Confronting Shadows E-Book

David Lynch

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Thomas Kinsella's poetry is amongst the most challenging, but also the most rewarding. In this exciting new introduction, David Lynch investigates the themes that underlie Kinsella's work, uncovering motifs of Irish history, political struggle, love, death, war, God and the fractured psyche. Engaging with the connections and rhythms that resonate throughout Kinsella's poetry, and drawing on the work of philosophers and psychologists, Lynch reveals the ways in which Kinsella's work is a response to the ordeal of modern life. Providing a detailed reading of poems from different eras, Confronting Shadows is an entrance for students and other readers into the work of one of the leading Irish poets of the modern era.

Leseprobe

CONFRONTINGSHADOWS

CONFRONTINGSHADOWS

An Introduction to the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella

By David Lynch

Confronting Shadows: An Introduction to the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella

First published in 2015

by New Island Books,

16 Priory Hall Office Park,

Stillorgan,

County Dublin,

Republic of Ireland.

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © David Lynch, 2015.

David Lynch has asserted his moral rights.

Permission has been kindly granted by Carcanet Press Limited to quote from a selection of poems from Kinsella, T. (2001)Collected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet).

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-287-4

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-288-1

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-289-8

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Contents

1 Entry

2 Working-Class Heroes

3 Walking Alone

4 The Dreams that Died

5 The Truth Within?

6 Resistance

Works by Thomas Kinsella

Selected Bibliography

Suggested Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Also by David Lynch:

Radical Politics in Modern Ireland: A History of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) 1896–1904

A Divided Paradise: An Irishman in the Holy Land

In memory ofthe martyrs of the Egyptian Revolution2011–2012

1 Entry

Thomas Kinsella’s first book of poetry was published the year the Soviet army entered Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, and when the British state, dealing with the Suez Crisis, finally realised that its role in the world was to become somewhat more modest than it had been accustomed to.1 It was a time that was pre Troubles, pre The Beatles, and (largely) pre TV. The longevity of Kinsella’s literary career is thus breathtaking, and made all the more so when we recognise that he still publishes regularly, pushing his life’s work into the second decade of the twenty-first century. This long literary life may be a crucial contributing factor to the rather odd and contradictory position Kinsella holds within Irish literature.

He is a writer regarded as central and at the same time marginal, his poetry both canonical and existing on the fringe. It is thus understandable that he has been called ‘Ireland’s finest unread poet.’2 As backhanded compliments go, it captures much of the elusiveness of the poet and his influence. His work has been a feature of the Leaving Certificate curriculum for decades, ensuring that recognition of his name remains high. Critics, even those who find his work somewhat obscure, agree on the immensity of Kinsella’s achievement, but even so, he is not a regular on Ireland’s literary circuit, and poetry sections of bookstores will often carry none of his material. Since the early 1970s, when his readership was arguably at its peak, there has been a steady decline in the numbers of those who read his work.

This incongruity of his recognised importance, coupled with his somewhat perplexing marginality, has created an enigmatic impression around the poetry itself. This is an enigma that some readers and critics have found alluring, others annoying. As early as 1990, Eileen Battersby was writing of the ‘mysterious aura which surrounds the poet.’3

The waning of his central influence in Irish poetry has been credited to a number of factors.

His ‘turn’ in style from the structured, ornate early work to poetry of a more modernist, free verse form, dealing with matters of the complicated internal psyche, is often mentioned. The angry and unapologetic anti-imperialist stance of his high-profile ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ poem of 1972, written on the occasion of the Widgery Tribunal, is raised as a reason for his lack of readership in Britain, as well as in a Republic of Ireland that became increasingly politically ‘revisionist’ during the Troubles. That these are contributors to the narrowing of the audience is undoubtedly true. But there are also more subjective factors, such as the nature of publication undertaken by the poet himself. Since the early 1970s, the majority of his work has been published in short, carefully designed chapbooks called the Peppercanister Series. It was a ‘small publishing enterprise, with the purpose of issuing occasional special items from our home in Dublin, across the Grand Canal from St Stephen’s Church, known locally as “The Peppercanister”,’ as the poet has written.4 The series is deliberately produced in short runs, in the hundreds, making each one a special edition. The Peppercanister poems have been occasionally collected into book form. One end result of this style of limited publication, however, has been that the writer, widely regarded as Ireland’s most significant living poet, is quite difficult to read, not because of the complexity of his verse, but because of the unavailability of his published work. Added to this, the poet has become increasingly distant, to the point of almost non-existence in the mainstream world of Irish literary life, giving few interviews, rare poetry readings, and hardly expected to wander onto our TV screens on a late-night chat show. In an age as wholly extroverted as our own, such behaviour goes against the commercial grain, even while it adds to the sense of mystery and authenticity that are core aspects of the poet’s work.

Bono has quipped that he was ‘soaked’ by Kinsella’s poetry in his school days.5The U2 frontman meant it as a compliment, but the image is a telling one. There are critics for whom Kinsella’s work does more than soak; some have complained of drowning in incomprehension. One critic in the early 1970s commented that the Irish poet had ‘brooded himself to pieces.’6

The poet’s reputation for difficulty and obscurity has become a ‘fixed idea’ in places, as the poet himself has noted.7As with many fixed ideas, however, it occludes a more nuanced reality. Kinsella’s work is challenging to be sure, but even the moments of deepest ambiguity, such as in sections of the 1985 collectionSongs of the Psyche, are notwilfullyobscure. An appreciation and understanding of the general mindset of the poet and the thematic rhythms of the work makes even the most bizarre of internal journeys into the psyche increasingly comprehensible, and worthy of close reading. One academic has described the early resistance followed by the enjoyable engagement that her class in University College Dublin (UCD) felt when reading Kinsella: ‘The initial silently groaning resistance, from the serried ranks – undergraduates’ typical mass first reaction to poetry – gives way with remarkable speed to pleasure.’8Dr Catriona Clutterbuck sees this change as a product of the ‘response-ability’ that is required of the reader by Kinsella’s poems. She views his type of art as ‘radically reciprocal and transferable,’ and it makes Kinsella the ‘most democratic of major Irish poets today.’ This interpretation of Kinsella as an open and engaging poet, his work democratic and accessible to the reader, stands in stark contrast to much critical response.

Kinsella was awarded the freedom of his home city in 2007,and recent years have seen a wave of new critical engagements with the poet’s work, after decades of relative silence.9The majority of these works belong to the genre of academic, theoretical monographs, providing incredibly rich and new insights into the work. Most have been written by professional literary critics or poet-critics. They have also tended to provide chronological treatments of the work, focusing in particular on the stylistic turn that took place early in Kinsella’s career.

This emphasis on the ‘turn’ in Kinsella’s work is arguably misplaced. It is somewhat like zeroing in on the moment that Bob Dylan ‘went electric’ as the single most crucial event in that singer-songwriter’s career. It is important, no doubt, but it may be of more interest to the guitarist or musician than the listener. The formal change in Kinsella’s poetry may be of more interest to other poets than it is to readers. The move away from formal verse was signalled in the early 1960s, and certainly by the end of that decade the change was complete. Even in thematic terms, the concerns, topics and interests of the poetry have been relatively consistent since that time. This is not to say that there have not been developments and departures, but if one takes a step back and surveys the complete poetic oeuvre, it is the consistency of theme and the gradual accumulation of insights, rather than rupture, which is the works’ most distinctive aspect.

* * *

This study, although building on previous critical engagements, is not in the genre of specialised literary theory. Neither a literary academic nor a professional poet, my primary position of interaction in this study is not even as a journalist. Rather, it is as a close reader, hoping that this contact with the poetry will provide a helpful introduction to other general readers eager to enter the work, but who are searching for a little guidance.

Kinsella, more than many other poets, has emphasised the collaborative relationship between writer and reader. In section 19 ofA Technical Supplement,he describes a happy evening reading a‘demanding book on your knee,’underlining sections intently. This active engagement from the reader is the sort of response Kinsella would like from the readers of his own work. In an interview in 1996, the poet was clear regarding the fundamental role a reader plays in the creative aspect of poetry. ‘Poetry is a dual effort. The poet initiates an act of communication, while also recording the data, and readers complete the circuit.’10But this is no easy collaboration: the poet expects the reader to be up to the task, and the undertaking can be difficult. ‘The poems are demanding,’ Kinsella has said. ‘I am aware of that. And they get more demanding as they succeed each other.’11But true to his project, he does not attempt to ease this burden of difficulty for the reader. He intentionally sets the bar high, and he expects the reader to put in the work. The poems ‘assume that the act of reading is a dynamic one, the completion of an act of communication, not an inert listening to something sweet or interesting or even informative. They are not meant to increase the supply of significant information, but to embody a construct of significant elements.’12Kinsella toldThe Irish Timesin 1990 that ‘Poetry should be concerned with communication, not entertainment.’13

Whilst this highly engaged and reflective mode of reading is sometimes described as ‘bridging the gap’ or ‘closing the circuit’, for Kinsella the connection is more creative. This is about more than an understanding between poet and reader – it is about a partnership of sorts. Something new and significant is generated during this reading process, as he writes in section 19 of the 1976 collection, A Technical Supplement:

Except that it is not a closed circuit,

more a mingling of lives, worlds simmering

in the entranced interval: all that you are

and have come to be

– or as much as can be brought to bear –

‘putting on’ the fixed outcome ofanother’s

encounter with what what he was

and had come to be

impelled him to stop in flux, living,

and hold that encounter out from

the streaming away of lifeblood, timeblood,

a nexus a nexus

wriggling with life not of our kind.14

This is a dynamic encounter between two lives; it is‘simmering’with potential and wriggles away alive. The author is not dead here. Certainly not in the way Roland Barthes (1915–1980) read the last rites for the artistic creator by concluding ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’15The author remains vital in Kinsella’s formulation, for he stopped a moment out of flux to render it a work of art. But the author is not the only contributor to this new creation: the active reader produces as well.

It is a seminar, not a lecture; a horizontal rather than vertical relationship; equal rather than imperial. As we will see, the most important intellectual influence on Kinsella’s poetry has been the work of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Interestingly, Jung’s theory on the role of the analyst during therapy has some striking similarities to Kinsella’s view on the relationship between reader and poet. While Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and others had emphasised the role of the therapist as a listener, silently noting the words of the patient, Jung promoted interaction between the two sides, with the therapist actively engaged. For Jung, it is ‘a commitment on the part of the analyst that is at least as great as that of the patient. At the unconscious level, both doctor and patient are participating in what the alchemists termed a coniunctio: like two chemical substances, they are drawn together in the analytic situation by affinity, and their interaction produces change.’16 Like the analyst, the reader of Kinsella’s poetry is urged to not be quiet, but to speak up and engage.

In section 19 of A Technical Supplement, the poet writes warmly of the joys of a nice meal on the patio, picnic on the beach, and reading a page-turner whilst by a tree in the park. But the joy of these pursuits pales against what really matters: ‘for real pleasure there is nothing to equal/sitting down to a serious read.’17

Kinsella’s work is a serious read. Humour is not entirely absent, but it is rare. The matters with which it is engaged are generally on the sombre end of the scale. His description in the opening section of the 1973 collection,New Poems, of the furious intellectual excitement of his youth‘underlining and underlining’books and poetry resonates with what it is like to read Kinsella closely. Since his collections are hard to come by, getting your hands on one of the collected works and photocopying an individual poem is one of the most manageable ways of negotiating his work. You will find sections underlined within seconds. By its very nature there is engagement; the rapidly zigzagging pen strokes across the page will etch their own ink marks upon the reader’s mind.

The reader’s commitment is near physical; as Dennis O’Driscoll (1954–2012) notes, it is as if Kinsella regards the interaction as incomplete unless the reader walks away with some injury or other. ‘He expects his readers to wrestle with his poems until they draw the blood of meaning from them.’18

But while Kinsella has been quite consistent in the importance he places on close reading by an attentive reader in completing the artistic act of poetry, he has been a little less definitive on the nature of the framework in which such a reading should take place. While in some later critical writing he has emphasised the importance of close reading of individual poems, he had previously stressed the need to see each poem as part of a totality. In a 1989 interview the poet said: ‘One of the things that has disappeared, by comparison with the early work, is the notion of a “complete” poem, the idea that a poem can have a beginning, middle and end, and be a satisfactory work of art thereby. The unity is a much bigger one that that. And it isn’t a sequence, or a set of connected long poems. It’s a totality that is happening with the individual poem a contribution to something accumulating.’19

This is how this book approaches the poet’s work, actively engaged with the poetry, whilst also seeing the work as an evolving whole rather than hundreds of separate poems. It does not deal with the incredibly important work of translation of old Gaelic literature that the poet has completed, or the prose work he has published through the decades. Neither is it a book focused on the biographical life of the poet. Unlike other writers who live on beyond the verse in the minds of readers, such as Patrick Kavanagh or Dylan Thomas, Kinsella’s off-page persona remains remote. Much of the poetry has a strong autobiographical element, although the narrator or poetic ‘I’ in the work does not always correspond directly with the writer. Biographical and family detail will be touched on when required, but the focus will be primarily on the poetry. It will not be a comprehensive literary theory study, but rather an introduction to the poetry for the general reader that will hopefully prove provocative and engaging, and perhaps encourage more people to read Kinsella’s work. The fact that Kinsella has often and comprehensively altered some of his poetry through the decades makes a work like this difficult. Therefore, all work quoted is from theCollected Poems(CP) published by Carcanet in 2001, unless otherwise stated.

Literary criticism has become increasingly specialised since the 1960s. Much of its work has been beneficial, in that it has sharpened technique and also undermined the pious pronouncements of old humanist literary certainties. Certainties that led to judgements on works that were meant to be ‘objective’, however, in fact hid many varied inherent positions – whether sexist, racist, Eurocentric, bourgeois, conservative, or reactionary. As with any specialisation, a helpful shorthand terminology among experts has been developed, but this brings with it the risk of alienating the general reader. Whilst this study will not shy away from some aspects of modern literary theory, it will attempt to keep jargon down to a minimum.

Sometimes there will be close readings of longer poems, but often the book will jump from one poem to another that was published decades later. This is because Kinsella’s work echoes within itself across decades of writing, with some poems directly quoting from others. The majority of the work is integrated in terms of recurring themes, built around important personal moments and memories, and favourite intellectual concerns. This repetition, looking again and again at certain personal moments and grand themes, gives the work a sweeping rhythm. Rhythm is still important to a poet, even one like Kinsella, who has for the vast majority of his career not restricted himself to received forms. His work rarely sings with obvious music like much modern Irish lyrical work. But rhythm does not have to be a direct result of poetic tools like alliteration, assonance or end rhyme; it can also result from overall structure and theme. The poet in 1989 said as much: ‘The music of poetry, however understood, is of primary importance. Rhythms and rhythmical structures and the rhythm of form – not merely the audible rhythm line by line but the achievement of a totality and the thematic connections amongst one’s material – all of that is absolutely primary.’20

This work primarily engages with these thematic connections and the rhythms that beat throughout Kinsella’s work.

* * *

In 2013, Ireland lost Seamus Heaney, its most famous poet. On the morning that his death was announced, RTÉ Radio ran a special show dedicated to his memory. Along with many other poets and critics, Thomas Kinsella was invited onto the show. Presenter Myles Dungan opened with a long question about Heaney’s role as a public poet, but he was interrupted by a Kinsella clearly still shaken by the news of Heaney’s death.

‘Listen, Miles, I am still in a state of shock.’ The deliberate voice was unmistakable. ‘I am just feeling how unexpected it is. It really is an extraordinary event, the powerful presence taken from the centre of our scene. My first reaction after the shock, and the shock is still continuing, is the memory of his very earliest poems. I knew straight away that we were dealing with the real thing. But Myles I am leaving you now; it will take a while for me to assess the full extent of that shock. And all I can say is God rest him, and God help us all.’21In life, Heaney was vastly complimentary of Kinsella’s work. In a close reading of some of Kinsella’s poetry from the 1970s, Heaney displayed a real understanding of what his fellow Irish poet was doing. ‘Since the late sixties, this deeply responsible poet has been absorbed in a slowly purposeful, heroically undeflected work of personal and national inquisition.’22

Heaney’s style, persona and ability made him loved by a massive worldwide audience. While Kinsella has never had the same reach in terms of readership and influence, there are literary observers who are happy to position Kinsella’s work in the same category as that of Heaney.

Thomas Kinsella was born in the first decade of the new Irish state on 4 May 1928 to working-class parents in Inchicore, Dublin. With grandparents on both sides living in the close locality, the poet spent most of his childhood in different homes in the Kilmainham and Inchicore area. His father, John Paul, worked at the Guinness Brewery, like his father before him, and was influenced by left-wing politics. His mother features rarely in the poetry. He was educated through Irish at Model School, Inchicore. Gaining a scholarship, he was later to go to the Christian Brothers O’Connell School on Richmond Street.

In his youth there was the death of a young sister, Agnes, which features in the poem ‘Tear’. There was also a brief period of living in Manchester during the Blitz. This was an important direct experience of what the poet would later call in his notes the ‘catastrophe’ – a series of horrific events in the twentieth century, including the Second World War, that would irrevocably change the nature of the world, and humanity’s perception of itself.

Despite his modest roots, and after applying for a scholarship, he entered UCD in 1946 to study science, soon realising that this was not for him. Sitting an entrance exam for the Civil Service, Kinsella began a successful nineteen-year career that would finish in 1965 at a prominent grade in the Department of Finance, and for a time he was personal secretary to the famous head of the department, T. K. Whitaker. While at university, he had the most important meeting of his life. Eleanor was a ‘very striking person, I had no notion whatever of capturing,’ according to the poet. ‘One day when we were sitting together,’ said Eleanor, ‘he was eating banana sandwiches. He asked me would I eat one, and I said no thank you. And he said what would you eat? And I said I’d have some lunch, and I thought he was very nice.’23Thus began a relationship that would become a marriage in 1955, and would feature prominently in Kinsella’s poetry for decades. Eleanor is the poet’s great muse.

Other important friendships began in terms of literary publishing when he met Liam Miller in the early 1950s. The founder of the Dolmen Press was of crucial importance in the poet’s early career, publishing his early works. He also became close to composer Seán Ó Riada(1931–1971), whose death was marked by Kinsella in verse. His love of poetry had begun early in secondary school, but it wasn’t until reading W. H. Auden that Kinsella truly felt that poetry could be important in his life. Serious writing began in the 1950s, and continues to this day.

In 1965, Kinsella left the Civil Service and took an academic posting in the United States; it was also an opportunity to concentrate on poetry full-time. There have been many awards, books and collections since, and he is now regarded by many as Ireland’s greatest living poet.

* * *

Despite the critical praise, in lighter moments the poet has himself expressed suspicion at talk that poetry can teach you anything about how to live, or whether it has any point at all. ‘I’m really at a loss to explain poetry’s function. I mean, it doesn’t help to handle the experiences of life. You just record significant encounters. Sometimes I wonder why not just play golf or something else instead.’24 We must be grateful that the poet committed his life to the artistic act rather than working on his handicap. By 2010, Ireland had more than 350 golf courses. The nation is undoubtedly well served (probably over served) in that department. We have only one Thomas Kinsella, and through a career spanning more than half a century he has served the cultural life of the nation.

His poetic legacy is debated. Gerald Dawe has written that some of Kinsella’s work has ‘an almost take it or leave it aggressiveness, unique in Irish poetry.’25 Although I am one of those who have taken it, I do understand why others may leave it. The encounter can be brutal and bruising, but it remains an encounter (I hope this study suggests) worth having.

Poets like Thomas Kinsella often reveal interesting insights into the core nature of life. These insights are the result of dedication, hard work and practice over many decades of craft. Just as in the case of a new band dedicating hundreds of hours to practice in their garage, a soccer player training session after training session perfecting free kicks, or long months of immersing yourself in a new language, we know we can improve our skill set with time and practice. Poets like Kinsella, who see their central work as the ‘encounter ... between the individual and the significant ordeal,’ by their years of labour in the area of metaphysical and poetic search could indeed have accumulated insights that may be of interest to the rest of us.26

Poetry, and art in general, is most powerful when it resonates, and Kinsella’s work has resonated with my life with increasing intensity since my late twenties. Living in the Islandbridge and Kilmainham areas of Dublin during the late Celtic Tiger years, I walked the streets and back lanes named in his childhood poetry, a poetic portal into a contrasting era of poverty and struggle in the new Irish state. I have read his walking poems while completing the Camino de Santiago, and investigated his work on nation and place when reporting from Palestine and Israel. While covering the Egyptian revolution as a journalist, his poems celebrating differing aspects of heroism such as ‘The Messenger’ and ‘Dick King’ brought context and contemplation to days in Cairo full of tear gas, resistance and deadlines, and his observation in ‘Mirror in February’ ‘for they are not made whole / That reach the age of Christ’ has rung through my mind since I have entered my thirties, questioning the route ahead, contemplating the path behind. In this and many other aspects, the poetry has interested, provoked and infuriated me, but crucially it has always thoroughly engaged.

With poetry that is complex and rewarding, angry and honest, flawed and portentous, it is hoped that this work will encourage others to enter Kinsella’s work and read the poems. This offering is made as an attempt at an entrance.

2 Working-Class Heroes

One day while walking through the packed streets of London, a young Cork man working as a messenger for a stockbroker firm was dreaming of home. Michael Collins’s (1890–1922) blisteringly brief period as the famous Irish guerrilla and political leader was still in front of him. But through his family Collins had already become immersed in Fenian politics, and had subsequently joined the GAA and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in England. London life was very different to the rhythms of the rural country Cork scene in which he had grown up. As he was finding his feet through the massed throng of consumers and commuters, something emerged out of the mess of mechanical modernity all around him that briefly resurrected those rhythms from his memory. There, moving along at a pace more familiar in the Irish farmlands than in the heart of the modern city, an old man on a donkey came forward, making his way down the Shepherd’s Bush Road. The image gripped Collins, and he loudly exclaimed, ‘I stand for that.’1

The old man and his donkey, with its connotations of pastoral labour, contrasted with the urban setting. This rural world was organic and real compared to the alienation of the modern city. Such hostility towards London was not confined to Irish republicans. A decade later, the great modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) would deem the British capital an ‘unreal city’ full of fear, waste and broken fragments in his epic The Waste Land (1922).

The old man’s appearance did not merely provoke an intense bout of homesickness for the Irish countryside that Collins had left behind. The exclamation in his response has a positive projection in its cry. He is standing for something and fighting for something, and not merely something that already exists. For the Irish republican, the man and his horse was not a signifier of backwardness or stagnation that compared unfavourably with the innovation and high pace of the city. Rather, he represented the very definition of the positive hope for Irish freedom. Not only would the Ireland he was fighting for be free from British rule, its predominant social structure and mode of production would be rural and agricultural.

Collins was not alone in connecting the rural with his dreams for Ireland. His great rival, Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), made a St Patrick’s Day address in 1943 that has been caricatured beyond all that is reasonable. However, even given the somewhat admirable anti-consumerist vision that is at the heart of the speech, de Valera’s outline of an idealised Ireland suffers from at least two fatal flaws.2 Firstly, it bore little resemblance to the reality of Ireland in 1943. Secondly, the vision was so rural-centric that any Irish citizen living in a community where you did not hear cows lowing in the morning could not help but feel excluded. ‘The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of,’ de Valera told the Raidió Éireann listeners, ‘would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.’3 For listeners in swathes of rural Ireland whose life was bedevilled by chronic emigration and desperate poverty, the divergence between de Valera’s rural dreamscape and their everyday surroundings must have been painfully striking. But at least the broad outlines of their life were included in the Taoiseach’s imagination. The urban slum-dweller on Dublin’s northside, or Cork’s inner city, or the Guinness worker living in his small house in Inchicore, were left in little doubt by the Taoiseach that the type of lives they led were not part of this dream for Ireland. It was almost like they were a national mistake, a residual remnant of the British presence. The urban Irish who had lived for generations in the cities were not quite part of the plan, but de Valera’s dream was particularly offensive to those who had recently left rural Ireland to move to Dublin. His vision must have been especially difficult to stomach for the formerly rural Irish who had arrived in the city trying to build a life for themselves and their family. The railway worker in Inchicore who had left his Irish-speaking community in the Claddagh, Galway, not only missed his former life, but was now informed by his Taoiseach that he had abandoned the very place in which the great dream of Ireland was meant to be built.

An acceptance that rural life and the agricultural economy was part of the core DNA of what Ireland should be was also a conviction that proved popular with politicians of the left like James Connolly (1868–1916). The great hero of Irish socialism and republicanism sacrificed his entire adult life to the cause of the urban worker, the labour movement and Irish independence. He would never exclude the working class from his vision of Ireland, unlike some other founding mothers and fathers of the state, and his more hardheaded temperament prevented him from painting visionary pictures of pastoral perfection. He had toured Kerry during a famine in 1898, and became intimately familiar with the drudgery and misery faced by many rural workers.4 In the long term, he regarded land nationalisation as the answer to the nation’s rural economic woes. However, even Connolly believed that the Irish Republic for which he was fighting, even if it were to be a socialist workers’ republic, was destined to be predominately agricultural in nature. He called it the ‘one important industry of the country,’ and that is the way it would remain.5

Partition removed the large industrial centre of Belfast from the Irish economy. Following the Civil War and the early decade of the Free State, the focus of mainstream southern political opinion continued to be on rural matters. This orthodoxy remained into the early 1950s, with a protectionist national economic policy and a conviction that agriculture was still the most important industry and rural life the ideal mode of living.

This persisted, despite economic stagnation. TheIrish Independenteditorialised in March 1952 that the rapid rise in emigration meant that there was a ‘growing menace to the race.’6Thus, some observers felt that the dire economic situation posed an existential threat to the Irish people. Despite this fear, the elite failed to change its set of priorities. ‘Any sense of urgency about the issue was weakened by the general orthodoxy or underlying instinctive sense, shared by many in all three major parties, that agriculture was and would remain Ireland’s major source of work and wealth, and was the key to the country’s economic development,’ writes Tom Garvin of the period.7Economic debates in the national parliament and newspapers were largely restricted to ‘farmer versus ranchers, or the plough versus the cow.’8The urban worker and the need to foster industrial development remained a marginal concern. Despite the contention of some historians, the state during this period was not purely a backward, economically inward-looking island of agriculture, adrift from global capitalism. This was because ‘Ireland was always part of the modern era. Its role was to provide agricultural produce for the industrial centres of Britain, and this was done mainly in the form of live cattle exports.’9A degree of political independence had been achieved, but the Irish economy was still dominated by British economic needs. This was an economic relationship that somewhat bypassed the Irish urban working class.

As in politics and the media, so it is in literature. In the years prior to independence, and the early decades of the Irish state, the focus on the rural as the significant location for Irish identity predominated among writers and intellectuals. The exemplary literary figure for the leading lights of the Irish Literary Revival was heroic, Gaelic, and most often rural. The typical setting was pastoral. When William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), John Millington Synge (1871–1909), Lady Gregory (1852–1932), Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) and others thought and wrote about what the new Ireland should look like and how the new Irish should act, the backdrop was most often one of fields, the characters physically strapping, simple and Gaelic.

The generally positive connotations surrounding rural life was contrasted with the morals of the growing urban middle class that Yeats disliked so much, and also with the urban working class, who seemed a little too British to fit into any uncomplicated reconstruction of Irish identity. It also reflected wider trends in the literary modernist movement at the time, which sometimes exalted the peasantry as heroic and organic compared to the corruption and lack of authenticity of city life. The peasantry were often the object rather than real subjects of this work. Yeats compared the Sligo countryside of his youth to an innocent, childlike idyll, uncorrupted by modernity.10 The peasantry, for him, were often mere vessels to carry images rather than real and complex humans.

Of course a swift pen-picture of such a dynamic literary movement does it an injustice. The themes of the Irish Literary Renaissance were rarely homogenous, its perceptions of Irish identity nuanced. Whether it was the complicated, questioning Mayo peasantry of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, or the life of Dubliners in Sean O’Casey’s great trilogy of plays, there were countercurrents and critiques coming from within the revival. But it is not reductive to conclude that the movement’s general thematic fixation was with the pastoral setting and the rural character. Even when we skip a generation and address what is regarded as the first great poetic counterblast to the Yeatsian dream of what Irishness is, the urban experience is still largely absent.

Patrick Kavanagh’s (1904–1967) ‘The Great Hunger’, published in 1942, was a rejection of the idealised vision of Yeats. Published a year before de Valera’s St Patrick’s Day speech, this is a long poem full of real, broken humans repetitively working the Irish fields rather than the muscular heroes of the Taoiseach’s dreams or the idyllic Celtic twilight countryside of Yeats’s imagination. By facing the deprivations of rural labour in 1940s Ireland and the aridity of its social and sexual life, Kavanagh’s poem was a sharp and necessary readjustment to the unbalanced Yeatsian legacy from the Irish Literary Revival. But if it was a needed riposte, it is again a largely rural one. The battle over Ireland’s national identity, over what it meant to be truly Irish, would take place, figuratively, in a field. But what of the battles on the cobblestones, back lanes, inner-city tenement housing and the growing suburbs? Why this comparative lack of focus on the urban?

Suspicion of the nationalist loyalty of the working class, particularly the Dublin proletariat, may have been a factor. A legacy of the history of the Pale (a region of Ireland around Dublin under English control in the Middle Ages) perhaps; the lingering use of the pejorative ‘jackeen’ to describe a Dubliner speaks to this. Dublin was regarded as the most ‘English’ of the cities, a place where the Union Jack could fly unperturbed. The stories of Dublin slum-dwellers turning on the rebels of 1916 fitted into this narrative. The politics of organised labour and socialism were denounced by leading nationalist figures like Arthur Griffith (1872–1922).

That the Dublin working class in reality never fitted into this stereotype need not delay us here, but as Declan Kiberd has shown, in the conscious modern recreation and invention of Irishness that took place between the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1871 and the Irish revolution, the most significant factor in the invention was the relationship with the English.11 With England rejected as an imperial and occupying force, the colonial masters had been associated with the industrial and urban in many nationalists’ eyes. Thus, the industrial and urban were damned by association. The Dublin working class proved problematic to the more narrow conceptions of what Irish identity would be. As is often the case with difficult things, they were regularly ignored. English-speaking, soccer-playing, urban slum living with an eye towards international trends in popular culture, they may have been Irish, but not as Yeats or de Valera (in their different ways) wanted to know it.

The 1960s and 1970s brought a shift in economic policy towards a greater focus on industry, and there was an increased urbanisation of Irish people’s lives. However, the perception that ‘rural Ireland was real Ireland’ continued.12 The country remained politically conservative, the power of the Catholic Church still strong.

This was the backdrop from which Thomas Kinsella’s long poem ‘The Messenger’ emerged. It was not a moment of national concern that sparked its creation, but rather personal loss. In May 1976, the poet’s father, John Paul Kinsella, died, and the poem was published two years later. The cover was designed to replicate the front page of TheSacred Heart Messenger, a popular religious magazine in Ireland at the time. The symbols on the front cover are proletarian rather than pious, the starry plough rather than the cross. That one bookshop in Dublin was said to be offended by The Messenger because of its sacrilegious design gives a sense of the type of capital city into which it was published in the late 1970s.13

‘The Messenger’ is an extraordinary elegy for a father, critically commemorating the life of worker, trade unionist and family man John Paul Kinsella. It is an artistic act of love that retrieves a life full of hope and courage, disappointment and bitterness. But by tracing this life, the poet also salvages a marginalised radical, political and social tradition, resuscitating the memory of a Dublin urban experience that may have been lost in the back lanes and shadows of the capital city.

They might not have fitted into the bucolic dreams and official visions of the founding fathers and mothers of the Irish state and writers of the Celtic Twilight, but in reality these urban Irish were there, working, loving, striking, losing and striving. In ‘The Messenger’, the lives lived on these poor Dublin streets get their moment on the poetic stage.

* * *

As an introduction to Thomas Kinsella’s work, ‘The Messenger’ is an excellent place for a reader to commence their engagement.

Coming towards the end of what is the most important and fruitful ten-year period in his writing career, thissprawling, muscular elegy is arguably one of the most impressive poetic creations by any Irish writer since independence. For those readers trying to grab a hold of the most significant themes and consistent forms in the Kinsella canon, all of it, or at least most of it, can be found here. In terms of form it is episodic and often fragmented, yet tight in subject and development. Thematically there is the delicate dance between the historical and personal, the careful rendering of specific national and familial moments and the strange delving into the internal psyche of poet and father. There are the favoured words like ‘half’, ‘turned away’, ‘deeper’, ‘egg’ and ‘pearl’, which appear and reappear across his six-decade-long output. There is the sense of family tradition, the restrictions of organised religion, an imaginary explanation of the central themes of Jungian philosophy, a cast of figures of public proletarian heroism like James Connolly and James Larkin, and private working-class valour like Kinsella’s father and grandfather. And there is a dragon. Yes, a dragon who raises its reptilian head during an argument between father and son. The mythical reptile slides in during a dispute, and is the symbol of the unmanaged ego, the half-spoken tension and half-ignored friction that looms large between the men.

A dragon slashes its lizard wings

as it looks out, with halved head,

and bellows with incompleteness.14

Early in the poem, the reminiscences of John Paul’s life begin following an incident at his funeral. An inappropriate comment by a man in a managerial position at the Guinness Brewery enrages the poet. The unthinking words about his father, that‘He lived in his two sons,’angers the narrator, who counters that his father’s existence had its own legitimate independence beyond the lives of his children. Although he was a supporter of great communal causes, he also possessed an inner fire of his own. He lived in his‘own half fierce force,’and this force propels the narrator into a series of recollections about his father’s political, working and personal life. It is telling that it is an unwelcomed comment from an individual from the capitalist class that sparks the fury, for ‘The Messenger’ is a proletarian poem written from the perspective of the labouring class.

John Paul was originally from the Liberties area of Dublin, but after marriage moved to different houses in Kilmainham and Inchicore and worked in the Guinness Brewery. During his time at the brewery he was involved in attempts to found its first trade union. Brewery workers had not traditionally been known for militancy, and in a ‘paternalistic’ firm like the Guinness Brewery, the drive to unionisation came later than many other sectors. As early as 1911, trade union leader James Larkin was chiding the brewery workers for their lack of action. ‘Is it not time you took your place by your class and organised yourself?’ he asked a crowd of workers in Beresford Place in July 1911.15