Religion and Identity Politics in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry: The Critical Landscape

Abstract

If The Devil’s Dictionary is to be trusted, the legacies of sectarianism in Northern Irish political culture are nests for foul birds. In attempting to address these legacies, criticism of Northern Irish poetry has at times nestled sectarian difference within its modes of analysis in ways that are not always transparent. But Bierce defines the dictionary as ‘a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic’ (96). In writing about the foul birds, Northern Irish literary criticism from the 1980s can be commended for acknowledging and addressing religious and political difference during grim decades of political violence and death. Critics of Northern Irish poetry employ sectarian, secular and spiritual frames of reference but, in each, identity politics assumed on the basis of religious culture is a significant touchstone. The sectarian model demarcates Protestant/Catholic poetry on the basis of the poet’s socio-cultural background rather than by reading poetry in relation to Protestant or Catholic theology, and the distinction is often also used to identify unionist/nationalist politics but usually in very subtle ways. This subtlety itself manifests the difficulty critics have had in speaking about their historical moment of violent political conflict. But such subtlety also risks masking the theological and political arguments motivating particular critical analyses. This chapter attends to such subtleties in order to reconsider the role of theology in contemporary criticism.

Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.

John Gray

Religion, n. A goodly tree, in which all the foul birds of the air have made their nests.

Ambrose Bierce