Sir, - Disgraceful, and I use the word advisedly, i.e. - lacking in grace. I refer to John Boland's attack on Francis Ledwidge, Goldsmith Press and Mr Liam O'Meara (Books, April 18th). We all thrill to a little controversy in the dull world of literature but surely this is going too far. I detect a determination to "nip something in the bud", an attempt to prevent Francis Ledwidge becoming enthroned as an icon of reconciliation in the new era of magnanimity. It would have been more honest of Mr Boland if he had admitted that the poetry of Francis Ledwidge has lain in a backwater for the past 80 years - that Ledwidge's work has been viewed with suspicion by nationalists and republicans because he put on the King's uniform and fought in the Great War.
It would have been fair of Mr Boland to say that Ledwidge's traditional style, with the use of rhyme, etc., was not to his taste, that it was out of kilter with modern forms, that by today's standards it is old-fashioned. However, it was wrong of him to describe Ledwidge's poetry as lazy, predictable and sometimes "awful". Ledwidge's masterpiece Behind the Closed Eye, written at 16 years old, and his Thomas McDonagh compare favourably with anything written by Yeats or Mangan, and the latter poem was memorised affectionately by tens of thousands who learned it at school before it was removed from the national curriculum. And, yes, Ledwidge did cultivate the image of a peasant poet, as did Kavanagh and Hartnett after him.
It is correct and proper for Mr Boland to point out the number of typographical errors in a book as important as The Complete Poems, but it is mean-spirited in the extreme of him not to acknowledge the scope and depth of scholarship on the part of Mr O'Meara in unearthing 66 previously unpublished poems, their sources, and indeed Francis Ledwidge's motives for writing many of them. - Yours, etc.,
Michael O'Flanagan
Emmet Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8.