Seite 10 [10]
8 ] Győző Ferencz
that every square metre of territory is made up of layers of history and culture
that are inextricably intertwined, and because every square metre of territory
can only be described by a diversity of languages and cultures.
Unfortunately, this idea cannot be said to have permeated Northern Irish
society. As the English poet W. H. Auden, born in the same year as Hewitt,
put it in a poem he wrote on the death of W. B. Yeats in January of the porten¬
tous year 1939, “poetry makes nothing happen”. A few months later with the
outbreak of World War II, Auden soon experienced how true this was. Poetry
never prevented wars from breaking out, never put an end to massacres. But
that is not to be expected of it.
While regionalism remained a wonderful humanist idea, it anticipated the
voices of the great range of poets to emerge in the North of Ireland from the
1960s onwards. The title of John Montague’s seminal book, The Rough Field
(1972), refers to Northern Ireland as both a concrete and symbolic place, and
the title poem of Michael Longley’s first volume, 1969, No Continuing City,
celebrates his forthcoming marriage with a metaphor of geographical loca¬
tion. Derek Mahon placed his poem “Spring in Belfast” (first published as “In
Belfast”) at the head of both Collected Poems (1999) and New Collected Poems
(2011), and his other poems also abound with Irish geographical locations. As
do Seamus Heaney’s collections and poem titles. He took account of Northern
Ireland as a place in a series of essays such as “Mossbawn’”, “Belfast”, “The
Sense of Place”, “Frontiers of Writing”. Even his essay on his great predecessor
bears the title “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh”. One of his
most important essays on the subject is entitled “Place and Displacement: Re¬
flections on Some Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland”.
But there is another side to the question. Seamus Heaney did not consider
himself a Northern Irish poet, but as an Irish poet born in Northern Ireland.
Montague, Mahon, Longley are usually listed as Irish poets in handbooks
and anthologies. Examples abound. Just to mention a few, the fine poet and
editor Frank Ormsby made this subtle distinction in the title of his Poets
from the North of Ireland (1979), that included poets from the generation of
Hewitt and MacNeice to Montague and the Heaney-Mahon-Longley trio, to
Medbh McGuckian to Tom Paulin to Paul Muldoon. Paul Muldoon, however,
includes much the same poets - with the addition of Patrick Kavanagh, and
some others - in his The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986). Peter
McDonald, who also appeared as a poet in Ormsby’s anthology, analyses the
problem of Northern Irish identity from a post-nationalist perspective in his
book Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997).
The term Northern Irish poetry seems to be the result of a process of canon¬
isation that also included the search for tradition. Edna Longley has done a lot
for this in her magisterial collections of literary essays. It is in no small part
thanks to the efforts of Edna Longley that the poetry of Louis MacNeice has
been reframed as a possible model for Northern Irish poets while retaining
his status as a key member of the 1930s Auden group. He was born in Belfast,
studied and lived in England, but his poetry often visits places like Belfast,