Politic Words

Politic Words reflects on five decades of reviewing and discussing Irish writing, both inside the university classroom and in various literary and academic forums. Part I concentrates on Irish women writers. While gender is not the explicit focus of these chapters, it forms a key defining element in various arguments touched upon in relation, for example, to feminism and nationalism, questions surrounding the notion of ‘the’ canon, the meaning of literary value, and the critical role the academy can play in the reclamation of important if overlooked writers and artists.

For decades modern Irish writing was often seen in critical terms as something of a relay-race beginning in the early twentieth century with the two modern masters of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, fathers of the next generation of mostly male writers continuing up to, at least, the breaking point of the 1960s. Things most certainly started to change then. But this patriarchal myth allowed for few Irish, or Anglo-Irish women writers to feature in the tradition except, perhaps, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Molly Keane and Eilís Dillon. The radical revision of this viewpoint gathered momentum publicly when Irish national traditions, and nationalism per se, came under increasing interrogation by feminists, critics and writers; some of whom feature in the first part of this book.

I have been deeply influenced in my own writing and thinking by many of these women writers, particularly Edna Longley and Eavan Boland, so Politic Words is also a gesture of acknowledgement to each one of them, with enduring thanks and respect for their innovative and challenging writing.

Part II develops some of the historical settings and themes of Part I while concentrating much more on social and political legacies and attempts to describe how traumatic Irish historical events, such as the Great Famine, are rendered in the writing, for example, of the nineteenth-century writer William Carleton, and reimagined by later interpreters of his fiction such as Benedict Kiely.

Many of the chapters in Politic Words were commissioned for various collections of Irish literary criticism going back to 1987. In the decades since, other chapters began as lectures in Trinity College Dublin or as (in part) introductions to editions of poets or anthologies of poems. To the organisers of conferences/seminars who gave me the opportunity to engage with these very different and challenging writers, I offer thanks and kind acknowledgement. And to the publishers and editors, in particular to Maria O’Donovan (Cork University Press) and Conor Graham, Maeve Convery and Wendy Logue (Irish Academic Press/Merrion Press) a very special word of thanks.

The author and publisher extend their thanks and appreciation to the literary estates of Christabel Bielenberg, Dorothy Molloy and Eilís Dillon, for permission to quote from the work of these authors. The poetry (and prose) of Eavan Boland is published by Carcanet Press and in North America, W.W. Norton, Dorothy Molloy’s poetry is published by Faber and Faber, Michelle O’Sullivan and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin by The Gallery Press, and Leontia Flynn by Jonathan Cape. The publishers of all other quoted work are cited in footnotes and bibliography.

The chapters were first published in the following chronological order:

Part I ‘In the Wars’, Linen Hall Review (Winter 1987), collected in How’s the Poetry Going: Literary Politics and Ireland Today (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1991).

‘Suburban Night’, Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Elmore Andrews (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992).

‘Exchanging Messages’, originally delivered as a lecture, Trinity College Dublin 2010 and subsequently published in Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections in Modern Irish Writing (Cork: Cork University Press, 2015).

‘Ethna Carberry in H Block’ originally delivered as a lecture, Trinity College Dublin, extracts subsequently published online in Dublin Review of Books (October 2015) and revised and extended in The Wrong Country: Essays in Modern Irish Writing (Newbridge: Irish Academic Press, 2018). ‘Burned Countryside’ and ‘The Moy, Basho & the Superser’ were also first published in The Wrong Country.

‘Native City’ originally delivered as a lecture at the Belfast Book Festival, 2019 and sections were published in The Lonely Crowd (Issue 12, 2019) and The Irish Times (31 August 2020).

‘Lost and Found’, extracted from the introduction to Ethna MacCarthy Poems, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Gerald Dawe (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2019), was included in part in Samuel Beckett’s Poetry, ed. James Brophy and William Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

‘Politic Words’ originally delivered as a lecture at ‘Eilís Dillion@100’ conference, Trinity College Dublin and subsequently published online in Reading Ireland (Issue 13, spring/summer, 2021).

Part II ‘A Real Life Elsewhere’: Linen Hall Review, Summer 1987 and Theatre Ireland (May/April 1988).

‘Carleton’s Address’: Stray Dogs and Dark Horses: Selected Essays on Irish Writing (Newry: Abbey Press, 2000).