10 - Seumas O’Sullivan and Revivalist Nature Poetry

Summary

In a mid-nineteenth century review of a collection of poems regarding antiquity, the reviewer turned to make a lengthy aside on the condition of the modern world: ‘Are we better than our fathers? We are wiser, but are we happier?’ The joy and mystery of the world, according to the reviewer, was rapidly disappearing: ‘We have disenchanted all nature. … The meadow which erewhile showed us the fairy ring, as if to put forever to silence all sturdy unbelievers, is now crossed by the massive train-way’. This vision of a specifically Irish ‘enchanted’ world, contrasted with the industrialized, disenchanted world of modernity, became fundamental, some decades later, to the theorization of the early Irish literary Revival. W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), AE (1867–1935), and many contemporaries sought out fairy-lore, became occult initiates, and cultivated a literature that sought to re-enchant a sterile modern world. This movement, in many ways, was a typical late-Victorian reaction to the loss of orthodox faith, and its nostalgia is symptomatic of contemporary degenerationist narratives, which had doubts regarding the veracity of progressive evolutionism. For many of its writers, encountering Darwin and other evolutionists resulted in a spiritual crisis. In his autobiographical writings, for example, Yeats described being ‘deprived by Huxley and Tyndall … of the simple-minded religion of [his] childhood’, and claimed to have retaliated by creating ‘a new religion’ in the form of ‘an infallible Church of poetic tradition’. For a number of Revivalists, however, the reaction was quite different. Rather than rejecting science in favour of spiritual exploration, these Revivalists used scientific knowledge as a way of framing their re-enchantment of nature.

One such Revivalist, who still remains a shadowy figure in the history of Irish literature, was Seumas O’Sullivan (1879–1958). Born James Starkey in Dublin in 1879, O’Sullivan wrote eight collections of poetry, a number of pamphlets, a play on the alchemist Nicholas Flamel, and two books of essays. He was an influential publisher, editor of the Dublin Magazine (1923–58), and an avid book collector. His father, a pharmaceutical chemist, was also a poet, and contributed to many of the nationalist magazines of his time.