Introduction

Summary

CHANGING THE AXIS

To compare modern Irish and Scottish poetry is to change the critical axis. It is to unsettle categories like the ‘English lyric’ or ‘Anglo-American modernism’. We might begin with two Irish-Scottish poetic encounters a century apart. The Rhymers' Club, which foregathered in 1890s London, laid crucial foundations for modern poetry in English, and established the prototype for later avant-garde coteries. The club's make-up was strikingly ‘archipelagic’: a term that will recur in this introduction. The Rhymers' Club marks a space where literary and cultural traditions from different parts of the British Isles came into play; where late nineteenth-century aestheticism met Celticism; and, more materially, where Irish, Scottish and Welsh poets competed for metropolitan attention – W. B. Yeats with particular success. In ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1922), his memoir of the 1890s, Yeats recalls how he once out-manoeuvred the Scottish poet John Davidson:

An infallible Church, with its Mass in Latin and its mediaeval philosophy, and our Protestant social prejudice, have kept [Ireland's] ablest men from levelling passions; but Davidson with a jealousy which may be Scottish, seeing that Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate, laborious, discriminating taste an effeminate pedantry, and would, when that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and bustling … He, indeed, was accustomed … to describe the Rhymers as lacking in ‘blood and guts’, and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting to supply the deficiency by the addition of four Scotsmen … […]