2 - Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)

Summary

John Hewitt seems a natural starting-point in that nearly all subsequent Ulster poets have looked up to him as a moral exemplar and pioneering figure, the ‘daddy of us all’, even if they developed a completely different poetics and aesthetic. Hewitt picks up the perennial debate about poetry and place from a distinctively Protestant, Planter point of view:

In my experience, people of Planter stock often suffer from some crisis of identity, of not knowing where they belong. Among us you will find some who call themselves British, some Irish, some Ulstermen, usually with a degree of hesitation or mental fumbling.

In these, the opening sentences of his essay, ‘No Rootless Colonist’ (1972), Hewitt speaks for many Ulster Protestants who, aware of Britain's ambivalence towards Northern Ireland, do not feel securely British, and who, perceiving the Gaelic and Catholic emphasis of cultural nationalism in the South, also feel excluded from dominant images of Irishness. In contrast to the glamour of the romantic nationalist narrative espoused by Northern Catholics, the Ulster Protestant, it is often felt, hasn't much of a story to tell, reflective as it is of an historic siege mentality, and structured largely in negative, defensive terms, in contradistinction to the perceived threat of the Catholic, Gaelic Other, North and South. Given Northern nationalists' rejection of Britishness, and Protestant Unionists' lack of an adequate cultural identity, Hewitt turned to the possibilities of territory and landscape viewed as common ground shared by all sections of the community.