THE RONALD DUNCAN LECTURE 1994

I am honoured to give this lecture here under the auspices of the Poetry Book Society, with all its distinction and devotion to poetry, and in the context of this exciting festival, the Poetry International. My theme is the authority of the poet. But my method will be as much autobiography as argument. If at times this lecture seems to be as much self-portrait as advocacy, then I think the reasons may well be in the nature of the art. Poetry is not a scientific or objective business. Every new poet stands as an archer does, with their head tilted up to see how fast, how far, how close to the air and true to the destination that arrow flies. And the arrow is the poem and the air is the history of the poem. And the archer's report is always blind-sided and hopeful and partisan.

I am an Irish poet. A woman poet. In the first category I enter the tradition of the English language at an angle. In the second, I enter my own tradition at an even more steep angle. I need to be candid about this because, of course, these two identities shape and re-shape what I have to say today. The authority of the poet - that broad and challenging theme - is really, in my case, a series of instincts and hunches. The difference in my case, is that while many poets look to the past for the story of that authority, I no longer do so. I have stopped listening to the story which grants automatic authority to the poet and automatic importance to the poem. Instead, I have come to see a suppressed narrative. I have come to ask certain disrespectful questions of the tradition. I do not say they are valuable, but they have seemed to me to be necessary. But once again, none of this is academic or scientific or logical. It is personal. I have no way of talking about these issues unless I use the lens of my own experience. And this is what I offer now.

I became a poet in a country and a tradition which had entered an odd and powerful moment of European poetry. The Dublin I began writing in - it was then the early sixties - was almost but not quite MacNeice's city from Autumn Journal. I was a student at Trinity College, and late at night, I could walk safely home through a city of lamplight, iron and water, passing the fanlights and doorways of an Augustan oppressor. Not quite MacNeice's Dublin perhaps, but there were resemblances. The veils of rain were certainly there, and Nelson was still on his pillar in O'Connell Street 'watching his world collapse'.

I had a flat over a busy street. I had a table by a window and a notebook and a pen. Outside the window was a crooked path, an apple tree and the balcony of a convent. I would cast a glance at that, and lift my pen and bend my head and begin to write a poem. I lifted that pen assuming, as all new poets do, that I was a free agent. In fact, as I began to write, my pen described a tension between histories and of the poem which influences my view of the poet to this day.

Upon that pen, across that page fell the shadow of nineteenth century English poetry. This was my learned and spoken language. I had spent part of my childhood outside Ireland and I knew no other. To adapt Yeats's phrase 'Irish was my native language but it was not my mother tongue'. And so this first shadow was a familiar one. Here was Wordsworth and Tennyson. Here was the struggle between self and form which had marked the Romantic movement. Like any young poet, I spent too long writing someone else's poem and I wrote these influences down obediently. But they were not pure influences. The poem I wrote was nominally called Irish, yet it was blemished by the music of drawing rooms and light tenor voices. It was compromised by the way the nineteenth century poem had entered Irish poetry, under the auspices of what Samuel Beckett has called 'The Victorian Gael'. Above all, it averted its eyes from the harsh facts of the loss of a language and the abandonment of history. Somewhere in the songs of Tom Moore and the rhetoric of Clarence Mangan and the early poems of Yeats, the rigour and individuality of the British nineteenth century had gone awry in Irish poetry. In its place was an Irish lyric, with a musical content and an anxious relation to the past. And yet sometimes it was possible to see through that past, to touch for a moment the civil energies of a gracious eighteenth century. In fact, in its technical components at that time the Irish poem often selected the stanza to be an instrument of wit rather than of drama, thereby bypassing the nineteenth century altogether and, with Auden as guide, looking straight into the smiling visage of Traherne.

But there was another influence as well. As soon as I began to write, another shadow, another strength laid claim to my attempts. A darker nineteenth century, a more bitter eighteenth century demanded to be acknowledged. The poets who are described by Daniel Corkery in his book The Hidden Ireland were the Munster poets of that era, whose work survived the collapse of the Bardic order. As I wrote in a new Ireland - a country of new music, fast food, foreign cars - their memories were voices on the other side of an underworld river. I could hardly hear them; I barely understood their gestures. Yet in the eighteenth century these Irish-speaking poets had been receiving stations for energies and influences far beyond the shores of their own country. They stood in assigns for the elaborate, wound-around and powerful reality of the old Bardic order. They were poets to whom the ultimate nightmare happened: the authority they claimed was denied by history.

With that denial, a great tragedy befell the literature of my country. It was not simply an Irish tragedy, but a European one as well. To these poets of eighteenth century Munster, Corkery writes 'Paris was nearer than Dublin and Vienna than London. Aodghan O'Rathaille, who probably never went outside Cork and Kerry, reckons up the consequences of the death of the King of Spain. Brian Merriman who never wandered far from his native Clare, wrote his well-known poem Cuirt an Mheadhan Oidhche in 1779-80; and the Rousseau-like turn of thought in it is held by some, though perhaps not on sufficient evidence, to be due to his contact with Continental officers in the big houses he was wont to visit'.

These poets were hostages to history. In a broken world, which Corkery acclaims as Pindaric, amid fragments of language and downright grief at the loss of their patrons, they became loud and distraught voices of elegy. Aodghan O'Rathaille records one night spent out of doors on a cliff over the Atlantic. With no pillow but rock, with no food but peri-winkles, his is the voice that touches a communal grief, while lamenting the loss of an elaborate bardic order. I did not speak the language of these poets; a childhood away had seen to that. But I understood that they were ghosts; that they had not been banished from the language I wrote, the poems I composed, the city I walked home through at night.

Indeed on damp winter days, which version of the poet's authority was revealed could seem to depend on nothing more exact than where I got off the bus in the morning. If I took the bus as far as Trinity College then I walked over cobbles and towards high-ceilinged rooms where Thomas Gray would have found comfort and familiarity. If I got off before the College and went down one of the sidestreets into one of the pubs where poetry was discussed with vehemence and emphasis, I could hear the older tones of outrage and invective. The tones 'which suggested the poet was the evicted tenant of an absentee history. That language was a sign for dispossession, and the authority of the poet was vested in the record kept of such dispossession.

I have made this maquette of myself as a young poet for a purpose. To show, perhaps, that the authority of the poet is not, and cannot be, an abstract matter. It has to be filtered through the untidy details of personal life. Perhaps I did not understand this when I left my apprenticeship with, so I thought, two clear and working models of the poet's life, the poet's stature. On the one hand, there was that light and fragrance of nineteenth century England, compromised by the tenor strains of the drawing room, and the after-dinner song; on the other, there was that outrage of the abandoned bard, that harsh musical note of defiance which offered, across my blundering attempts to be an Irish poet, an example both 'pure and terrible', to use Emily Dickinson's words from another context. According to which of these two versions of the poet's life I chose, I should have had a clear access to the poetic past. My early days as a poet should have prepared me to find in that past a continuous story. Instead something happened to me, and I found instead a suppressed narrative.

What happened to me was ordinary, unexceptional and yet, in terms of view of the poet and poetic authority, entirely disruptive. I got married. I went to live in a suburb, south of Dublin. I had two small children. I packed my books, padded my mugs with newspaper and walked back into a poem from which I thought I had escaped. The view from my window was of the Dublin hills and freshly laid pavements and recently planted white beams. Everything was raw, from the wounded colour of the floorboards to the wet tar of the driveways. The view on the page where I now wrote poems was also altered. I was, to start with, no longer a student of poetry. Subtly, without warning, everything was shifted. From writing lyrics with a little comprehension, and a fair amount of historic certainty, I now inhabited the lyric moment itself, but without signposts, without directions. On rainy mornings I looked around my kitchen and saw materials for a still life. Washing machines and medicine bottles, a glimpse of poplars in the distance and a child's hand reaching up for mine. What would it take I wondered to confer on these, not simply a visionary reality, but a visionary permission as well. The fact was it seemed to be missing. To be able to create it, endow it, argue for it seemed to me where the true authority of the poet lay. Not simply in reproaching history from a rocky cliff-face, or making cadences by a ruined abbey, but in determining a relation between the ordinary object and the achieved poem. And yet in that kitchen, I felt more like the object of a poem than its author. I felt part of the visionary absences I seemed unable to change. The clear poetic models of my first encounter with poetry were gone. I did not feel Irish; I did not feel in possession of a tradition. I simply felt that I could not record the life I lived in the poem I wrote, unless I could find my name in the poetic past. And I could not find it.

At that moment it seemed to me that the authority of the poet was a fiction composed in such a way that I could neither write nor read it. Not that is if I wanted to be the author of my poems. As an object, I could find myself written and read in a hundred poems. As a myth, as a legend, as a pastoral shepherdess, as a woman coming downstairs in a silk skirt. Of course I knew that I could make a visionary claim for my own experience; and that I must. But when I turned to the tradition to find support for that visionary claim, I could not find it. The name of my life was missing in the history of my form. It was that simple. But of course it wasn't.

I named this lecture for the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. He was born in Monaghan in 1904. He had come to Dublin at end of the thirties, had published his powerful anti-pastorol poem The Great Hunger. But he took issue with those elements of post-Revival Irish literary life which would have screen-tested him for the part of rural Irish poet; a writer of comfortable angers and reassuring narrowness. He denounced that easy relation to the tradition and went on to darken his lyric perspective and write the beautiful poems, set by the Canal in Dublin

I had the good fortune to meet him when I was young, before I had published many poems. I sat across from him cafe at the bottom of Grafton Street, where they still turned gritted the coffee beans into the window. Our conversation was brief but to me memorable. But the image I took with me into my later life and work was not of sitting across from him cafe table, but a more inward and less easily realized image: a writer of persistence and craft, who was not afraid of the limits of his subject matter. This is the poem Epic.

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork armed claims.
I heard the Duffy's shouting 'Damn your soul!'
And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot, defying blue-cast steel' -
'Here is the march along these iron stones'.
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

This poem of Kavanagh's, which I knew by heart when I was young, offered courage and light to me as I struggled to understand the tradition, but with an important qualification. In the diagram of the poem Kavanagh traced a naive and powerful line of transmission. Here were the stony fields of Monaghan, the iron appearance of a loved and unyielding landscape. Here, was the poet, all flesh and blood and local insistence. Here, the end of that line, and as its origin, was Homer's ghost, speaking his comfort and persuasion. And, yes, lending his authority. 'I made the Iliad from such a local row'. I loved the argument, the obstinacy of Kavanagh's poem. But where was my Homer? I saw no ghost, I heard no whispering at my ear as I stood in my garden, or went back into my house. I saw instead the Dublin hills on the horizon, and the sign they made of a geography at once formidable and exclusive, turning out into Irish literature and back into Irish history. In the place where I lived it was indeed possible to feel the lyric centre and the local importance as together and integral. But the fact remained that Homer in Kavanagh's sonnet lends both authority and history to more than Kavanagh's fields, and more even than his subject matter. The poetic authority is also conferred in Kavanagh as a poet: is granted across time, across whispers of distance, form: is - in Kavanagh's argument - a traveller with bright heels, journeying from the Ionic coast to Monaghan, and from the epic to the lyric. It was that authority I observed and missed. It was not simply that my life in a Dublin suburb where I lifted a child from a cot, or put rinsed milk bottles on the step, centred on small route-lines which had no exact name in poetry. It was more than that. I honoured the world I inherited both intellectually and imaginatively. When I lay down to sleep at night, over a garden or in ordinary darkness, where ordinary leaves clicked and rustled, I understood then, as well as any poet ever had, the difference between love and a love which is visionary. The first may well be guaranteed by security and attachment: only the second has the power to transform. As I lay there, my mind went seeking well beyond the down-to-earth and practical meaning of a daily love. The apple trees. The rustle and click of shadow-leaves. The mysterious cycle of plants. In those darknesses it could seem to me that this was not a world in which my love happened, but one whose phenomenology occurred because of it.

I knew that world was worthy of poetry. I knew it deserved the visionary claim I wished to make on its behalf. I knew that I was Irish: I knew I was a woman: that these categories of identity made a duality of reference. Perhaps that duality of reference made me, by its nature, an unreliable witness. But I cannot be the only contemporary poet, indeed I know I am not, who looked at the poetic tradition, to use Adrienne Rich's beautiful phrase, as 'a book of myths in which our names do not appear'. Forth is reason, if no other, I have thought it necessary to offer my witness as a possible text on the nature of the poet's authority, and its meaning in our time.

Let me for that reason ask you to support the fiction that I lived in that world of suburbia, small children and routine tasks and kept an inquisitor's eye on the tradition and the idea of the poet's authority. Of course I did no such thing. I wrote poems slowly: my ideas were untidy, half-formed and half-realized. I sensed an absence slowly and an isolation only gradually. But this is a lecture and therefore presents an outcome with a symmetry which never existed in the origin. And therefore I hope you will bear with me as I try to move this argument away from autobiography and more towards analysis.

I left College, a half-fledged apprentice, with - as I've said - two distinct ideas of the poet's authority. Of course there were other models, more recent innovations and more contemporary examples. There is, for instance, the great poetry of the American twentieth century which later came to mean so much to me, from Elizabeth Bishop's heartbreaking demotic to the innovative and magically courageous vernacular of John Ashbery. There is also the Russian tradition, which I could take heart from although I could not read it. But to begin with anyway, and in the relatively conservative environment I found, these were the ones most visible to me. The first looked back, as I've already said, to Irish history. I could not stay long in the pubs, or listen for long to the powerful conversations among those who loved poetry in the Dublin of that time, without sensing the ghosts and presences of the Bardic memory. When Oliver Goldsmith came to Dublin in the eighteenth century he took back with him the same memory, more recent in time, but also fresh and painful. These are his words about his fallen Irish fellow-poets:

'Their bards in particular,' he wrote of the Irish 'are still held in great veneration among them: those traditionary heralds are invited to every funeral, in order to fill up the interval of the howls with their songs and harps. In these they rehearse the actions of the ancestors of the deceased, bewail the bondage of their country under the English government and generally conclude with advising the young men and maidens to make the best use of their time, for they will soon, for all their present bloom, be stretched under the table, like the dead body before them'.

The veneration had survived, the image of bardic authority still lingered. But there was also now behind me the nineteenth century in which the English language began to assimilate that Irish-speaking defiance and the soft airs of Tom Moore: and the wolfhound and shamrocks and blackthorns of an anxious and colonized culture turned to British drawing rooms the acceptable face of Irish self-consciousness.

The question can be asked why did I even turn to the past? The answer is because I was already in it. I was not named there as an author, but I was written there as an object. In the Irish nineteenth century the political poem and the public poem twined together in an image of woman which slowly, as the century went on, became images of nationhood also. Hibernia sitting on her throne. The Dark Rosaleen of Mangan's poem. The Cathleen ni Houlihan of Yeats's play and a hundred more subtle, understated feminizations of the national and nationalizations of the feminine. These existed. 'O Ireland. My queen and my mother' wrote John Mitchel the Young Ireland patriot, as he steamed out of Dublin bay. I understood the sentiment; but I did not want to inherit the association.

Naturally then, I turned to the English language tradition of the nineteenth century. Once again that verb makes it more active and conscious than it was. And yet I was conscious enough, self-conscious enough perhaps, to become an active and even aggressive critic of that tradition. And that brings me to the most contentious part of this lecture. The authority of the poet is a concept which is under pressure. How much does it mean to the poet of a minority culture, who is a sexual dissident or politically restless, or that treasured poet who may not even be writing yet who feel themselves to be an outsider how much does that concept and the tradition behind it really mean? Does it not perhaps stand in as a sign for all the exclusions, erasures and caste-systems with which art should never be associated and yet somehow manages to be, generation after generation. If I critique that tradition, it is partly a political choice. Women poets, despite the changes of recent years, despite increasing access to university courses, anthologies and so on, have still restricted access to that inner sanctum of a tradition: its past. I want that access: I claim it. And this critique is part of that claim.

When I found it difficult to record the life I lived in the poems I wrote, when the permission for that act did not seem forthcoming, then it seemed natural to question why I could not find the help I needed in the past I loved. Then the order of the poetic tradition began to shift and crack and before my eyes appeared that suppressed narrative in which I could hear the story of false claims and false steps. If I turn to Matthew Arnold first, it is not to pillory his great and afflicted intelligence. But because I believe it is with Arnold that one of the significant and unreported shifts in poetry took place. Here, for instance, are his words from The Study of Poetry.

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

In his Oxford lectures on poetry Arnold expanded this view in this way:

There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

In these words of Arnold, even when you subtract Victorian rhetoric, something momentous is happening; has already happened. In dark cluttered studies, in tentative lyrics like Tennyson's Two Voices, during winter twilights in gas-lit college rooms, a boundary has shimmered and dissolved. The line between religion and poetry has given way. And what comes forth, monstrous to my eyes anyway, is neither religion nor poetry, but the religion of poetry.

Arnold, who used the beautiful expression that when we come to poetry which touches us in time, we come 'on burning ground', remains the sorcerer who dissolved that line between poetry and religion. He did it with the music of his prose, and the nobility of his intelligence. But he suffered for it. His is the nineteenth century poetic intelligence - among the significant writers that is -most afflicted by longing for vision, and lack of vision. When I stood at the centre of what I believed to be my own lyric moment, I found a recent tradition of poetry which however illuminating part of it was - made certain stem prescriptions about what was a suitable subject matter for a poem. I believed then, I still do now, that these prescriptions came from these moments of dissolution, when religion and poetry blurred into that questionable union, when a false authority was conferred on a poet, and a false importance was required of the subject matter for a poem.

And now to 'the burning ground'. Arnold, that heartbeat away from modernism, does not propose something radically at odds with the ethical suggestions of Wordsworth, the claims of Shelley, or the aesthetic statements of Keats. He simply draws them together in a statement of faith at a moment of doubt. And that potent combination does something to and for the authority of the poet which became part of the many influences which flowed forward into modernism.

Of course, in this wide series of statements, I am telescoping and jumping, suiting myself and hiding the evidence. I am, if you like, loitering with intent. My intention is to propose that one of the reasons the authority of the poet in our time is a questionable concept is because modernism has failed. I want to make clear what I am saying. I do not believe that the modern poets failed. How could they have? Each one is a study in courage. Each one of them - Eliot, Pound and William Yeats - is a beautiful and persuasive artist. Each one stood on the burning ground and made it safer. But the poetic movement they were involved in - sometimes more and sometimes less a part of - was in itself part of a wider movement. Yet in poetry its course ran differently from the other arts. In poetry it proposed a radical change. The problem was in the nature the discontinuity it proposed with the past. The stanza, the pentameter, the way the line was made - all these were challenged. And why not? The poem of the fin de siècle was expiring in a desert of style and ornament. So far, so good. But the discontinuity appears to me now to have been formal only in the most problematic way. The form they chose to challenge was the exterior furnishings of the convention. The challenge was brilliantly conceived and executed. But the customary formalization of the poet's identity and historic inheritance - these were not challenged.

And here we come to the heart of the argument. If I as a woman, with young children, in a world I perceived but could hardly express, found my subject matter unauthorized, and my name as a poet uninscribed, then I believe that the nineteenth century post-Romantic tradition is at least partly the cause of it. A poet like Arnold treated the malaise he sensed, within his own gift and in the age around him - and to the poet the two are sometimes hardly separable - by claiming new and wider privileges for the poet. Where, in other words, he sensed a loss of power he claimed an increase in privilege. Where the poet has always stood in some proximity to the religious function, now -according to Arnold - the poem might actually usurp religious meaning. These new privileges were not random either. They were sought through a species of intense historical opportunism. But at terrible cost. The cost was in Arnold's suggestion that the imagination could lay claim to the kingdom of faith, a claim which Donne and Herbert for instance had been careful not to make.

It is here, I believe, at this very moment in the nineteenth century, that many of the problems of audience, confidence and purpose which poetry now faces have their origin. Here in a claim for the form which made the ordinary day, the ordinary experience seem somehow unimportant, an inflationary spiral of subject matter was started. I think the heroes of obstinate, private vision such as Larkin have done much to redress the balance. But to place the idea of the authority of the poet any where in the region of the concept of religious veracity, at a time when faith was ebbing, was a mistake. The poetic imagination is not a sacramental force; it is simply the origin of the ambiguous, risky formal relation each poem requires. Just that; nothing more. To claim the first, may well endanger the second.

And so we come to Eliot, Yeats and Pound; to 'the burning ground' as Arnold calls it. Nothing in their dispositions seems to me to have made them ready to quarrel with the new privileges arranged for them and handed on by poets such as Arnold. They were not disposed to hand back these territories. On the contrary, the discontinuity they proposed was self-chosen. Eliot may have argued for the extinction of personality, he did not question the authority of the poet. Yeats and Pound did not contest it either. Their courage and foresight lay in disassembling elements of style. But that dismantling of formal constraints seems to me now, even today, absolutely incomplete without the dismantling of the poetic persona which gradually, through historic precedent, had arrayed itself in privileges, separations and types of artistic hubris which have not fitted well with the radicalized stylistic programme they advocated. 'It was not a revolt against form' said Eliot 'but against dead form'. One of the most dead fragments of that dead form, as far as I am concerned, was a poetic person a which claimed almost druidic rights and arbitrations for the poet. Which caused me problems, certainly; which caused them also, I have no doubt, to many of the other poets who like myself did not fit into that historic interpretation of the poet. I also think that explosive mixture of disarranged style and poetic hubris was the main cause of the collapse in mid-career of enormously gifted poets like Robert Lowell, who could not reconcile the anti-formal strategy of their poems with the formalized and inherited vision of the poet which remained at the centre of them. But that is a different story.

The arguments I have put forward here are wide and I claim no more status for then than they are a practitioner's impression. There are other, quite different views, whether on modernism, or the Irish nineteenth century; and I have listened to them, and learned from them.

But of one thing I am certain. Despite the wonderful, talismanic poems which have been written since 1950, we are no nearer to separating the true power of poetry from its historic privileges than we were fifty years ago. The true power is known to everyone here. It is irreducible and obvious, wherever it is encountered. It is Larkin's railway platform on that magic Whitsun afternoon; it is Ashbery's curved mirror; it is Bishop's scratchy moonlight in the wood; it is Wallace Stevens's winter silence and Adrienne Rich's ocean-bound wreck. But the privileges are different and divisive. They are blemished by quarrels about subject-matter, by uncertainties about literary status, and by the silence of poets who will not join a debate which concerns them.

I did not resolve my idea of poetic authority in my house, or my garden, or at that moment when I felt my subject matter was not sanctioned by my tradition. To suggest I did would be sentimental, or self-deceptive or both. But I did learn there - I had no choice but to learn - that poetry is not a fiefdom or a private domain. It is a city whose gates stand wide; which has never exactly welcomed its newcomers but has always found room for them. At the gates of this city now stand the poets of the future; of other cultures, of different identities. The gift we can offer them should be instructed by Wordsworth's offering to his new century, two hundred years ago. When he honoured the vernacular and disowned poetic speech, he made more room in that city. We have a chance now to honour the power of poetry and look in a challenging way at an historic notion of the poet's privilege which is neither inclusive nor useful. If we issue that challenge, then our dialogue with the poetry of the future will have dignity and energy. If not, we may well end up clinging to privilege and calling it poetry. We have the chance now: and we should take it.