Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry
In case you are wondering, the Norton Anthology is organized chronologically, by birth date of poet. I am not including every poet that shows up here, because many I am either not familiar with, OR I have separate volumes devoted only to that poet – and I’ll do excerpts from those books, rather than this one.
Austin Clarke was a poet Dublin-born, and is the leading Irish poet in the generation after W.B. Yeats. John Montague (another poet I love) called Clarke “the first completely Irish poet to write in English.” He was born in 1896, and had similar journeys to other Irishmen at that time. 1916 radicalized him (he was in college at the time), although the pump was already primed, his parents being nationalists. He went to University College, Dublin – and I think ended up teaching there. He is a very Irish poet, his topics are Irish, his language and phrasing recognizably Irish – but it just goes to show you that there are a million ways to be Irish. He sounds nothing like Yeats – at least not once he found his own way. He imitated him quite a bit in the beginning, before setting himself free. Yeats has a grand and mystical lyricism, which Clarke doesn’t share at all. He is much more grim. Thomas Kinsella, who was a great supporter and advocate of Clarke wrote:
The diction of his last poems is a vivid, particular voice, rich and supple; nothing is unsayable. But it is no natural voice.
He liked limitations. He used assonance a lot. He wrote:
Assonance is more elaborate in Gaelic than in Spanish poetry. In the simplest forms the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by an assonance in the middle of the next line. The use of internal pattern of assonance in English, though more limited in its possible range, changes the pivotal movement of the lyric stanza. In some forms of the early syllabic Gaelic metres only one part of a double syllable is used in assonance … and this can be a guide to experiment in partial rhyming or assonance and muting. For example, rhyme or assonance on or off accent, stopped rhyme (e.g. window: thin: horn: morning), harmonic rhyme (e/g/ hero: window), cross-rhyme, in which the separate syllables are in assonance or rhyme. The use, therefore, of polysyllabic words at the end of the lyric line makes capable a movement common in continental languages such as Italian or Spanish.
Michael Schmidt (my go-to guy for additional context) in Lives of the Poets
Yeats cast a long shadow. The endless debate about what constitutes Irishness in art and literature, continued, as it had for Joyce in his self-imposed exile and for Samuel Beckett. Readers were reluctant, given the achievement of Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh’s accessibility, to accept Clarke on his own terms. It can’t have been easy, as he emerged, to reconcile personal vocation, deep learning, a time of historic change, and an indifferent or hostile milieu.
He wrote a lot. He wrote plays, editorials, book reviews (he could be quite caustic) – and also novels. He got into trouble repeatedly with the censors in Ireland, a powerful force. He had a nervous breakdown later in life, and in the 60s published a book of verse about it.
Schmidt writes (and this is very interesting to me):
He gains much from being rooted in Ireland in ways Yeats was unable to be. Impoverishment comes from having to acknowledge and define that rootedness, to manifest it in prose and verse. History would not allow him to take his country of origin for granted. Tomlinson insists that Clarke’s nationalism is not “the inertia of chauvinism, but a labour of recovery”. Clarke adapted elements from a tradition alien to the English, working toward a separate Irish, not Anglo-Irish, poetry. It was for him a project, a required labor added on to his primary vocation, and it is responsible for peaks and troughs in his work. Yeats assimilates the Irish struggle into a preexistent rhetorical tradition. Clarke introduces the struggle, preserved in a language long suppressed, into the rhetoric itself, to forge a new poetic idiom.
I love his stuff, as I love most Irish literature, in all its complexity and diversity. His is another kind of voice, contemporary to the great early 20th century giants, but somehow still managing to do his own thing.
Schmidt writes about his “place” in Irish literature:
The uncompromising force of his best satires, the vividness of his love lyrics and visions, and the cool candor of his “confessions” set him apart. He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term “Anglo-Irish” is meaningless.
That is a big big deal.
Here is one from 1928. I love it because you can feel an oral tradition in it (“They say … Men that had seen her …”) You can feel the gossip of small towns, and also the long memories of a people who have lived in the same place for generations. The Norton Anthology has a footnote to the poem which I will include, since it’s by Austin Clarke himself, his own note to this haunting poem. It’s a footnote that gives really important context to what we are reading here. The language is simple, but as with a lot of Irish stuff, there are buried meanings and symbols that everyone there at that time would get – but are lost to us now.
The Planter’s Daughter1
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went –
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
1 “In barren Donegal, trees around a farmstead still denote an owner of Planter stock [that is, a Protestant], for in the past no native could improve his stone’s-throw of land” [Clarke’s note].
