UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Wharton, Jill
Dept./Program:
English
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
This study, along with many others more worthy ofthe claim, found its beginning in Paul Fussell's classic Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Fussell's text anticipates the broad concerns of postcolonialism and opens conversation about both the voluntary and retributive actions taken by Ireland with respect to the Empire, and the Great War iconography that has become an inextricable element of poetic commemoration in the modern age. The anomaly of his narrative is that Ireland, requiring a different chronological and cultural framework, appears as a mere specter in that imaginary.
Chapter one presents a brief history of post-War Ireland from a nationalist perspective, and speaks to the ways in which the lyrics of the Irish poets Francis Ledwidge, Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Pearse, writing from both within and outside the front lines personalized the tropes of Romantic Nationalism for W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. My understanding of Irish republicanism is as a political amalgam encompassing historicized anti-imperialism, Enlightenment principles, insurgent nationalism, and socialism. Throughout, I consider the organizing concerns of postcolonial theory to be expressed in a poetics of landscape, of language, and national religious identity; I then engage a dialectical, Materialist understanding of the relation between social and political subjectivity and lyrical form. I also indicate the significance of these poets' collective participation in a tradition of distinctly Gaelic origin: the role of poet as bard, public activist, and social functionary.
The second chapter considers the Yeatsian dialectic of history and the heroic imagination prevalent in several of his most overtly political poems arising from the aftermath of WWI, and the contested, and often class-coded, interpretation of his racialized Celticism in directing national tradition. The concluding chapter on Heaney is concerned with the evolution of postcolonial consciousness and Great War paradigms in his earlier collections, and the broader significance of the popular and academic understanding of Heaney as a postcolonial critic-poet. I then speculate on how such a theoretical dimension might help make sense of Heaney's artistic handling of the dilemma of Irish political violence-particularly in the Six Counties-as both an historical phenomenon and as a personal, and often purgatorial, lived experience running the course of the twentieth century.
Chapter one presents a brief history of post-War Ireland from a nationalist perspective, and speaks to the ways in which the lyrics of the Irish poets Francis Ledwidge, Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Pearse, writing from both within and outside the front lines personalized the tropes of Romantic Nationalism for W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. My understanding of Irish republicanism is as a political amalgam encompassing historicized anti-imperialism, Enlightenment principles, insurgent nationalism, and socialism. Throughout, I consider the organizing concerns of postcolonial theory to be expressed in a poetics of landscape, of language, and national religious identity; I then engage a dialectical, Materialist understanding of the relation between social and political subjectivity and lyrical form. I also indicate the significance of these poets' collective participation in a tradition of distinctly Gaelic origin: the role of poet as bard, public activist, and social functionary.
The second chapter considers the Yeatsian dialectic of history and the heroic imagination prevalent in several of his most overtly political poems arising from the aftermath of WWI, and the contested, and often class-coded, interpretation of his racialized Celticism in directing national tradition. The concluding chapter on Heaney is concerned with the evolution of postcolonial consciousness and Great War paradigms in his earlier collections, and the broader significance of the popular and academic understanding of Heaney as a postcolonial critic-poet. I then speculate on how such a theoretical dimension might help make sense of Heaney's artistic handling of the dilemma of Irish political violence-particularly in the Six Counties-as both an historical phenomenon and as a personal, and often purgatorial, lived experience running the course of the twentieth century.