An Absence of Influence: Three Modernist Poets

Abstract

Unlike statues, monuments, battle-sites or names of streets, a poetic tradition makes its presence felt in precariously obscure and intangible ways. My concern in this essay is with drawing attention to the way we construct ‘Tradition’ by considering the relationship to it of three important Irish poets — Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Thomas Kinsella. I want to consider why these poets exert such an ambivalent influence upon the general and critical perceptions about what constitutes the tradition of Irish poetry. Seamus Deane, in an essay on Derek Mahon called ‘Freedom from History’, has neatly summarised my approach when referring to Denis Devlin and Sean O’Faolain:

For them the cultivation of the intellect is not only a goal in itself but also a means of escape from besieged and rancorous origins. Others — Joyce, Beckett, Francis Stuart, Louis MacNeice — although they also seek in the world beyond an alternative to their native culture, have come to regard their exile from it as a generic feature of the artist’s rootless plight rather than a specifically Irish form of alienation.¹

Much of my essay relates to this qualified sense of exile and, in particular, to its creative bearing upon the kind of a poem a poet will write as well as the critical context in which that poem will eventually find a place.