Beneath an Irish Sky

Let me begin on a personal note. While writing this critique I am listening to Enya. I, like many others, am trying to find myself, starting with my past, the Irish part that was lost when my great grandmother crossed the Atlantic at age fifteen in 1885. I was the first to return to Ireland in 2009. Every article I read, every paper I write, brings me one step closer to home. One of the two articles I chose for the critique is, “Writing the political poem in Ireland” by Eavan Boland in the Southern Review in the summer of 1995, p485. 14p. The abstract for this article reads: The article studies the changes in the construction of Irish political poems. The author explores how the emergence of Irish women poets affected Irish literature, discusses the subversion of the speaker's accruing of power within the political poem, and examines the confusion between political and public poems. I found the Boland article to be very conversational, making it an easy read. As for its methodology, I would have to say it is historical, limited to contemporary history. Eavan Boland’s writing reminds me of Bell Hooks. They both speak about, for and to women. I found the following most useful, in that it expresses what I am trying to uncover, “voicelessness” to voice, where she refers to it as “powerlessness.” 

Boland states, I do not believe the political poem can be written with truth and effect unless the self who writes that poem--a self in which sexuality must be a factor--is seen to be in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessness with which the political poem is so concerned. (Boland) And these lines, that follow, I think will serve me well:
The woman poet in ireland, in moving from being the object of the Irish poem to being its author, has caused real disruption. A poetic landscape that was once politicised through women is now politicised by them. Hence, there is a new political poem. Against that background, a poet like myself who writes that poem incurs a responsibility to claim and define it. (Boland) Boland shared with her readers important insights, such as the following: maleness remained a caste-system within the poem…The final effect of the political poem depends on whether it is viewed by the reader as an act of freedom or an act of power…authority grows the more the speaker is weakened and made vulnerable by the tensions he or she creates. By the same logic, it is diminished if the speaker protects him- or herself by the powers of language he or she can generate… It is a weakness and not a strength of the Irish poetic tradition that it encourages its poets to act as envoys of dispossession…Women had for so long been a natural object-relation for the Irish poem that women poets seemed less a new arrival in the literary tradition than a species of insubordination: a fixed part of the Irish poem had become volatile…Yet I knew that the permission for a suburban woman to write the Irish political poem was neither allowed nor foreseen…Irish poetry was male and bardic in formation…Adrienne Rich's words, ‘I did begin to resist the apparent splitting of poet from woman, thinker from woman and to write what I feared was political poetry.’…accrued too much power to the speaker to allow that speaker to be a believable critic of power. And the power he had was a sweet and venerable one, with its roots deep in the flattery of princes and a bardic outrage at losing protected status for poets. It gave to Irish poets an authority long taken from or renounced by their British counterparts…I perceived that the same tree and the daylight frost were not just recurrences but had the power to alter my view of the elegy, the pastoral, and the nature poem…The poetic image,’ writes Muriel Rukeyser, ‘is not a static thing. It lives in time as does the poem." I wanted the Irish poem to live in my time. The dial of a washing machine, the expression in a child's face--these things were at eye-level as I bent down to them during the day. I wanted them to enter my poems. I wanted the poems they entered to be irish poems…The image of the woman that I was dealing with had already been allotted a place in the Irish poem. But as object, not subject…Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's fine essay ‘What Foremothers?’ I was beginning to recognise ‘how the image of woman in the national tradition is a very real dragon that every Irish woman poet has to fight every time she opens her door.’ …Political poetry operates in the corridor between rhetoric and reality. It is an ineffective presence there if the poet provides the rhetoric while the reality remains outside the poem…Besides these insights I found the genesis of The Nation interesting. (Boland) Where I found Boland lacking was her scope of Irish political poets and history. She did not include many references. I don’t feel her article was a study, as much as it was an explanation of the emergence of women poets into the Irish political poetry community, not as “object,” but as “subject.” Boland, I believe, wrote with a feminist point of view. The other article I choose for the critique is, “James Arbuckle and Dean Swift: cultural politics in the Irish confessional state” by Richard Holmes in the Irish Studies Review, in November 2008, p431-444. 14p.The abstract, written by the author, reads as follows: James Arbuckle, born a Presbyterian in Belfast, educated at Glasgow University, moved to Dublin under the patronage of the radical Whig Viscount Molesworth. He arrived at the time of Swift's triumph as 'The Drapier'. Writing under the name 'Hibernicus', he produced a series of essays in the style of Addison's Spectator (1725-26). They can be read as a 'polite' Whig critique of Swift's Irish writing, particularly on confessional division. Arbuckle was clearly identified as a political opponent of Swift in a series of lampoons from Swift's circle. He wrote more incisively against the confessional state in his 1729 work The Tribune, lost to historians because of a mistaken attribution to Swift's friend Delany. This article will study Arbuckle's critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked. (Swift) I found this article to be historic, more conventional in style, but given that material covered was from the 1700’s, it makes sense that Holmes could not use the same style as Boland, the feel of the article is more formal, as witnessed by the following: The opening voice, ‘a scribbler’, ‘a pert, lively little Writer’, recalled the over-eager writer (‘the paltry Scribbler’) with his ‘Ambition to be heard in Crowd’ in the opening of Tale of a Tub R. Holmes 436 (i, 116). Arbuckle’s interest in the politics of religion was indicated by a series of jokes: he did not recommend reading all that Trash that is thrust into People’s Hands at every Corner of the City: There is a wide Difference betwixt tolerating a Thing and cherishing it. The learned in Politicks, besides those that are positive, have most judiciously contrived a Sort of negative Punishments, which, in certain Cases, they hold, it may be lawful to inflict even upon Men that have done no Fault. (Swift, p38) I did find it very useful in that it concerned itself with Swift, a poet and writer I am interested in for my research, as he was Irish/English. He straddled the “fence,” so to speak. I would have to say that this article employs the historic methodology. Holmes did his research, which in turn, saves me from doing it, so therefore this article adds to the breadth and scope of my information. Some of the following quotes are a small sampling of what I mean by Holmes having done the research, so I don’t have to: This article will study Arbuckle’s critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked.” “The Tribune and A Panegyric have been largely overlooked by Irish historians owing to misattribution…(Swift) The intention of this article is to examine Arbuckle’s critique of Swift, taking Arbuckle’s image of the obtrusive cleric as the key. Christopher Fauske’s recent study finds that: ‘Swift became an Irish patriot not by design but because his own determined loyalty to his church found an opportunity for expression in his country’s plight’3…This article will explore the ways in which Swift as defender of the Anglican Church helped, in Arbuckle’s eyes, to bolster the ‘confessional society’ and the divisions in Ireland that flowed from it. It will seek in the process to explain why he saw their difference in terms of Whig and Tory at a time when, in the generally accepted view, ‘party’ had given way to ‘patriotism’.5 …His poem Snuff announced his 
 lifelong commitment not to God but to his Muse…The timing was significant, coinciding with the triumph of Swift’s ‘Drapier’ campaign; the view that ‘patriotism’ had succeeded ‘party’. (Fauske) Both articles dealt with the “Irish Voice, and political poet. Both concerned themselves with newspapers, Boland; The Nation; Holmes; The Tribune, and how these newspapers were used as platforms. I found Boland’s article a lighter read, and therefore was attracted to it more than the Holmes piece. The Holmes piece was more of a study, more research based. Holmes was more comprehensive, as in this example: Arbuckle’s main attack on the moral authority of the High Church interest was in two satirical schemes for Church improvement. Both employed Swiftian satire of ‘a projector’ and it is worth noting the timing. They were published within weeks of A Modest Proposal in which Swift satirised the inhumanity of a Whig ‘projector. (Swift, 41) Whereas Boland included whole poems for example Kavanagh’s poem, “The Great Hunger” The pull is on the traces, it is March
And a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk.
The twisting sod rolls over on her back--
The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.
No worry on Maguire's mind this day
Except that he forgot to bring his matches.
"Hop back there Polly, boy back, woa, wae,"
From every second hill a neighbour watches
With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
 These men know God the Father in a tree:
The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,
And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb

Works Cited 

Boland, E. (1995). Writing the political poem in Ireland. Southern Review, 485 - 499.
Swift, A. a. (2008). Cultural politics in the Irish confessional state. Irish Studies Review, 431 - 444.