MAKING IT NEW

IRISH LITERATURE FROM YEATS TO HEANEY

W.B YEATS

JAMES JOYCE

PATRICK KAVANAGH

SEAMUS HEANEY

THEMES AND ISSUES The Political context in which some of these works were produced.

The need for a distinctly Irish culture in colonial Ireland.

The representation of rural Ireland in her literature.

The increasing internationalisation of Irish literature in the latter half of the twentieth century.

THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND

It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this half-way house -- how it continues to apparently hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them; how it continues to clamour for recognition as a distinct nationality, and at the same time throws away with both hands what would make it so.

THEATRE MANIFESTO We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show {and this is a crucial part of the passage] that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of the Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside of all political concerns that divide us.

 

THE IRISH FRANKENSTEIN

THE MUNICPAL GALLERY REVISITED

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought

All that we did, all that we said or sang

Must come from contact with the soil, from that

Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

We three alone in modern times had brought

Everything down to that sole test again,

Dream of the noble and the beggarman.

THE ARAN ISLANDS The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection. Their way of life has never been acted on by anything much more artificial than the nests and burrows of the creatures that live round them, and they seem, in a certain sense, to approach more nearly to the finer types of our aristocracies—who are bred artificially to a natural ideal—than to the labourer or citizen, as the wild horses resemble the thoroughbred rather than the hack or cart-horse. Tribes of the same natural development are, perhaps, frequent in half-civilized countries, but here a touch of the refinement of old societies is blended, with singular effect, among the qualities of the wild animals.

DUBLINERS I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by, preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.

IRELAND: ISLAND OF SAINTS AND SAGES

Our civilisation is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin and without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day comes, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till…Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean him no harm (pp.212)

“SELF PORTRAIT” ‘I would say now that the so-called Irish Literary Movement which purported to be so frightfully Irish and racy of the Celtic soil was a thorough-going English-bred lie.’ (Self-Portrait, 1964, p.9; Collected Prose, p. [16]; Selected Prose, ed. Antoinette Quinn, 2003, p.306.)

“THE GREAT HUNGER” Clay is the word and clay is the flesh/Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move/Along the side-fall of the hill—Maguire and his men.

“THE GREAT HUNGER” She stayed too long, /Wife and mother in one. /When she died The knuckle bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside. And he was sixty-five. /O her loved his mother/Above all others/O he loved his ploughs. And he loved his cows/ And his happiest dream was to clean his arse/With perennial grass.

THE IMAGINARY IRISH PEASANT Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O’Brien, and Kavanagh formulated, destroyed and reformulated the character of Irish peasant life. Since to reconceptualize the peasant was to control and rewrite the essential Irish image, the source of all authentic Irish culture, each revisionary portrait of the peasant privileged itself and tried to establish its own empirical authenticity by turning culture into nature.

PUNISHMENT I feel the tug/of the halter at the nape of her neck, the wind on her naked front/It blows her nipples to amber beads/it shakes the frail rigging in her ribs

“PUNISHMENT” I who have stood dumb/when your betraying sisters/cauled in tar/wept by the railings/who would connive /in civilized outrage/yet understand the exact/and tribal, intimate revenge.

INVENTING IRELAND If the notion of “Ireland” seemed to some to have become problematic that was only because the seamless garment one wrapped like a green flag around Cathleen ni Houlihan had given way to a quilt of many patches and colours, all beautiful, all distinct, yet all connected too No one element should subordinate or assimilate the others: Irish or English, rural or urban, Gaelic or Anglo, each has its part in the pattern.