From Landscapes to Cityscapes

A few good years have passed since my first academic engagement with Irish Studies. I have had the opportunity to know great people along the way and across the continents, friends who inspired me to write and colleagues who encouraged me to pursue my research. I have been incredibly lucky to have had the support of my loving family back home, especially my parents who will forever remain my first and greatest teachers. I am grateful to Prof Farideh Pourgiv, Dr Alison O’Malley-Younger, Prof John Strachan, Dr Geoff Nash, Dr Pilar Villar-Argáiz, Dr José Ruiz Mas, Dr Eroulla Demetriou, Dr Audrey Robitaillié and Dr Eamon Maher, the Reimagining Ireland series editor. I would like to extend my gratitude to Alejandro Pérez Clotilde for his original engraving of La Fundación Rodríguez-Acosta in Granada, which appears on the cover of this book.

The initial research for this book was supported by The North East Culture Beacon at the University of Sunderland, without whose generous support I would not have been able to undertake this project. Hereby I acknowledge that all quotations from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh are by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. I would also like to mention that parts of Chapter 1, 4, 5 and 6 were previously published under ‘Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes: The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands’, Études Irlandeses, 44/1 (2019), 17–30, ‘Towards a Poetics of Dwelling: Patrick Kavanagh’s Countryside’, Estudios Irlandeses, 14 (2019), 146–59, and ‘“If Ever You Go to Dublin Town”: Kavanagh’s Urban Flânerie and the Irish Capital’, Journal of Franco-Irish Studies, 3/1 (2013), 131–42.

Granada, April 2023

Despite a critical lag in the introduction of ecocriticism in the field of Irish Studies, the last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in the study of Irish literature and culture in dialogue with environmental discourse. Gerry Smyth’s ‘Shite and Sheep: An Ecocritical Perspective on Two Recent Irish Novels’ (2000), Tim Wenzell’s Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature (2009), Christine Cusick’s Out of the Earth: An Ecocritical Reading of Irish Texts (2010) and Eamonn Wall’s Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (2011) constitute the first body of an ecocritical scholarship in Ireland. Smyth heralded the emergence of an Irish ecocriticism as a ‘ready’ option ‘to surpass the particularism which has fed discourses of domination and division’ in Ireland and to discuss the country’s ‘wider fortune’ in a global context.¹ Wenzell highlighted the importance of ecocritical studies in preserving Ireland’s natural history and landscape as well as its rich literary tradition.² The collection of essays contained in Out of the Earth offered analyses of a number of canonical and contemporary Irish texts from a range of theories, including ecopoetics, ecofeminism and environmental ethics. Wall, on the other hand, explored the possibility of a comparative environmental approach in the Irish and American literary traditions based on the ‘Western-ness’ of their landscapes.³

Just as the first generation of ecocritics felt the urge to establish the relevance of ecocriticism as a valid critical approach in literary and cultural studies, the majority of the early ecocritical publications in and about Ireland included an apology to justify the place of an Irish ecocriticism in the wider spectrum of Irish scholarship. However, as Malcolm Sen in A History of Irish Literature and the Environment (2022) has pointed out, such meditations often rely on ‘ideological certainties and nationalist exceptionalism’, which simplify the rich and complex interplay of nature and culture, further segregating rather than considering them as part of an interrelated system.⁴ Moreover, the exclusivism and particularism of these narratives are counterintuitive to widening the scope of Irish Studies beyond nationalist, insular concerns. Today, Irish ecocriticism engages with concepts as diverse as political ecology, transnationalism, famine and ecology, climate narratives, travel literature, deforestation and animal rights amongst others.

In the field of ecocriticism, what was once considered a lack of a robust methodological approach can now be celebrated as its dynamic compass, enabling a varied critical discourse that extends beyond the field’s primary literary and textual practices. In the case of Irish Studies, an ecocritical approach can provide a fresh perspective into the often politicized and historicist interpretations of place and identity. From Landscapes to Cityscapes: Towards a Poetics of Dwelling in Modern Irish Verse continues with the current environmental debates in Irish scholarship, with a particular focus on the works of three major Irish poets of the modern period: William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice.

The study of place and place attachments

Ireland is a rewarding country for ecocritical studies due to the attraction of its natural history and landscape, the island’s unique ecological and geographical situation in Western Europe and its rich literary tradition concerned with place and place attachments. Despite the late blooming of Irish ecocriticism, there is not a lack of precedent when it comes to the study of place and place attachments in Ireland, evident from the plethora of interdisciplinary publications that in one way or another address questions that are very much relevant to or inspire environmental conversations. As Gerry Smyth has pointed out in Space and Irish Cultural Imagination, ‘[g]eographical peculiarity and historical discontinuity produced a situation in Ireland in which questions concerning space, landscape, locality, gender, urban and rural experience, nature, and so on became central to both the cultural and the critical imagination.’⁵

Historically, Ireland has been a contested territory with unstable socio-political boundaries. With time as the dynamic variant in historical narratives, place has often been taken for granted as unchanging and stable. In the words of the eminent historian James Camlin Beckett, ‘[w]e have in Ireland an element of stability – the land, and an element of instability – the people. It is to the stable element that we must look for continuity.’⁶ Beckett’s conviction was shared by the majority of the writers, scholars and politician of the Celtic Revival out of a ‘desperate hope’⁷ to restore stability and continuity to a nation of diverse ethnic, religious and political backgrounds amidst the country’s continuous struggle for independence. Geographically, Ireland’s diverse landscape and changing environmental conditions do not correspond to the notion of land as a stable and dehistoricized entity. The regional diversity of Ireland, portrayed by the likes of geographers Emyr Estyn Evans and Tom Jones Hughes, has been at odds with ‘the monolithic nature of traditional nationalist historiography’, responsible for legitimizing the idea that ‘Ulster alone is the separate or different region in Ireland’.⁸ Eamon de Valera’s utopian vision of Ireland in his St. Patrick Day’s radio address in 1943 was an example of ignoring the geographical, hence cultural heterogeneity of Ireland, which resonated in the ethos of the 1937 constitution, imposing ‘a startling degree of manipulated cultural homogeneity upon the twenty-six counties’.⁹

The intricate yet often ignored relationship between cultural heterogeneity and regional diversity is crucial to understanding the connections between marginal identities and marginal landscapes. The study of Ireland’s cultural landscapes in relation to the environment can reveal the links and discrepancies between cultural values and environmental actions in various regions and throughout history. It might also provide answers as to why a certain place is left in ruins while others are heavily protected. As such, (re)reading Ireland’s literary heritage in the light of its dehistoricized and marginalized landscapes becomes part of an attempt to preserve its environment, just as the study of the human-environment interactions turns out to be part of a larger quest for (re)defining identity and sense of place.