Justin Quinn says (drb blog, Jul 16th) that I sound like “an unreconstructed Irish nationalist” – which is not, admittedly, quite the same as saying that I am one.
Whatever I may be or may be called, in the time that I have been commenting on Irish history, cultural debates and music I have called time and again for the British dimension of Irish experience to be acknowledged. Unlike a significant section of the Irish intelligentsia, however, I do not write as if all problems in British/Irish relations would melt away if Irish nationalists would see the light. I see cultural and political life on and between this and the neighbouring island as multipolar, dynamic, interactive – and also as involving multiple blind spots and shared responsibilities.
Justin Quinn is, it seems to me, in the line of Irish intellectuals who see themselves as transcending (petty, narrow, insular…) Irish concerns and speaking from an enlightened post-nationalist or international or European or cosmopolitan perspective. This perspective is attained more in theory than in practice.
Thus, though he may wish to provide a route away from cultural nationalism towards a purely artistic, language-centred appreciation of literature, in practice Justin Quinn offers less a comprehensive introduction to modern Irish poetry than a lengthy reprimand to cultural nationalism that fails to map out any model of British/Irish cultural relations or to consider how unionist ideology worked itself out in the domain of poetry.
In the failure to question his own positions, in his uncritical embrace of empire, in his writing about Ireland in such a way as to position British readers as uninvolved spectators on Irish matters, in his partitioning of his thinking about Ireland from his thinking about countries such as the United States, Quinn is a less a light-bearer than a reflector of the ideology of some of the more complacent sections of the contemporary Irish middle class.
A few of his specific points need to be answered.
1. He reminds me that poems are made with words, not ideas. Neither in the drb nor elsewhere have I judged poets or other artists by their conformity to the “nationalist agenda”. Like Quinn and other readers, I am quite capable of reading a poem, now for pleasure, now for its place in cultural history.
2. There is nothing unusual in the fact that Quinn and I should differ in our reading of the Revival. One of my problems with Quinn’s book lies not in matters of detail but in the fundamental matter of how a critic or literary historian should approach a cultural movement. As I see it, the internal logic of the movement must be described (ie, how the participants saw themselves) at least as fully as the
inconsistencies and contradictions and flaws identified by the critic or historian. Quinn is interested only in the second part of the process where the revival is concerned.
3. In my recent review of essays by Maurice Harmon and Gerald Dawe in Poetry Ireland Review, I argued very much like Quinn that the field of Irish Studies should not stay complacently within its own boundaries. It is a pity that Quinn did not act on his own advice and build a comparative dimension into his study of Irish poetry.
4. I was not at all disappointed at Justin Quinn’s failure to excoriate Allingham’s unionist ideology. I was attempting to point out that while (perhaps in an attempt to offer benighted nationalists a lesson
in broadmindedness) he adopts a monotonously negative tone when mentioning any manifestation of Irish nationalism, he tends to go weak at the knees when invoking either Unionism or empire.
5. Where Louis MacNeice is concerned, I see things less dramatically than Quinn does. MacNeice moved to London and was at the centre of English/British literary life for a period. It is not surprising,
therefore, that this is the context in which he tended to be read – though there were sympathetic readings to counterbalance the Austin Clarkes (see the April-June 1945 issue of the Dublin Review) and he featured in the Inter Cert poetry textbook well before his more recent critical repatriation.
6. I am sorry if my brief comments on Ferguson appeared to deny his Unionism. Any study of his thought or writings that did so would be absurdly misguided (though it would also take account of his brief Repeal phase). I do not believe that my writings on Irish history, culture, music or literature have anywhere involved a denial or erasure of unionist thinking.
7. Quinn says that Gaelic culture “has for some time now been learning modes of existence outside nationalism”. Is there not a note of condescension in this little pat on the back? The sentence itself is
rather vague, but I imagine the reference is to writers of Nuala Ní Dhómhnaill’s generation or younger. But how many of Seán Ó Riordáin’s poems are nationalist in intent? How many of the poems in the de Paor/Ó Tuama or any other recent anthology of twentieth century Irish language poetry are? A glance at the international content and references in the mid-sixties volumes of Eoghan Ó Tuairisc or Máire Mhac an tSaoi, or at the young Tomás Mac Síomóin’s work a few years later, would be enough to expose Quinn’s reductionist reading of Irish language culture. But then, as detailed in my review, Quinn’s monocular obsession with nationalism tends to blind him to the specificity, variety and, on occasion, the internationalism of the works of the writers he deals with and leads
to a reductionist reading of the story of Irish poetry.
BOS
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