Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English by Gregory A. Schirmer Cornell University Press 426pp, (no price given)
HOW do North American universities colonise "Irish literature"? Let me count the ways. But perhaps I should stick to the evidence before me and to the general point that American interest in Ireland (unlike English interest) is, on the whole, interpreted benignly by both parties. There are also unexamined complicities. It was sometimes hard to tell whether Jean Kennedy Smith was US Ambassador to the Republic or Irish Ambassador to the US. Similarly, American exponents of Irish studies are seen, and see themselves, as disinterested ambassadors.
Despite great Irish debts to American scholarship, such innocence will not do in these politically alert times. Hot on the heels of Helen Vendler's context-free study of Seamus Heaney comes Gregory Schirmer's History of Irish Poetry in English. Schirmer goes to the opposite extreme, saturating his book with context. However, he restricts context to the most obvious parameters. Having set out an ambitious project - "to establish the distinctive aesthetic and cultural qualities of the genre, to consider its complex relation to the traditions of English poetry and of poetry written in Irish, and to make clear the ways in which it both reflected and contributed to the social, cultural and political history of Ireland" - he allows his third aim to overwhelm the first two. Here poetry can never break free of "Ireland". If Vendler is the American critic as transcendentalist, Schirmer is the American critic who gets bogged because he loses one perspective without gaining another.
Thus "social, cultural and political history" boils down to the old-style nationalist narrative that slopped around in literary studies until the 1980s. As in Robert Garratt's Modern Irish Poetry (1986), a version of Irish history has become confused with a reading of Irish poetry. Schirmer writes literary history forwards, i.e. backwards from 1921. Characteristic sentences run: "[Laurence] Whyte's spirited defence of the Irish tradition beyond the pale, and his assumptions about the validity and value of that tradition anticipate the work of nineteenth-century poets and translators such as James Clarence Mangan"; "[Moore's] setting of traditional Irish airs to English lyrics looked ahead to efforts to translate Ireland's Gaelic culture into English."
It is not that Schirmer signs up for romantic nationalism, but that he lets "looking ahead" dictate his story. Nor does he define "Irish poetry in English". Rather, he derives from politics an Anglo-Irish antithesis which he applies trans-historically to poetry. He would be lost without the adjective "ambiguous". And while his heart may be in the right (culturally diverse) place, he says with question-begging naivete: "this book is as interested in an Ulster Protestant like Louis MacNeice whose work on the whole belongs more to English poetry than to Irish, but who wrote seriously about Irish issues and conditions, as it is in a Dublin Catholic like James Clarence Mangan, whose work is thoroughly and intimately bound up with Irish culture."
A chapter headed "The North" discusses MacNeice, Hewitt and Rodgers a propos "Irish issues and conditions". But this regional concession (Munster comes off as badly) is tied to Partition and renews Schirmer's persistent misunderstanding of the Ulster Enlightenment. He states: "James Orr and William Drennan often wrote out of an acute consciousness of the distinctive culture of their region, but they were, first and foremost nationalists". Earlier he commends Orr's lack of condescension in "reproducing the dialect of county Antrim" without noting that he was a Scots speaker influenced by Burns.
At least Schirmer mentions Drennan and Orr. The positive aspect of his book is its concern with the lesser-known. I welcome a chapter on "Women Poets after the Revival" - though even here Blanaid Salkeld's "view of her Irishness was always somewhat ambiguous". A less panoramic work might have examined such figures in detail. Instead, they nip and tuck with inevitably perfunctory, not so inevitably conventional, accounts of Swift, Yeats, Kavanagh, et al. The proportions of coverage seem ill-conceived or unconceived. Whether from exhaustion or prudence, Schirmer concludes his study in the early 1970s.
Despite this terminus, a book aimed at students should keep up with the critical literature and contemporary arguments. Schirmer supplies no bibliography of criticism, let alone historical, cultural or theoretical works. He cites some critics randomly in his Notes, but has not absorbed - to give a sample - Mary Helen Thuente's The Harp Re-strung, Sean O Tuama's Repossessions, Peter Denman's Samuel Ferguson, Patricia Coughlan's and Alex Davis's Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, Neil Corcoran's The Chosen Ground, Peter McDonald's Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland. Among the omissions from a scant list of anthologies are Andrew Carpenter's ground-breaking collection of 18th-century poems, Frank Ormsby's Poets from the North of Ireland, Patrick Crotty's Modern Irish Poetry.
This book imposes on "Irish poetry" because it does not pay enough attention. The intersection between aesthetics and history is always complex, but a more rigorous literary historian would not, for instance, have taken his steer on "post-Revival" poetry from the contradictory manifestoes of various poets."Ambiguous" is where the questions start.