"O come all ye youthful poets and try to be more human."

Prompts for next time:

1. One could argue (many critics have) that Kavanagh is the first poet of the new, independent Irish State. If this is true, what are your impressions of that State based on your reading of his poetry?

2. The shadow of Yeats is long, falling over not just modern Irish poetry, but all modern poetry written in English. However, Kavanagh stands in stark contrast to his predecessor. We talked about some of those differences in class today, but I would like for you to explore this further. And, what is perhaps more difficult, discuss any similarities you see in their work. (You might pair an answer to this question with an answer to #5 below.)

3. How is the poem "Advent" a celebration of the immediate, and perhaps most especially a celebration of the vernacular? Where and how do you see this kind of celebration reflected in Kavanagh's other poems?

4. In "Peace," do you think the speaker feels more of an affinity with the "country fellows" mentioned early in the poem, or with the "fools" who try to transcend the local setting and "fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time"? Our instinct is to place Kavanagh among the turnips, potatoes, and turf banks, but isn't the relationship expressed in the poem a bit more complex than that? Thoughts?

5. After reading "Irish Poets Open Your Eyes," go back and read Yeats's "Under Ben Bulben." What are some of the most striking differences between the two poems?

6. Do you see anything in Kavanagh that reminds you of Joyce? If so, what? Also, after reading the poem of the same name, you might consider answering Kavanagh's question: "Who Killed James Joyce?"

7. If "Spring Day" is an artist's manifesto (I'm not saying it is, but for the sake of an interesting question...), what are the principles of that manifesto?

8. One thing that always strikes me when I read The Great Hunger is how many different styles Kavanagh uses. There are sections in rhyme and meter, sections of long-line free verse, sections of short couplets, etc. Why do you think Kavanagh varies the form of the poem so much? How might that be related to the content?

9. Talk about sexuality in these poems. How is used differently than in Wilde, or Yeats, or Joyce? Why, for example, might Kavanagh use sexual imagery and language to describe farming (and, for that matter, farmers)? Quinn calls the Ireland of The Great Hunger a "famine-stricken, psycho-sexual wasteland." Do you agree? Can comparisons be made to that pillar of modern poetry, The Wasteland?

Patrick Kavanagh Reading List

Here I am, rushing back from Ohio, with a Patrick Kavanagh reading list in-hand. If you haven't been able to track down the Penguin Selected Poems, or if it hasn't arrived yet, you should be able to find many (but probably not all) of these poems online. I definitely want you to read Quinn's "Poetry and Independence" piece at the beginning, so I will be bringing a few copies of that to class for those of you who don't have it yet. It's very good, if slightly repetitive in places; and for those of you who find yourselves drawn to Kavanagh's work, or who want some supplemental material for your term paper, Quinn has also written an excellent biography on him.

I like to think of Kavanagh as the counterweight to Yeats. That's overly simplistic for sure, but it's accurate in many ways, which we will discuss. I will start a Kavanagh thread tomorrow, but for now, feel free to compare his work to Yeats's, or to Joyce's for that matter. He was a big fan of Joyce.

Here is your reading list. I'll be excited to see what you make of Kavanagh.

For Monday
"Inniskeen Road: July Evening"
"Shancoduff"
"Memory of My Father"
"Spraying the Potatoes"
"Stony Grey Soil"

For Wednesday
The Great Hunger
"Advent"
"Peace"
"Threshing Morning"
"Pegasus"
"In Memory of My Mother"
"Spring Day"
"Irish Poets Open Your Eyes"
"To be Dead"
"Who Killed James Joyce?"

For Friday
"Innocence"
"Epic"
"If You ever Go To Dublin Town"
"Irish Stew"
"The Hospital"
"Come Dance With Kitty Stobling"
"Canal Bank Walk"
"Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin"
"An Insult"

Most of these poems are fairly short, but The Great Hunger, Kavanagh's magnum opus, is quite long, so you might want to read ahead if you have time.

See you tomorrow.

Patrick Kavanagh monument on Dublin's Grand Canal.

Dubliners

Let's start a Dubliners thread. I liked what you had to say in class yesterday very much and would welcome any further discussion of open-ended narrative, atypical or fragmented plot structures, authenticating details, or comparisons to/tie-ins with Yeats and Wilde or anything else (yes, including comic books, Andy). Here are a few things I wouldn't mind reading about:

1. Some critics argue that the main character in Dubliners is the city of Dublin itself. How do you feel about this? Can any place transcend "setting" and function as a character?

2. Do you feel as though you gain something from reading the stories together, as a collection, as opposed to reading only a few of them? I realize it may be impossible to know how you would react to a story on its own, separated from the others, but it isn't impossible to see what is gained from reading them as parts of a whole (perhaps wholeness isn't the best adjective to use when discussing Joyce, but you know what I mean). For example, what common motifs, images, situations, themes, landmarks, etc. run through the stories, and what effect does this have on you as a reader?

3. Joyce was skeptical of the Celtic Revival, famously saying, "I distrust all enthusiams." However, as important to Ireland's identity as revivalist texts were/are, could it not be argued that Joyce's depictions of Dublin's political climate, religious tensions, family life, sexuality, stagnation, etc. are ultimately some of the most substantive texts when it comes to modern Ireland's identity?

4. Could Joyce's stories be called, in Yeatsian terms, "the fascination of what's difficult"?

5. Joyce once wrote in a letter that "Two Gallants" is "one of the most important stories in the book," and he said he would "rather sacrifice five other stories" than lose that one. Why do you think this is?

Yeats Exhibit - National Library of Ireland

There is a really cool interactive exhibit on Yeats at the National Library of Ireland, and it's online. Check it out: http://www.nli.ie/yeats/

The Poet, The Scarecrow, the Dying Animal

I mentioned in class that I would post a reading/assignment/test schedule to Blackboard. It's up now. Once you have finished the selections from Yeats, you'll want to get started on Dubliners as soon as you can.

This week I would like to talk about Yeats's image/perception of himself as he ages, his feelings about Ireland as it does the same, and how he views the role of the poet, and the importance of art, in the Ireland of the future.

Remember what we discussed on Friday about gyres and cyclical journeys (including Nietzsche's idea of "eternal recurrence"). The later Yeats is a man who is aware that he is aging (you might want to look up "Steinach operation" to see the lengths Yeats went to in order to keep/restore his virility) but is also continually questioning his past and his future. He believes in reincarnation as well, and this is not something to be glossed over. Furthermore, as a very "public man" (as he refers to himself in "Among School Children"), Yeats believes that his life and his art, indeed the work of all artists, constitutes the soul of a nation.

Any comments that address these concerns directly or indirectly (or that don't address them at all, if you'd rather talk about something else) will be welcome.

"Terrible Beauty"

The Easter 1916 rising was the result of a chain of events, but in a nutshell, it occured largely because the English refused to give Home Rule to Ireland. A bill had been passed in the House of Commons in 1912, giving Ireland home rule, but the House of Lords refused to ratify it. This actually happened twice, and then the bill was shelved when WWI began.

The uprising, passionate as it was, was futile in some ways. Home Rule was not given (or taken), and many who were involved lost theie lives, both in the fighting and in subsequent executions. But it was also because of the executions that the Easter Rising became a symbolic event, an important rallying point, for the Irish liberation movement. Republicans won the majority of the seats in the next parlimentary election, and Ireland declared independence in 1919, resulting in the Irish War of Independence.

Yeats, we should note, was uninterested in the onset of WWI. It didn't hit close enough to home. But when the Easter rising broke out soon after, Yeats was "changed, changed utterly." He knew the men that marched on the General Post Office, some of whom he mentions in "Easter 1916": MacDonagh and MacBride, Connolly and Pearse. Yeats did not necessarily agree with what these men did. "Was it needless death after all?" he asks in the poem (Yeats, incidentally, almost never answers the questions he asks. The poets role is to ask them.) He also writes that "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart" - a line that nationalists like Maud Gonne did not like because they believed one could not sacrifice too much. But whether or not Yeats agreed with the actions of these men, the experience changed him a great deal. He began to see people in a new way (the poem, in fact, is largely about this altered perception of people). For example, Yeats disliked Maud Gonne's husband, Major John MacBride, "A drunken, vanglorious lout" as the poem has it. But MacBride, too, is numbered in Yeats's song, "changed" along with the others.

We will talk about this poem, and these events, in greater detail, but what I would like for you to do now is focus on the birth of "terrible beauty" in this poem and others. Yeats's earlier work is beautiful, certainly, but it is not "terrible." As we discussed in class today, there is much in these middle-period poems that talks about the price that life exacts, whether in love, or art, or politics. That price became very real to Yeats in 1916. I would like to have a discussion about the awareness of "terrible beauty" that is evident in these poems.

I would also like to talk about the idea of passion, or rather the act of being passionate, in these poems. In particular, look at "The Fisherman," "The Wilde Swans at Coole," "September 1913," and "Ego Dominus Tuus." Talk about passion.

I would like for everyone to respond to one of these ideas before class on Wednesday.
-D

Walking Naked

This week, in lieu of writing responses before each class, I would like to have an ongoing discussion here. I will post some questions every day for you to think about and respond to. You don't need to feel obligated to respond to all of them; just pick the ones that strike you and respond to those.

You will have noticed while reading "middle" Yeats that there are definite developments in the poetry. It seems like every time I begin reading these poems, I begin to say (sometimes out loud), "Where is Fergus? Where are the faeries?" and what I quickly realize is that Yeats is dealing with his feelings more directly and honestly, as opposed to burying them in a refashioned mythology. I don't know if I would go so far as to call it "Yeats Unplugged," but it is definitely Yeats stripped-down. In fact, stripping is a good metaphor because it's one Yeats uses himself:

A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

It's perhaps no coincidence that this poem comes from Responsibilities (1914), a volume whose title reflects Yeats's growing sense of, well, responsibility as a public figure and national poet. In fact, one of the volume's two epigraphs is "In dreams begin responsibility" (feel free to discuss what you think this might mean in the context of the poems we are reading).

I would like to begin with a discussion of the changes you are noticing in the poetry. What themes seem to arise and recur in these poems? What is different about the poetry in terms of form and content? What features and themes remain from the early work? try to draw some conclusions about how Yeats is evolving as an artist.

You are going to notice a lot of references to love, especially to spurned and/or unrequited romance. As we briefly discussed in class on Friday, many of Yeats's poems are devoted, at least in part, to his feelings for the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. Indeed, it is difficult to read Yeats without at least some of this biographical background. But try, at least for a few days. People read Gonne into practically every line Yeats penned, and they often do so at the expense of the poems. (You will have noticed by now that I try to work against the cult of personality, and the popular practice of reading literature in order to "get to know" a writer. The artist is important, of course, and biography can illuminate the art, but it is the art itself that makes us care about the artist at all.) So let's start by getting into the poems themselves, which is where we really belong anyway.

See you Monday,
-D