5 - New Things That Have Happened: Forms of Irish Poetry

Summary

One feature of Irish poetry and of the preponderance of the criticism it has spawned makes it singular among contemporary anglophone poetries: its resolutely anti-theoretical, not to say anti-intellectual bias. Where rigorous and sometimes acrimonious debate and radical formal variation has invigorated the post-war poetry and poetics in the United Kingdom, the United States or the Caribbean, to name only three anglophone contexts, Irish poetry has for the most part remained peculiarly sheltered from such challenges. Criticism, which ought to furnish theoretical stimulus and self-reflection, has tended to be at its most acrimonious the more it has advocated for a poetic conservatism whose time, one would have thought, is by now all too well outworn. This shell into which Irish poetry repeatedly withdraws in intellectual renunciation coincides with the niche that it has been assigned in the global market of anglophone poetry. Irish poetry occupies a peculiar nook, long secured for it by the retailing of rural and decaying industrial backdrops and by their correlatives, the insistent formalism and programmatic adherence to the constancy of “voice” that has dogged poetic production since Yeats, while tamely eschewing the rigorous violence that sustained his magisterial verse. Like deal dressers and hand-blown glass, Irish poetry offers a reliably commodified form of traditional craft, supplying a market segment within the larger global circuits of poetic production.

The latter components—formalism and the simulation of individual voice—have proven of greater importance and perdurability than the decor: Irish poetry has for the most part clearly survived the advent of Celtic Tiger neoliberalism and its post-industrial mode of production with little challenge to the established parameters. Likewise, its response to the counter-insurgency modernization that made Northern Ireland a laboratory for the surveillance industries of our moment has been for the most part—with exceptions to be considered below—an insouciant connivance in the violence of civility. Irish poetry continues to provide the anglophone world serviceable exhibitions of poetic craft with sufficient formal prowess to maintain its market niche and furnish a digestible alternative to postmodern economic and cultural dislocation even where its thematic material embraces the Irish diasporic experience, no longer in Paris alone, but from Prague to San Francisco.