under his garlic-breath. Sheugh, he says. Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage.¹¹¹

Here Muldoon parodies ‘Broagh’, in which Heaney invokes a place name Protestants and Catholics could both pronounce, but which ‘the strangers found | difficult to manage’, to convey hope for mutual understanding. As Neil Corcoran and Edna Longley have pointed out, Muldoon’s revision of this poem is perhaps a comment upon Heaney’s political naivety, one which ‘offers us a Paul Muldoon who, once tutored by Seamus Heaney in the School of English at Queen’s, goes and does quite otherwise’.¹¹² Earlier in the poem Muldoon alludes to a young woman reminiscent of the ‘Little adulteress’ in Heaney’s ‘Punishment’: Someone on their way to early Mass will find her hog-tied to the chapel gates— O Child of Prague— big-eyed, anorexic. The lesson for today is pinned to her bomber jacket. It seems to read Keep Off the Grass. Her lovely head has been chopped and changed. For Beatrice, whose fathers ¹¹⁰ Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, 38. ¹¹¹ Paul Muldoon, Quoof (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 49. ¹¹² Neil Corcoran, ‘ “A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59: 3 (1998), 562; 563; Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, 38.

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knew Louis Quinze, to have come to this, her perruque of tar and feathers.¹¹³

Here there is no historical or aesthetic distance to temper the reader’s reaction to the horror. Where Heaney uses poetic language to gloss over the gory details of torture, Muldoon’s Beatrice is ‘hog-tied | to the chapel gates’. The effect is consequently more grotesque, and more disturbing, than the delicate portrait of the frail, naked young girl whose nipples Heaney tenderly describes as ‘amber beads’.¹¹⁴ Muldoon further undermines Heaney’s temptation to eroticize his Jutland martyrs (in ‘Bog Queen’, ‘The Grabaulle Man’, ‘Punishment’, etc.) by using hard, consonantal language in contrast to Heaney’s soft, long vowels: Beatrice’s head is ‘chopped | and changed’, while the bog girl’s is simply ‘shaved’. Muldoon’s version of this ‘punishment’ is a criticism of Heaney, akin to Edna Longley’s, for softening the blows of tribal violence and for eroticizing martyrdom. The entire premiss of ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ may, in fact, stand as a revision of political themes presented in North: Heaney’s grave, slow, deliberate tone of inexorability is replaced by the quickness and lightness with which the main character, Gallogly, shifts into various guises and locations through Muldoon’s loose sonnets. Heaney’s ‘artful voyeur’, on the other hand, speaks through verses weighted to the ground. Muldoon has more fun at Heaney’s expense when Alice A. ‘gobbles a dozen Chesapeakes’ in the oyster bar at Grand Central—perhaps a playful subversion of the self-scrutiny and guilt which are the subjects of Heaney’s ‘Oysters’.¹¹⁵ Where Heaney chews deliberately, Muldoon gobbles. No doubt such subversions pleased Edna Longley, who continually reads the poets against one another in her critical essays, often finding in Muldoon a more (politically) sophisticated treatment of a theme borrowed from Heaney—‘a Joyce to Heaney’s Corkery’.¹¹⁶ Both, in their ways, have disavowed what they see as Heaney’s political posturing: Longley in her scepticism towards North, Muldoon in poems such as ‘The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants’. Yet Muldoon’s parodies have perhaps just as much to do with competitive subversion as they do with politics. As Neil Corcoran has noted, Muldoon’s review of Station ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶

Muldoon, Quoof, 43. Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 37. Muldoon, Quoof, 51. Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, 38.

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Island—in which he singles out the Muldoonian ‘Widgeon’ for praise and admonishes Heaney to ‘resist more firmly the idea that he must be the best Irish poet since Yeats’—must be read in its context of pupil writing to teacher.¹¹⁷ Heaney, for his part, continued to champion Muldoon’s work, notably against the objections of John Carey.¹¹⁸ Although by this time the Ulster Renaissance was over, the Northern poets were attracting an international audience, and their individual and collective fame was growing with each passing year. Longley would continue to fund literary ventures and individual writers at the Northern Ireland Arts Council, while Edna Longley would become one of the most formidable poetry critics in the British Isles. Ormsby and others would keep the Honest Ulsterman running as Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Simmons, and Montague continued to give readings at home and abroad. Heaney would land Robert Lowell’s old job at Harvard, and become a household name in America, Ireland, and Britain, while Muldoon would continue to dazzle and tease the literati from his post at Princeton; both would be elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Mahon and Longley, for their part, would win greater recognition and eloquent critical champions of their own; at the same time, Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian would find a receptive audience in a place where poets had once despaired of finding a voice, much less listeners. Though begrudgery would surface when Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, his peers none the less recognized the award as a triumph for Northern Ireland, for Belfast, for anyone who had sat in Hobsbaum’s smoky flat in the early sixties and listened to a group of young poets nervously read their new work. Longley wrote Heaney a letter of congratulation that, though brief, brimmed with nostalgia: I’m very happy for you and pleased for poetry that the prize has gone to such a wonderfully gifted writer. I’ve been remembering the early days of our friendship and apprenticeship, the first poems, the booze-ups and car-rides: all of that ¹¹⁷ Quoted in Corcoran, ‘ “A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, 571. ¹¹⁸ In 1988, Heaney was awarded a literary prize by the Sunday Times. In his acceptance speech, he thanked John Carey—who had recently praised The Haw Lantern but berated Muldoon’s Meeting the British in the paper—but defended Muldoon, saying, ‘It is not so long ago indeed that I experienced a sharp regret that John Carey’s unstinted praise of work that I had done had also provided the occasion for his fierce underestimation of work by a friend and countryman of mine.’ Seamus Heaney, ‘Anglo-Irish Occasions’, London Review of Books, 10: 9 (5 May 1988), 9. Quoted in Corcoran, ‘ “A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, 568–9.

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adds to the present excitement. I feel very proud of you and what you have achieved. Good on ye, Big Shay.¹¹⁹

Longley’s words were not just flattery, and Heaney admitted as much when he told him his letter ‘Meant more than the usual congratulatory exclamations.’¹²⁰ The debates were not over, nor was the air entirely clear of resentment, yet this exchange shows a desire on the poets’ part to put aside old grievances. Later, in his Nobel speech, Heaney would credit not only poetry but also the achievement of his fellow Irish poets: ‘I ask you to do what Yeats asked his audience to do and think of the achievement of Irish poets and dramatists and novelists over the past forty years, among whom I am proud to count great friends.’¹²¹ This expression of gratitude was not empty rhetoric. Despite the events that had strained relations between the Belfast poets, one might just imagine Longley, Mahon, or Muldoon— had they been in Heaney’s place that night—also quoting Yeats: Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.¹²² ¹¹⁹ Longley to Heaney, n.d. (c.1995), 15a, MLP. ¹²⁰ Heaney to Longley, 19 Oct. 1995, 15a, MLP. ¹²¹ Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 462. ¹²² William Butler Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 604. Quoted in Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, 462.

Bibliography UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL correspondence Cited correspondence of Heaney, Mahon, the Longleys, Simmons, Muldoon, and all others except Louis MacNeice comes from the Michael Longley Papers (MLP), the Derek Mahon Papers (DMP), the James Simmons Papers (JSP), the Paul Muldoon Papers (PMP), the Edna Longley Papers (ELP), and the Seamus Heaney Papers (SHP) at the Special Collections Archives, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. See footnotes for box numbers of cited letters. See also the Irish Literary Collections Portal online for finding aids to these collections at Emory. belfast group ‘groupsheets’ The Groupsheets of Heaney, Mahon, and Longley are held in Box 60, MLP, Special Collections Archives, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Many are also available in duplicate at the Special Collections Archive, Queen’s University Belfast. bbc archival material: Information regarding BBC post-war poetry programmes in Chapter 4 comes from the Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Louis MacNeice Papers, BBC Written Archives, Caversham, Reading, England. Bell, Sam Hanna, et al., ‘New Writing in Ireland’, BBC Radio 4 script, recorded in Belfast, broadcast Apr. 1971, Box 30, MLP. Deane, Seamus, E-mail to author, 28 Jan. 1999. Grennan, Eamon, Interview with Derek Mahon, 1995, with edits by Mahon, typed MS, Box 34, DMP, published as ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXIII’, Paris Review, 154 (2000), 151–78. Hammond, David, Heaney, Seamus, and Longley, Michael, ‘Room to Rhyme’ Poetry Tour Programme, 1968, Folder 214, JSP. —— —— —— and Mahon, Derek, ‘Books, Plays, Poems, Part I’, script of BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4 (Schools) programme, recorded in Belfast, broadcast Feb. 1970, Box 39, MLP. Heaney, Seamus, ‘For the Commander of the Eliza’, poem, typed MS, part of Groupsheet, Box 60, MLP. —— ‘Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966’, poem, typed MS, part of Groupsheet, Box 60, MLP.

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—— ‘Requiem for the Irish Rebels’, poem, typed MS, part of Groupsheet, Box 60, MLP. —— ‘Soliloquy for an Old Resident’, poem, typed MS, part of Groupsheet, Box 60, MLP. —— ‘Tweed’, poem, typed MS, part of Groupsheet, Box 60, MLP. —— ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, Richard Ellmann lecture, delivered at Emory University, 12 Apr. 1988, Box 1, SHP. —— Letter to author, 24 Jan. 2000. —— and Longley, Michael, ‘Soundings’, unedited script of BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4 programme, recorded in Belfast, broadcast 5 Feb. 1970, Box 39, MLP. Hill, Ian (ed.), Festival, 1, programme for the Belfast Festival at Queen’s, Nov. 1965, Special Collections Archive, Queen’s University Belfast. Hobsbaum, Philip, Tape-recorded interview with author, Glasgow, 27 Oct. 2000. —— E-mail to author, 25 Jan. 2005. Johnston, Dillon, Unedited interview with Michael Longley, typed MS, n.d., Box 43, MLP, edited version published as ‘Q & A: Michael Longley’, Irish Literary Supplement, 5: 2 (1986), 20–2. Longley, Michael, ‘Leaving Inishmore’, poem, typed MS, part of Groupsheet, Box 60, MLP. —— Draft review of Ariel, by Sylvia Plath, handwritten MS, n.d., Box 36, MLP. —— Draft of ‘Introduction’ in Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, typed MS (with handwritten marginalia) regarding the social role of the artist in a time of crisis, beginning, ‘Confronted with tragedy . . .’, n.d., Box 35, MLP. —— Draft of ‘Michael Longley’ in ‘The State of Poetry: A Symposium’, typed MS, n.d. (c.1972), Box 37, MLP. —— ‘For Derek, Seamus & Jimmy’, poem, handwritten MS, n.d., Box 17, MLP. —— ‘To Derek Mahon’, poem, typed MS, n.d., Box 16, MLP. —— Handwritten marginalia on A. N. Wilson, ‘A Bloodless Miss’, review of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ed. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, Spectator, 27 Nov. 1982, Box 48, MLP. —— Untitled obituary for John Hewitt, typed MS, n.d. (1987), Box 37, MLP. —— ‘Ulster Poetry’, typed MS, n.d., Box 37, MLP. —— Untitled handwritten MS regarding the phenomenon of contemporary Ulster poetry, beginning, ‘In 1979, Frank Ormsby . . .’, n.d., Box 37, MLP. —— Untitled handwritten MS regarding personal background and the phenomenon of contemporary Ulster poetry, beginning, ‘1) Interest in Writing’, n.d., Box 37, MLP. —— E-mail to author, 12 Jan. 2002. —— Letter to author, 27 Jan. 2002.

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Longley, Michael, Mahon, Derek, Muldoon, Paul, and Ormsby, Frank, ‘New Writing in Ireland’, unedited BBC script, produced by Sam Hanna Bell, broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland Radio 4, Apr. 1971, Box 39, MLP. McDiarmid, Lucy, Unedited interview with Derek Mahon, typed MS, 1991, Box 34, DMP, edited version published as ‘Q & A with Derek Mahon’, Irish Literary Supplement, 10: 2 (1991), 27–8. McGrath, Niall, Interview with Paul Muldoon at the John Hewitt International Festival, Co. Antrim, typed MS, 1994, Box 34, PMP. McSweeney, Siobhan, Unedited interview with Michael Longley, typed MS, 1981, Box 43, MLP, edited version published as ‘The Poets’ Picture of Education’, Crane Bag, 7: 2 (1983), 134–42. Mahon, Derek, ‘The Sheep and the Goats’, draft review of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Paul Muldoon, typed MS with handwritten marginalia, 1986, Box 4, PMP. This review later appeared, with changes, in the Irish Times, 7 June 1986. —— Untitled verse letter to Michael Longley, typed MS, n.d. (1970), Box 18, MLP. Muldoon, Paul, Interview with author, Oxford, 17 Nov. 1999. —— Notes for Chez Moy: A Critical Autobiography, typed MS, n.d., Box 29, PMP. Rodgers, W. R., ‘Memorandum on Literature and Writers in Northern Ireland’, handwritten MS, 1965, Box 128, MLP. Simmons, James, Prospectus for the Honest Ulsterman, Box 17, JSP. —— ‘Five Year Plan’, handwritten MS, n.d., James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. —— Journal entry, typed MS, 1970, James Simmons’s scrapbook, JSP. Smyth, Damian, Telephone interview with author, Oxford–Belfast, 7 Nov. 1998. PRIMARY PUBLISHED MATERIAL i. poetry collections and anthologies, plays, novels, and uncollected poems Auden, W. H., and MacNeice, Louis, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937). —— and —— Letters from Iceland, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). Carson, Ciaran, Belfast Confetti (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1989). Deane, Seamus, ‘Pause’, Gorgon, 2, Queen’s University Belfast (May 1959). —— While Jewels Rot (Belfast: Festival Publications, 1967). Fallon, Peter, and Mahon, Derek (eds.), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Penguin, 1990). Foley, Michael, Heil Hitler (Portrush: Ulsterman Publications, 1969). —— The Acne and the Ecstasy (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1971). Friel, Brian, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).

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Index Adorno, Theodor 171, 193 AE, see George Russell Akhmatova, Anna 26 Allen, Michael 55, 68, 106–8, 123, 186 Allen, Walter 87 Allingham, William 118 Allison, Jonathan 106 Alvarez, A. 26, 85, 136, 192 Amis, Kingsley 50, 51, 90 Aran Islands 160–8, 176 Arts Council of Great Britain 88 n. 55, 116–17 Arts Council of Northern Ireland 8, 10, 28, 76, 87–8, 144–5, 178–9 Honest Ulsterman, patronage of 98, 144, 145 n. 9 sponsorship of poetry tours 81, 84 support of Ulster literary magazines 145 n. 9 support of Ulster writers 145 n. 9 Asekoff, Louis 31 Atlantis 193–4 Auden, W. H. 7, 29, 46, 50, 127–31, 136, 140, 152 Letters from Iceland 184 Banister, Rodney 47 Banville, John 151 n. 24 Baudelaire, Charles 24 BBC 2, 49, 52, 69, 74, 76, 86, 89–90, 93–5, 138, 202–3 The Arts in Ulster programme 90, 121 as employer of Belfast poets 121–2, 150–1, 179, 182 and exclusion of Catholics 120 ‘The Northern Drift’ programme 86 and regionalism 120–2 ‘Soundings’ 150–1 Beat poets 88 Beckett, Samuel 29 Belfast Festival 69, 73–4, 77–8, 80, 86, 142, 176, 182 Belfast Festival pamphlet series 74, 76, 80, 84, 142–3 Belfast Group workshop 1–7, 9, 13, 43–4, 52–71, 76, 87, 101, 176, 206; see also Belfast poetry coterie

discussion format 54–5, 57, 61–2 favoured aesthetic 62–71 as forum for cultural exploration 61, 142 founding members 55 Philip Hobsbaum, as chairman of 1–4, 6, 8, 12–13, 42–4, 52–71, 73, 101, 121, 142, 176 as label 1, 6–7 later additions 55 F. R. Leavis, influence of 54–5, 62, 68 and mutual influence 161 and provincial identity 44, 64 resentment towards 175–6 and rivalry 68 and Ulster Renaissance 142 Belfast poetry coterie 1–14, 57, 65, 68, 96–8, 99, 177, 202; see also Belfast Group workshop American influences 106–8 American poetry scene, criticism of 108–11 and ‘Belfast Group’ label 1, 6–7 and Belfast Group workshop 52–71 and collaboration 7–10, 156–72, 180, 191 and Dublin 22–30, 28 n. 67, 65, 76–80, 104, 119, 153–6 English influences 77, 105–6, 108 and formalism 104–6 and group promotion 142–56 Honest Ulsterman, identification with 143 influence of John Hewitt 7, 104, 112–13, 122–7, 141 influence of Louis MacNeice 7, 104, 127–41 mutual influence 156–72 and Northern aesthetic 105–6, 111, 113, 141–2; see also regionalism poetic influences 7; see also Seamus Heaney; Philip Hobsbaum; Michael Longley; Derek Mahon; Paul Muldoon; James Simmons and provincial identity 44 and regionalism 106, 126–8, 153–6 resentment towards 175–7

234

Index

Belfast poetry coterie (cont.): reviews of 151–3, 151 n. 24, 152 n. 30 and rivalry 175–207, 206 and the Troubles 11–12, 172–5 The Bell 118–19, 119 n. 78 Bell, Sam Hanna 43, 91–3, 112, 115–16, 119 n. 78, 120–1, 144, 151 n. 24 Betjeman, John 92 Bhabha, Homi 164 Bloody Sunday 11, 69, 101, 175, 189–90 Bloom, Harold 2, 14, 131–3 The Anxiety of Influence 2, 14, 132 Blunt, Anthony 136 Bly, Robert 188 Boddy, Michael 48 Bodley Head, the 96 Boland, Eavan 43, 153 Door into the Dark, review of 85 and Field Day 198 and Eamon Grennan 32 and literary sexism 29 and Michael Longley 33, 79–80 and Derek Mahon 28–30, 33, 79 and ‘The Northern Writers’ Crisis of Conscience’ 173–4 and Trinity coterie 65 Bond, John 55 Boyd, John 5, 112, 115, 118, 120–1, 178, 202 Boyle, John 20–1 Braidwood, John 37 Brautigan, Richard 99 Brearton, Fran 68, 72, 105, 107, 164 n. 72, 171 n. 101 Brecht, Bertolt 24 Bredin, Hugh 55 Brooke, Sir Basil, see Lord Brookeborough Brookeborough, Lord 20, 52, 119 Brown, Terence 105–6, 123, 128–9, 167 Brownjohn, Alan 49, 106 Bull, Iris 55 Buller, Norman 55 Burroughs, William 98 Butler Education Act 37, 88 n. 55 Butter, Peter 41 Buxton, Rachel 85 n. 45, 106 The Calendar of Modern Letters 45–6 Cambridge Group 47–8 Campbell, Joseph 118 Camus, Albert 25, 29–30 Capella 80 n. 31

Carey, John 206 Carson, Ciaran 13, 14, 55, 69, 102–3, 149, 194–5, 206 ‘Farset’ 14 Chadbon, John 98 Chambers, Harry 55, 74 n. 12, 76, 90, 143 Chaucer, Geoffrey 31, 36 civil rights movement 72, 87, 95–6, 101, 188–90 Clarke, Austin 26, 33, 53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3, 8 collaboration, see Belfast poetry coterie; Belfast Group workshop Connolly, James 20 Conquest, Robert 50 Corcoran, Neil 3, 118, 129, 137 n. 170, 138–9, 149 n. 19, 204, 206 n. 117 Corkery, Daniel 205 Cowan, Joe 18 Crane Bag 194, 197–9 Crane, Hart 24, 108, 154 Criterion 46 cummings, e.e. 23–4, 28, 108 Dante Alighieri 9 Davidson, Donald 46 Davie, Donald 50–1 Davis, Tony 47 Dawe, Gerald 162–3, 200 Day Lewis, Cecil 136 Deane, Seamus 6, 7, 40, 80, 127, 182 n. 31, 194 and Atlantis 193–4 and Belfast poetry coterie 143 early pamphlets 74 and Field Day 197–9, 201 poetic influences 37–9 at St Columb’s 36–37 and Seamus Heaney 12, 15, 36–42, 105, 190 Dedalus, Stephen 30, 36, 50, 92, 134, 141, 169; see also James Joyce de la Mare, Walter 21 Delta 48–9 Dickinson, Emily 7, 106 dinnseanchas 124 Dodds, E. R. 127 Dolmen Press 26, 75 Donne, John 31, 169 Doolittle, Hilda 3 Douglas, Keith 105

Index Drummond, Gavin 184, 185 n. 39, 186 n. 44 Dryden, John 184 Dublin-Belfast rivalry, see Belfast poetry coterie Dublin literary scene, see Belfast poetry coterie Dublin Magazine 77, 79–80 Dugdale, Norman 55, 70 Dunn, Douglas 147 n. 17, 151 n. 24 Durcan, Paul 28 n. 67, 152, 155 Eliot, T. S. 8–9, 38, 46 n. 9, 51, 60, 106 Collected Poems 60 ‘The Waste Land’ 9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 106 Emmerson, Michael 73–4 Empson, William 46, 51, 62 Eric Gregory Award 74, 76–7, 80 Evans, Estyn 123 n. 97 Ewart, Gavin 91, 103, 194 existentialism 25, 30, 135 Faber and Faber 74–5, 84–5 Fallon, Peter 80 n. 31, 187 n. 46 Ferguson, Samuel 118 Fiacc, Padraic 78, 81, 85, 90, 93 Field Day 13, 103, 127, 197–203 First World War 15, 17, 56, 105–6 Flanagan, T. P. 112 Foley, Michael 57, 93, 97–9, 100–1, 143, 148, 155, 175–8, 194 Forster, E. M., see Howard’s End Foster, John Wilson 123 Foster, R. F. 52, 72–3 Friel, Brian 73, 127, 197, 200–2 Translations 198, 200 Frost, Robert 7, 38, 64, 85, 104, 106–7, 123–4, 150 ‘The Gift Outright’ 107 Fuller, Roy 50 Gallagher, Maurice 55 Gallen, John 112 Gascoyne, David 50 Gide, André 25 Ginsberg, Allen 108–9 Glob, P. V. The Bog People 189 Gonne, Maud 21 Gorgon 39, 40 Graham, W. S. 62–3 ‘The Nightfishing’ 62–3

235

Graves, Robert 24, 150 Greacen, Robert 112, 115–16, 118, 121, 144–5, 202 Northern Harvest 115 Greene, Graham 92 Gregory, Lucille 55 Grennan, Eamon 19, 28 n. 67, 31–2, 35 Guevara, Che 95 Gunn, Thom 50–1 Hall, Donald 3, 26, 69 Hammond, David 73, 81, 85, 88, 112, 121, 150, 195, 197 Hardy, Thomas 37 Harland & Wolff shipyard 19 Harrison, Tony 58, 87, 91, 93, 194 Aikin Mata: The Lysistrata of Aristophanes 87 Hartnett, Michael 28 n. 67 Harvey, John 55, 74 Hazlitt, William 37, 38 Heaney, Marie 55, 59, 69, 112, 145 Heaney, Seamus American audience 200 American influences 38, 106, 108, 188–9 American poetry scene, criticism of 108–11 Anglo-Saxon poetry, influence of 37 and the Aran Islands 160–3 and the BBC 121–2, 150–1 Belfast Festival, participation in 73, 80–1 Belfast Group workshop, chairmanship of 8, 12, 68–9, 81 Belfast Group workshop, participation in 1, 6, 7, 13, 42–3, 53, 54, 58, 61–4, 70–1 Belfast Group workshop, as star of 63–4, 66, 177 and Belfast poetry coterie 1–14, 42, 85, 105, 141, 143, 145–52, 155–8, 160–2, 164, 168–72, 158, 177, 191, 206–7 and Catholic identity 38–9, 72–3, 81, 106, 123, 126 n. 106, 169, 174, 189–91, 198–200 and collaborative exchange 8, 105, 158 and contempt for pretension 5 n. 22 and Seamus Deane 12, 15, 36–42, 190 Dublin literary scene, involvement in 77, 80 early fame 69, 75, 77, 81, 86, 177

236

Index

Heaney, Seamus (cont.): early publications 53, 74, 81 and the efficacy of art 73 and T. S. Eliot 60 English poetic influences 37–8, 53, 77, 105–6, 108 and Field Day 127, 197–200, 202 and formalism 105 Robert Frost, influence of 64, 85, 106–7 group identity, uneasiness with 4, 8, 86, 191–2 at Harvard 200, 206 and John Hewitt 53, 112–13, 122–7 and Philip Hobsbaum 53–4, 55, 58, 64–7, 69–71 Honest Ulsterman, contributor to 93, 194 hostile reviews of 85, 156, 194–5 and Ted Hughes 53, 85, 162 identification with Michael Longley and Derek Mahon 57, 88–9, 101, 150–1, 177, 182, 192 and insecurity 2, 24, 60, 65–7, 70 and Irish literature 40, 53 and Patrick Kavanagh 53, 73, 137–8 and Michael Longley 10, 56–7, 65–6, 68, 70, 81–4, 127, 141, 145–7, 150–1, 157–8, 162, 174–5, 195–7, 206–7 and Louis MacNeice 40, 53, 122–3, 127–9, 134, 136–41 and Derek Mahon 36, 57, 65–6, 70, 84, 127, 141, 150–1, 154, 157–8, 174–5 modernism, distrust of 60, 85 and Paul Muldoon 84, 141, 157–8, 204, 206 Nobel Prize award 41, 206–7 Northern aesthetic, proponent of 105, 112–13 and Northern reticence 61 and Northern Review 76 poetic influences 7, 37–8, 53, 104–41, 157–8, 160–2, 164, 168–72, 158, 188–9 poetry readings and tours 81–5, 88 and political optimism 72–3, 81, 96 political pessimism 73, 103, 189 and provincial identity 2, 36, 44, 60, 82 and Queen’s University Belfast 37–40, 76, 81, 84, 112

and regionalism 112–13, 126, 202 ‘renaissance’, use of 71, 74, 76 resentment towards 175–80 residence abroad 10, 69, 109, 111, 123, 168, 180, 188–91 and rural themes 40, 53, 75–6, 84, 123–6 at St Columb’s 36–7 and James Simmons 70, 174–5, 191–3 Threshold, guest editor of 84–5 and the Troubles 65, 174–5, 189–90 as ‘Ulster poet’ 5, 154 Unionist hegemony, subversion of 37, 61–2, 81, 189 and Yeats 38, 137, 206–7 youth and adolescence 36–7 ‘Act of Union’ 161 ‘An Advancement of Learning’ 53 ‘Aran’ 39 Beowulf 37 ‘Bogland’ 113 ‘Bog Queen’ 205 ‘Broagh’ 204 ‘Bye-Child’ 170–1 ‘Churning Day’ 75, 84 n. 39 ‘Clearances’ 136 Death of a Naturalist 1, 64–5, 75–6, 81, 123, 161, 195–6 ‘Death of a Naturalist’ 64–5, 123 ‘Digging’ 84 n. 39, 150 n. 20 ‘The Diviner’ 75, 84 n. 39, 123 Door into the Dark 85, 123, 195 ‘Eel Returning’ 84 n. 39 ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ 84 n. 39 ‘Follower’ 157, 150 n. 20 ‘For the Commander of the Eliza’ 61–2 ‘For Marie’ 84 n. 39 ‘Frontiers of Writing’ 107 The Government of the Tongue 72 ‘The Grabaulle Man’ 205 ‘The Harvest Bow’ 197 The Haw Lantern 206 n. 118 ‘Honeymoon Flight’ 169 ‘Last Look’ 84 n. 39 ‘Letter to an Editor’ 101 ‘The Loaning’ 171 n. 100 A Lough Neagh Sequence 74 ‘Lovers on Aran’ 161–2, 164 ‘Mid-Term Break’ 53 ‘The Ministry of Fear’ 38, 40 North 13, 37, 102, 140, 161, 190, 194–5, 201, 203–5

Index ‘October Thought’ 53 An Open Letter 198 n. 86, 200 ‘Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966’ 62 ‘The Peninsula’ 56, 84 n. 39, 124–6, 168 ‘Personal Helicon’ 158 ‘Poem’ 160 n. 61 ‘Postscript’ 125, 168 ‘Punishment’ 204–5 ‘Reaping in Heat’ 40 ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ 84 n. 39 ‘Requiem for the Irish Rebels, Wexford, 1798’ 62 ‘Scaffolding’ 160 n. 61 ‘Shore Woman’ 161–2 ‘Soliloquy for an Old Resident’ 62 Station Island 205 ‘Station Island’ 171 n. 100 ‘Storm on the Island’ 161–3 ‘Synge on Aran’ 161 ‘Thatcher’ 150 ‘The Tollund Man’ 189 ‘Tractors’ 53 ‘Turkeys Observed’ 53 ‘Tweed’ 62 ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’ 171 n. 100 ‘Westering’ 168–9 ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ 60–1, 171 n. 100 ‘Widgeon’ 157, 206 Hederman, Mark Patrick 197–9 Hemingway, Ernest 38 Herbert, George 24, 31 Hewitt, John 7, 12, 28, 43, 53, 73–4, 78, 84 and Belfast poetry coterie 122, 148–9 and Seamus Heaney 53, 75, 112–13, 122–7 and the Honest Ulsterman 90–1, 93, 127 influence on Belfast poets 104, 112–13, 122–7, 179 intellectual influences 114 move to Coventry 122 and Northern aesthetic 107 and Protestant identity 113, 122–3, 125 and Rann 119 n. 78 and regionalism 94, 104, 112–16, 118, 121–7, 145, 154, 156, 200–2 and socialism 114 ‘The Alder Stick’ 123

237

Collected Poems 104, 125, 143 ‘The Colony’ 126 ‘Glenariffe and Parkmore’ 124–6 ‘An Irishman in Coventry’ 122 ‘The Witch’ 123 Hibernia 75–6, 77–8, 81, 86, 101, 156, 174 Hicks, Jerry 84 Higgins, F. R. 138–41, 203 Hill, Geoffrey 82, 92, 104, 110 Hobsbaum, Hannah 54, 59 Hobsbaum, Philip aesthetic sensibility 62–4 Belfast Festival, participation in 73 Belfast Group workshop, chairman of 1–4, 6, 8, 12–13, 42–4, 52–71, 73, 101, 121, 142, 176 and Cambridge Group 47–8 and Delta 48–9, 66 departure from Belfast 158 early youth 45 and Glasgow Group 69 and Seamus Heaney 41, 53–4, 63–7, 69 and the Honest Ulsterman 93 and Ted Hughes 48–9, 51, 66 Jewish identity 59–60 and F. R. Leavis 45–7, 89, 105 London connections 2, 60, 66, 69 and London Group 48–51 and Philip Larkin 59 and Michael Longley 25, 56–7, 67–8, 181 and Derek Mahon 4, 25, 60, 70 modernism, distrust of 51, 64 and the Movement 51, 64 and Paul Muldoon 84 and the Northern Review 76 provincial identity 59–60, 64 and James Simmons 58, 98, 181 theories of language 63 ‘The Frog Prince’ 64 The Place’s Fault 51, 59, 64 A Theory of Communication 51, 62–3 Hogan, Desmond 103 Holloway, John 50 Honest Ulsterman, the 3, 12, 58, 70, 74, 80–1, 85–103, 152, 174, 206; see also James Simmons Belfast poets, as mouthpiece of 97–9, 148–9 denounced by church 93, 99

238

Index

Honest Ulsterman, the (cont.): and Dublin rivalry 80, 155, 178, 193–4 and Louis MacNeice 128 and regionalism 77, 89, 91, 93–5, 97–8, 127, 201 reviews of 91–3, 91 n. 67 as target of investigation 98 and the Troubles 95–6, 100–2 and Ulster Renaissance 142 Holzapfel, Rudi 26 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 7, 53 Horton, Patricia 167 Howard’s End 60 Hughes, Eamonn 166 Hughes, Ted 7, 24, 26, 48–9, 51, 66, 82, 104, 121, 192 influence on Seamus Heaney 53, 85, 162 The Hawk in the Rain 162 Lupercal 53 ‘Wind’ 162 ‘The Woman With Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’ 48 hunger strikes 200–1 Hutchinson, Pearse 26 Huws, Daniel 48 Icarus 23–6, 28, 39–40, 77 Industrial Revolution 45 Inst, see Royal Belfast Academical Institution Ireland, Denis 93 Irish America 199–200 Irish Literary Revival 139, 161, 164, 197 Irish Republican Army 17, 81, 95, 188, 199 Jarrell, Randall 38 Jennings, Elizabeth 50 Johnston, Denis 20 Johnston, Dillon 1, 3, 18, 110 n. 39 Jones, David 47 Joseph, Rosemary 49 Joyce, James 38, 134, 137, 205; see also Stephen Dedalus Kavanagh, Patrick 7, 18, 20, 25–6, 73, 104–5, 123, 137–8 Come Dance with Kitty Stobling 26 The Great Hunger 53 Kearney, Richard 197 Keats, John 8, 21, 37

Kendall, Tim 85 n. 45, 139 n. 178, 169 Kennelly, Brendan 26–7, 30, 43, 65, 80, 90–1, 93, 97, 153, 155, 194 Kilroy, Thomas 197 Kinsella, Thomas 6, 26, 33, 53 Kirkland, Richard 44 n. 4, 92 n. 73, 100, 105, 127, 155–6, Lagan 112, 117 Larkin, Philip 7, 24, 26, 50–1, 59, 77–8, 82, 104, 110, 135, 150 The Less Deceived 24, 77–8 The Whitsun Weddings 24 Lawrence, D. H. 24, 93 Leavis, F. R. 45–7, 54, 89, 95, 105–6 Culture and Environment 45 Lefevere, André 132 Leitch, Maurice 90 Lemass, Sean 52 Lerner, Laurence 37, 40 Levenson, Christopher 47 Lewis, Cecil Day 86 Lodge, David 45, 50 London Group 48–51, 106 Longley, Edna and Belfast Group workshop 42–3, 52, 55–6, 59 and Belfast poetry coterie 6, 14, 68, 148–9, 196–7 Belfast poetry, as scholar of 3, 14, 106, 108, 206 and Crane Bag 198–200, 203–4 criticism of American poetry scene 111 n. 46 criticism of North 195, 203–5 Door into the Dark, review of 85, 195 and Dublin rivalry 154–5, 155 n. 41 and Field Day 198–200, 203–4 and Seamus Heaney 195–7, 203–4 on intertextuality 11 and Michael Longley 68, 108, 165, 180, 196–7 and Louis MacNeice 128, 131 and Derek Mahon 32, 34–5, 108, 152, 159, 165 and Paul Muldoon 84, 203–5 and James Simmons 93, 95, 99–100, 180 at Trinity 28, 65, 108 Longley, Michael American influences 107–8 American poetry scene, criticism of 108–11

Index and Aran Islands 160–5, 167–8 and Arts Council of Northern Ireland 19, 96, 130, 143–5, 201, 206 and the BBC 121–2 Belfast Festival, participation in 73, 80 and Belfast Group workshop 1, 2, 6, 7, 42–3, 55–7, 59, 61–2, 162 and Belfast Group workshop, hostility to 3, 53–4, 62 and Belfast Group workshop, influence of 67 and Belfast poetry coterie 1–14, 42, 68–9, 105, 143–72, 177, 196, 207 and Eavan Boland 33, 43, 65, 79–80 and the classics 18, 22–3, 25, 27, 43 and collaborative exchange 6–7, 105, 156–72, 180 and cummings, e. e. 23–4 and Dublin literary scene 22–30, 28 n. 67, 65, 77–80 early fame 74, 77, 81, 86 early pamphlets 74 and efficacy of art 10, 11, 96, 147, 174 n. 8 and English influences 77, 82, 105–6, 108 and European poetry 26 and father 16–17, 56 and First World War 17, 56, 174 n. 8 and formalism 104–6 group identity, uneasiness with 3, 8, 19, 86 and Seamus Heaney 11, 33, 56, 66–7, 68, 70, 81–4, 145–7, 150–1, 157–8, 162–3, 173–5, 195–7, 206–7 and John Hewitt 28, 112–13, 122, 127 and Geoffrey Hill 82, 110 and Philip Hobsbaum 25, 56–7, 67–8, 181 and the Honest Ulsterman 90, 93, 98–9, 103, 194 hostile reviews of 156 and Ted Hughes 24, 26, 82 identification with Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon 57, 88–9, 101, 150–1, 177, 182 and Inst 17–19, 21–2, 81 and Irish literature 18, 24, 26 and Irishness 22–3, 56, 185 n. 39 and Patrick Kavanagh 25–6, 73 and Brendan Kennelly 43, 26–7, 65, 80

239 and Thomas Kinsella 26 and music 21, 84 and Philip Larkin 24, 26, 77, 82, 110 ‘Letters’ controversy 183–8 and Robert Lowell 24, 107–8 and Louis MacNeice 24–6, 28, 112, 122, 127–31, 134–6, 138, 140–1, 162, 164 and Derek Mahon 11, 12, 15, 21, 24–8, 30–6, 43, 68, 70, 86, 145–7, 150–2, 159–60, 173–5, 183–8 and John Montague 26 and the Movement 105 and Paul Muldoon 68, 84, 157, 203 and Richard Murphy 26 Night-Crossing, review of 35, 151 and Northern aesthetic 105–6, 113 Northern poetry, promotion of 76, 98–9, 143–56 and Northern Review 76 and Wilfred Owen 174 n. 8 poetic influences 7, 20, 23–4, 26, 67, 77, 81, 123, 104–41, 147 n. 17, 157–72 poetry readings and tours 27, 81–5 and political optimism 72, 74 Protestant identity 18, 22–3, 25, 61–2, 163, 167–8, 173–5, 185–6, 200 and provincial isolation 2, 43 and regionalism 113, 153–6, 202 resentment towards 175–6 and rivalry 10, 13–14 and ‘schizoid’ identity 12, 15–16, 18–19, 62, 104, 136, 164–5 and James Simmons 11, 70, 99, 145–7, 152, 179–82, 185 and Edward Thomas 25 at Trinity 22–8, 65, 108 the Troubles, reaction to 11, 17, 170, 173–5, 185, 189 as ‘Ulster poet’ 5, 18–19, 86, 153 and the west of Ireland 162–3 and writing blocks 34, 183 and Yeats 21, 24, 174 n. 8 youth and adolescence 15–19, 17 n. 8 ‘Alibis’ 164 An Exploded View 146, 157, 183 ‘Birthmarks’ (originally titled ‘To Derek Mahon’) 33, 62, 146, 170–2 ‘Carrigskeewaun’ 163 Causeway 127, 143, 145 ‘Christopher at Birth’ 68, 84 n. 39, 150 n. 20

240

Index

Longley, Michael (cont.): ‘Circe’ 108, 158 ‘Dr Johnson on the Hebrides’ 33, 68, 84 n. 39, 162 The Echo Gate 152 ‘Elegy for Fats Waller’ 68, 84 n. 39, 150 n. 20 ‘Emily Dickinson’ 33, 56, 84 n. 39, 150 n. 20 ‘Epithalamion’ 84 n. 39 ‘For Derek, Seamus & Jimmy’ 146–7 ‘The Freemartin’ 33 ‘Freeze-Up’ 84 n. 39 ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ 68 ‘The Hebrides’ 62, 108, 131, 161–2, 164 n. 72 ‘In Memoriam’ 17, 150 n. 20 ‘The Island’ 161–3 ‘Lares’ 123 n. 97 ‘Leaving Inishmore’ 33, 62, 84 n. 39, 131, 158 n. 54, 161–2, 164–5 ‘Letters’ 147, 147 n. 17, 183 ‘The Linen Industry’ 131, 197 ‘The Linen Workers’ 140 ‘Lore’ 163 Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 130, 135, 141 ‘Narcissus’ 33 No Continuing City 68, 85, 164 ‘No Continuing City’ 159–60 ‘The Osprey’ 84 n. 39 ‘Persephone’ 158 ‘Questionairre for Walter Mitty’ 56 ‘Remembrance Day’ 84 n. 39 ‘River and Fountain’ 42 Secret Marriages 74 ‘To Derek Mahon’ (part of ‘Letters’ sequence) 161, 164, 167–8, 186–8 ‘The West’ 163 ‘A Working Holiday’ 33 ‘Wounds’ 17 Lowell, Robert 7, 24, 26, 104, 106–8, 206 Near the Ocean 107 Lucie-Smith, Edward 49, 51, 69 Lynch, Patrick 76 Lynd, Robert 115 Lyric Theatre, Belfast 20, 52, 100 McAuley, Roisin, ‘Hobsbaum’s Choice’ 43–4, 47–9, 55, 57 MacBeth, George 49, 74 McCroskery, Lynette 55

MacDiarmid, Hugh 150 McDonald, Peter 128, 163 McFadden, Roy 43, 52, 78, 112, 115, 117–18, 119 n. 78, 121, 145 McGahern, John 93 McGann, Jerome 158 McGee, Dan 55 McGough, Roger 91, 93, 95 McGuckian, Medbh 13, 149, 206 McKinley, John 118 MacLaverty, Bernard 43–4 55, 57–8 Cal 58 McLaverty, Michael 43, 75, 112, 115, 117, 121 MacNeice, Louis 14, 50, 87, 118, 152, 167 and the BBC 122 biographical details of 133 death of 73 and Englishness 133 F. R. Higgins, BBC debate with 138–9, 203 influence on Belfast poets 7, 12, 104, 113, 122, 127–41 influence on Seamus Heaney 40, 53, 123, 127–9, 134, 136–41 influence on Michael Longley 18, 20, 24–6, 28, 66, 112, 127–31, 134–6, 138, 140–1, 162, 164, 184 influence on Derek Mahon 24–6, 29, 66, 112, 127–9, 130–2, 134, 141, 184 influence on James Simmons 128, 134 and Irishness 128–30, 133, 137, 140–1, 167 and regionalism 145, 202 and Thirties poets 129–30, 136 ‘August’ 136 Autumn Journal 130–1, 134, 136 Autumn Sequel 26, 130 ‘Belfast’ 14, 130–1, 134–5 ‘Birmingham’ 136 ‘Carrick Revisited’ 128, 137, 140–1 ‘The Casualty’ 130 ‘The Closing Album’ 130 Collected Poems 40, 104, 118, 127–8 ‘Day of Returning’ 130–1 ‘Death of an Actress’ 128, 130 ‘The Dowser’ 128 ‘The Hebrides’ 16 ‘Leaving Barra’ 131, 161, 164

Index Letters from Iceland 184 ‘Letter to Graham and Anna’ 135 ‘The Mayfly’ 128, 130–1 ‘The Mixer’ 130 ‘Morning Sun’ 136 ‘Prayer Before Birth’ 128 Selected Poems 130, 135, 141 ‘Snow’ 128, 132, 136 ‘Suite for Recorders’ 140 Ten Burnt Offerings 26 ‘Trains in the Distance’ 130 ‘Turf-Stacks’ 128 ‘Valediction’ 134 MacSimmittoon 145–6 MacSpaunday, see Thirties poets Magee, Wes 143 Mahon, Derek American influences 24, 26, 107–9 American poetry scene, criticism of 108–11 and Aran Islands 160–1, 165–6 and Arts Council of Northern Ireland 144 and Atlantis 193–4 Belfast Festival, participation in 80 and Belfast Group workshop 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 43, 55, 57, 70 and Belfast Group workshop, hostility towards 4, 53–4 and Belfast poetry coterie 1–14, 6, 105, 143, 148–61, 163, 165–8, 170–2, 158, 177, 207 and Eavan Boland 28–30, 33, 65 in Cambridge, Massachusetts 31–3, 35 in Canada 31, 35, 43 and collaborative exchange 158, 180 and Hart Crane 24, 108, 158 and Dublin literary scene 22–30, 65, 77, 80 early fame 74, 77, 80–1 early pamphlets 74, 80 English influences 77, 108 English reviews of 156 and European poetry 26 and formalism 19, 34, 104–5 and French literature 25, 27, 29–30 group identity, uneasiness with 8, 86, 202 and Seamus Heaney 33, 36, 57, 66, 70, 80–1, 84, 150–1 and John Hewitt 113, 122, 127 and Philip Hobsbaum 60, 70 and the Honest Ulsterman 90–1, 93

241 identification with Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley 57, 88–9, 101, 150–1, 177, 182 at Inst 20–2 and Irish literature 13, 20, 24, 26, 29 and Irishness 20–3 and Patrick Kavanagh 26, 73 and Brendan Kennelly 26–7, 30, 65 and Thomas Kinsella 26 and Philip Larkin 77 and ‘Letters’ controversy 185–8 and Michael Longley 12, 15, 24–8, 30–6, 57, 68, 80, 86, 145–7, 150–1, 159–60, 183–8 and Robert Lowell 24, 26, 107 and Louis MacNeice 24–6, 29, 112, 122, 127–9, 130–2, 134–5, 141 and John Montague 26, 13 n. 52 and Paul Muldoon 84, 203 and Richard Murphy 26 and Northern aesthetic 105, 113 Northern poetry, promotion of 104, 142–3, 153–6, 202 and Northern Review 76 in Paris 30–1 as poète maudit 22, 27–8 poetic influences 7, 19–20, 24, 26, 77, 104–41, 158–61, 163, 165–8, 170–2 poetry readings and tours 27, 84–5 Protestant identity 19–23, 25, 163, 167–8, 173–5, 185–6, 200 provincial isolation 2 residency abroad 80 and Dylan Thomas 21, 24 at Trinity 22–9, 65, 108 and the Troubles 173–5 as ‘Ulster poet’ 5 Ulster Renaissance, dismissal of 1 n. 2, 187 n. 46 and Yeats 20, 24, 29 youth and adolescence 19–22 ‘After the Titanic’ 33 ‘Beyond Howth Head’ 108 ‘Day Trip to Donegal’ 108, 150 n. 20 ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ 140, 171–2 ‘Ecclesiastes’ 36 ‘Girls in Their Seasons’ 34 n. 99, 159–60 ‘Grandfather’ 150 n. 20 The Hunt by Night 107

242

Index

Mahon, Derek (cont.): ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ 33, 128 n. 116, 131–2, 141 ‘In the Aran Islands’ 161, 165–7 ‘Love Poem’ 24 ‘My Wicked Uncle’ 150 n. 20 Night-Crossing 33, 35, 81, 151–2, 161 ‘Nostalgias’ 163 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry 4, 203 ‘The Poets Lie Where They Fell’ 33 ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ 150 n. 20 ‘Rathlin’ 161 The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry 187 ‘Subsidy Bungalows’ 24 ‘An Unknown Child’ 34 n. 99 ‘What Would You Say If I Were to Tell You Darling’ 34 Mallarmé, Stéphane 38 Marlowe, Christopher 38 metaphysical poets 38 Michie, James 96 Middleton, Colin 112 Miller, Karl 69, 84 Milton, John 31, 37, 70 Mitchell, Michael 55, 76 Mitchell, Rex 55 modernism 50–1, 60, 85 Montague, John and the BBC 121 and Belfast poetry coterie 13, 13 n. 52, 80, 143–4, 148–9, 154, 177, 179 and Dublin rivalry 153–4 and the Honest Ulsterman 93, 102–3, 194 as poetic influence 26, 53 poetry tours 84 as ‘Ulster poet’ 86, 154 ‘All Legendary Obstacles’ 26 ‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood’ 21 ‘The Trout’ 26 Monteith, Charles 75, 84 Moore, Brian 52, 93 Moore, George 100 Morris, Neil 47 Morrison, Blake 5, 7, 50, 117 Movement, the 5, 7, 50–1, 64, 105–6, 117 Muldoon, Paul 55, 63, 69, 74 American poetry scene, criticism of 111

American poetry, influence of 106–7 and the BBC 121 and Belfast poetry coterie 6–14, 143, 148–9, 152, 207 and Catholic identity 106, 169 and collaborative exchange 8, 68, 180 and Field Day 203 first meeting with Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley 84 and formalism 105 group identity, uneasiness with 4–5, 8, 150 and Seamus Heaney 97, 140, 156–7, 169, 203–6 and John Hewitt 126–7 and the Honest Ulsterman 85, 89, 93, 96–7, 103, 194 hostile reviews of 156 and literary production 5 and Edna Longley 203–4 and Michael Longley 68, 157, 203 and Louis MacNeice 138–41, 203 and Derek Mahon 203 modernism, distrust of 85 No Continuing City, review of 85 poetic influences 7, 84–5, 104, 106–7, 113, 156 poetry readings and tours 84 at Princeton 206 as Professor of Poetry at Oxford 206 and James Simmons 84, 96–7, 179 ‘Centrepiece’ 96 n. 93 ‘Easter Island’ 96 The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry 138, 141, 203–4 ‘Good Friday, 1971. Driving Westward’ 169 ‘Hedgehog’ 96 n. 93 ‘Immram’ 140 ‘January’ 96 Knowing My Place 74 Meeting the British 206 n. 118 ‘Meeting the British’ 107 ‘The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants’ 107, 204–5 New Weather 85 n. 45, 152, 157 ‘Poem at Eighteen’ 96 n. 93 ‘Rodgers at Loughall’ 96 n. 93 ‘Seanchas’ 96 n. 93 ‘7 Middagh St.’ 139–41 ‘Snail’ 84 ‘Stillborn’ 84 ‘Taking the Rust’ 96 n. 93, 97

Index Mumford, Lewis 114 Murphy, Michael J. 75 Murphy, Richard 26, 53 ‘The Cleggan Disaster’ 26 ‘Sailing to an Island’ 26 Myers, Lucas 48 Nationalism 72, 140, 198–201 New Criticism 46 n. 9, 105, 110 Newmann, Joan 55, 57, 59, 69, 74, 77, 96 New Northman, the 112 Northern Ireland Education Act 37 Northern Review 76–7, 80, 98, 142, 201 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 195, 198, 202 O’Casey, Sean 154 O’Connor, Frank 20 O’Connor, John 75 O’Donnell, Peadar 75, 119 n. 78 O’Donoghue, Bernard 151 n. 24 O’Faolain, Sean 118–19, 153 O’Kelly, Sean B. 36 O’Malley, Mary 20, 52, 76, 92 O’Neill, Terence 11, 52, 72–3, 173 Ormsby, Frank 69, 93, 97, 101–2, 104, 143, 149, 155, 179, 206 Orr, Peter 132, 159 n. 55 Orwell, George 110 Over the Bridge, see Thompson, Sam Owen, Margaret 49 Owen, Wilfred 105 Pakenham, Jack 55, 63–4 Parker, Michael 72, 188 Parker, Stewart 43, 52, 55, 58, 69, 74, 77, 90, 94, 121, 143–4 Paulin, Tom 13, 93, 149, 156, 197–8, 201 Phoenix 74, 76, 80, 90, 107, 143 Plath, Sylvia 48–9, 106 Ariel 108 Poetry Book Society 117 poetry readings and tours 81–5, 87–8, 99 Poet’s House, the 58 Pope, Alexander 184 Porter, Peter 47–9, 66, 151 n. 24 Pound, Ezra 3, 8, 9, 70, 106 Propertius, Sextus 25, 27 ‘provincial’ poetry 2, 46, 50, 59, 64, 77, 88, 112, 117–18 Randolph, Jody Allen 3

243

Rann 5, 43, 112, 117–18, 119 n. 78, 121, 145 Ransom, John Crowe 38, 46, 110 Rea, Stephen 197, 202 Redgrove, Peter 47–9, 66 Redmond, John 67 n. 118 regionalism 112–128, 145 and the BBC 94–5, 120–1 and Belfast poets 106, 126–8, 153–6 Sir Basil Brooke, as proponent of 119 early proponents of 112, 113–22, 145, 153, 178, 200–2 in England 116–17, 120 and Field Day 200–2 and Seamus Heaney 112, 125–7 and John Hewitt 94, 104, 112–16, 118, 121–7, 145, 154, 156, 200–2 and the Honest Ulsterman 77, 89, 91, 93–5, 97–8, 127, 201 and Protestantism 94, 120, 153, 201 regional poetry 106, 112 regional promotion 76–7, 80, 89, 91, 93–5, 98, 104, 117–22, 128, 142–56 and James Simmons 89, 94–5, 96 n. 88, 113, 127, 153, 202 Reid, Alec 25–6 Reid, Forrest 5 Richards, I. A. 46 Richtarik, Marilynn 197–8, 200–2 Ricks, Christopher 75, 85 Rilke, Rainer Maria 24, 26 Rimbaud, Arthur 24, 51 Rodgers, W. R. 50, 53, 66, 73, 112, 115, 119 n. 78, 128, 145, 202 ‘Room to Rhyme’ poetry tour 81–4, 88 Rosenberg, Isaac 105 Ross, David 48 Royal Belfast Academical Institution 17–18, 20–1 Russell, George 114 Saddlemyer, Ann 190 Said, Edward 10, 12, 61, 198, 201 St Botolph’s Rectory 48 Sands, Bobby 200 Sartre, Jean Paul 30 Sassoon, Siegfried 105 Scrutiny 45–6 Second World War 114–16 sectarianism 37, 52, 61, 70, 72, 94, 96, 98, 124, 139 Shakespeare, William 9, 31, 36, 38

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Index

Sheehy-Skeffington, Owen 25 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 37 Shovlin, Frank 119 n. 78 Simmons, James alienation from Belfast poetry scene 87–9, 93, 176–82, 182 n. 31 as balladeer 87 and the BBC 121 Belfast Festival, participation in 80 and Belfast Group workshop 1, 2, 6, 7, 43, 55, 58–9, 63, 70 and Belfast poetry coterie 143, 148–9, 176, 179, 185 belief in art as a social force 69, 87, 95–6 and collaborative exchange 180 and Seamus Deane 182 n. 31 and Dublin literary scene 77 and Dublin rivalry 155 early fame 81, 86 early pamphlets 74 employment at University of Ahmadu Bello 87 employment at University of Ulster at Coleraine 81, 87 at Friends’ School 87 friendship with Belfast poets 96, 148–9, 179, 185 and Tony Harrison 87–9, 91 and Seamus Heaney 178, 191–3 and John Hewitt 91, 93, 95, 96 n. 88, 113, 127 and Philip Hobsbaum 58, 89 and the Honest Ulsterman 12, 58, 70, 81, 86–103, 153, 182, 194 jealousy towards Belfast poets 88–9, 93, 176–82, 193 and Lawrence, D. H. 93 and Leavis, F. R. 89 at Leeds University 86–7 and liberal humanism 95–6 and Michael Longley 145–7, 177, 180–2, 185 and Louis MacNeice 122, 128, 134 and Derek Mahon 177 and John Montague 13 n. 52, 93 and Paul Muldoon 84, 93, 96–7 and Stewart Parker 94 poetic influences 104, 122 poetry readings and tours 84, 87, 99 and political naiveté 95–6 and populist sensibility 89, 95–7, 176, 194

and Protestant identity 173, 96 n. 88 on provincial isolation 2, 43, 58 regionalism, as proponent of 89, 94–5, 96 n. 88, 113, 127, 153, 202 and the Troubles 173–5 as ‘Ulster poet’ 86 youth and adolescence 86 Aikin Mata: The Lysistrata of Aristophanes 87 Ballad of a Marriage 58, 93 ‘Flight of the Earls Now Leaving’ 179 In the Wilderness 58, 152 Late But in Earnest 58 Simmons, Laura 86–7, 180 Sinn Fein 173 Sitwell, Edith 50 Smith, Stevie 90–1, 93 Smyth, Paul 55 Snyder, Gary 188 socialism 114 Southey, Robert 3 Spender, Stephen 50, 136, 152 Spenser, Edmund 137 Stallworthy, Jon 136 Stanford, W. B. 25–6 Stephens, Michael 87, 90–1, 98–9 Stevens, Wallace 24, 38, 106, 108 Stewart, John D. 90–1, 99 Stillinger, Jack 8, 158 n. 52 Stormont 20, 52 Stronge, Marilyn 55 Sullivan, Robert 55 Sweeney, Jack 32 Swift, Jonathan 31 Synge, Jonathan Millington 40, 160–1, 164, 200 Tate, Allen 38, 39, 46 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 37 Terry, Arthur 55, 63, 74, 93, 99 Thirties poets 129–30, 136, 146, 174 Thomas, Dylan 20 n. 19, 21, 24, 50, 150 Thomas, Edward 25, 105 Thompson, Denys 45 Thompson, Sam 100 Threshold 76, 80, 84–5, 89, 91, 125–6, 174, 189 Thwaite, Anthony 192 ‘Tight Assed Trio’ 57, 101 Tomelty, Joseph 112 Toulson, Shirley 49

Index Troubles, the 11–12, 69, 81, 95–6, 98, 101–3, 106, 173–5, 185, 188–91 Turner, W. Price 91 Ulster Museum 89 Ulster Renaissance 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 71, 74, 76, 80, 86, 103, 142, 206 Unionism 18–21, 37, 52, 72–3, 81, 94, 120, 122, 189, 200–1 United Irishmen 16, 17, 20 Valéry, Paul 38 Varsity 47 Vendler, Helen 200 Vietnam War 109, 188 Wain, John 50 Warren, Robert Penn 46 Webster, John 38 Weissbort, Daniel 48 Whitman, Walt 106, 109 Wilbur, Richard 24, 26, 28, 108

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Wilde, Oscar 41 William, Carlos Williams 3, 106, 108 Wilson, Robert McLiam 200 Wolfe Tone 16 Woodberry Poetry Room 32 Wordsworth, William 3, 7, 8, 37, 124 Wormell, Donald 25, 26 Yeats, William Butler 15, 18, 38, 128–9, 134, 160–1 and Belfast poets 7, 104, 135, 150, 207 and Seamus Heaney 38, 137, 206–7 and John Hewitt 124 and Michael Longley 21, 24, 86 and Derek Mahon 20–1, 24, 86, 154 and Paul Muldoon 139, 206 and James Simmons 96 and vernacular, use of 106 n. 16 Collected Poems 21 Responsibilities 139 ‘The Stolen Child’ 20 York, Richard 131–2