Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition

231 Pages·2011·0.945 MB·English

by  Donna L. Potts

Contemporary
and the Pastoral
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Contemporary
and the Pastoral
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Donna L. Potts
University of Missouri Press Columbia and London
Copyright © 2011 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11
Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8262-1943-5
∞ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Designer: Kristie Lee
Typesetter: K. Lee Design & Graphics
Printer and binder: Integrated Book Technology, Inc.
Typefaces: Galliard
For Helen L. Potts
and in memory of Ronald F. Potts

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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
A Lost Pastoral Rhythm: The Poetry of John Montague 19
Chapter 2
“The God in the Tree”:
Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition 45
Chapter 3
“Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place”
Michael Longley’s Environmental Elegies 75
Chapter 4
Learning the Lingua Franca of a Lost Land
Eavan Boland’s Suburban Pastoral 98
Chapter 5
“In My Handerkerchief of a Garden”
Medbh McGuckian’s Miniature Pastoral Retreats 118
vii
viii Contents
Chapter 6
“When Ireland Was Still under a Spell”: Miraculous
Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill 139
Conclusion
The Future of Pastoral 162
Notes 179
Bibliography 193
Index 207
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Preface
Anthony Bradley’s “Pastoral in Modern Irish Poetry” and Sidney Burris’s
The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition (1990)
inspired me to reconsider the relationship of Heaney and, eventually, other
contemporary Irish poets to the pastoral tradition. Bradley divides Irish poets
into two groups: those of the Irish literary revival who lacked direct experi-
ence of the land, much less an understanding of the people who worked
on it; and those post-revivalists such as Patrick Kavanagh, whose firsthand
experience of the land made them resist idealizing either the land or those
who labored on it.1 Having loved and respected Virgil’s Georgics and the
poetic tradition that grew out of it, with its emphasis on the land as the site
of labor rather than of leisure, and having been raised in southwest Missouri,
where my family farmed a couple of acres, I had an affinity for the georgic,
or “anti-pastoral” tradition of the post-revivalists. Although I studied Yeats
in college, Seamus Heaney, with his rural County Derry upbringing and his
subsequently less romanticized view of country life, was the first Irish poet
who really spoke to me. As I began to consider how contemporary Irish po-
ets employed the pastoral tradition in their own work, Bradley’s and Burris’s
postcolonial approach formed the basis for my own. Yet I could not ignore a
number of other forces that have obviously contributed to and shaped con-
temporary Irish poets’ particular versions of pastoral. Pastoral poetry since
Kavanagh has served not only as postcolonial critique of British imperialism
but also as a response to industrialization, modernity, the commodification
of landscape, and gendered representations of Ireland and their political and
social repercussions. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Irish cultural
nationalism was reformulated and to some extent transformed by the envi-
ronmental movement.
ix