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26 | Péter Dolmanyos
supposed to address as its principal concern.”? Although the tracing of histori¬
cal and political elements affecting identity represents a more apparently de¬
terminist and generalising critical principle that tends towards an alignment
of poetic practice with the established patterns of social division in Northern
Treland,®° place is not an altogether neutral category from this particular as¬
pect either as the social foundations of its understanding indicate. Neverthe¬
less, the traps of substituting identity discourses for reading poems can be
avoided by due attention paid to the poems themselves instead of asking them
to conform to prefabricated patterns and positions determined by preferred
critical agenda or culturally or politically induced ideas and ideologies. While
Edward Said rightly insists on the idea that “texts are worldly, to some degree
they are events, and even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless
a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in
which they are located and interpreted”,®! the act of reading that social world
as a text allows the poet to engage with or refuse to comply with explicit no¬
tions of allegiance and thereby forge their own concept of place which, as a
result, can prioritise aesthetic considerations instead of socio-cultural expec¬
tations formulated in advance. The poets discussed provide different illustra¬
tions of this. Montague’s recognition of the failure to reconnect with places
from his childhood is a tacit admittance of the invalidity of cultural deter¬
miners presumed to be relevant and effective in the face of the richness of
personal experience. Heaney’s experiments with various traditions, his revi¬
sion of those very traditions and subsequent preference for personal empirical
experience of places indicate a similar path of aesthetic liberation. Longley’s
home from home in the West is a deliberate move beyond expected affiliative
attitudes, and Mahon’s various places observed from a measured perspective
also strive to keep distance from limiting socio-cultural, historical or political
expectations with their prescriptive agendas.
Heaney’s observation on the experience of the Northern Irish population
of simultaneously living in two places at once is a more complex idea with a
farther reaching scope than its casually elegant rhetoric would imply at first
glance. The bifurcated situation of living in the actual present and in some
mental construct at the same time does not only insist on the importance
of place but calls its absolute position into question by the same token. The
experience of place per se, as a given spatial context, is something to investi¬
gate and open up for experimental assessment, rather than to be comfortably
taken for granted as an uncontested constant. The immediate physical reality
of place is neither desirable nor possible to dismiss since it constitutes the
world of the actual present, yet the experience of that is assessed through the
mediating presence and assistance of the mental place, and it is the dynamic
79 cf. Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities. Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997), 1-19
80 cf. Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 29-35
81 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 4