Karmeli 1

Petra Karmeli

Vesna Uki Kota, PhD, assistant professor

Irish Poetry of the 20th Century

English Department

University of Zadar

20 February 2017

The Irish Modernism on the Example of MacGreevy

Introduction

In this seminar paper we will discuss the Irish modernism in poetry on the example of

Thomas MacGreevys poem Homage To Hieronymus Bosch. I will start with something about

the Modernist Period in general. Next part I will examine the Irish modernism as a part of a

larger cultural movement. Finally I will say something about MacGreevy, who is considered

one of the first Irish modernist poets, and his surreal poem Homage To Hieronymus Bosch.

The poem with nightmarish imagery is quite a good example showing the periods

characteristics. I have chosen MacGreevy because I loved the poem The Civitate Hominum

we did on lectures. However, I have found out he is not so popular as there is not much

written about him and his work.

 Karmeli 2

The Modernist Period in English Literature

To start with, modernism is a cultural international movement which flourished in the

first decades of the 20th century. It rebelled against the late 19 th century traditions and

embraced new economic, social and political aspects of the modern world. The movement

was strongly influenced by psychological work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, physicist

theories of Albert Einstein and Max Plank, ideas of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and

Henri Bergson, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, anthropologist James George Frazer,

sociologist Karl Marx, biologist Charles Darwin, and by many others.

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from the beginning of

the 20th century through roughly 1965. Since literature is the reaction to reality, movement

cannot be understood out of the context of 20 th century and its social and cultural

circumstances. By the end of 19th Century the pre-industrial way of life has almost

disappeared. The sense of local community was being lost as society fragmented into

anonymous individuals with fluid identities in the urban context. The machinery of modern

society is perceived as impersonal and capitalist. Therefore, the modernists struggle with the

failure of tradition and become skeptic of future. After the First World War 1914-1918

Modern begins to define the 20th Century. The modernists saw horrors of the war and fall of

humanity. Instead of progress and growth, they saw decay and a growing alienation of the

individual. Modernism was built on a sense of lost community and civilization.

The period was marked by sudden and strong break with traditional ways of viewing

the world, rebelling against social conventions and literary tradition. For the first time bold

experimentation was approved. There was a belief that the world is created in the act of

perceiving it and there is no absolute truth as all things are relative. The main experience is
 Karmeli 3

that of alienation, loss, and despair. The central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner

self and consciousness.

Few major names stand out as those who defined the 1900s literature: novelists such

as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, F. Scott

Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and D. H. Lawrence; poets such as Thomas Hardy, W. B.

Yeats, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden; and

dramatists such as Samuel Beckett.

The Irish Modern Poetry

The Irish Modernism has never become the mainstream of Irish poetry. Irish poetic

Modernism took its lead not from Yeats, but from Joyce. In the 1930s there was a generation

of writers who engaged in experimental writing. The most significant Modernist Irish poets

include Samuel Beckett, Patrick Crotty, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Randolp Healy, Thomas

Kinsella, Thomas MacGreevy, Mary Devenport ONeill, George Reavey, Blanaid

Shalkeld,Maurice Scully, and Geoffrey Squires.

The most obvious element of modernist poetry is the experimentation of expression.

The different ways of expressing include the imagist way of presenting just concrete images

for the reader to understand the idea, the symbolist way of presenting things symbolically for

reader to interpret them, the realist way, the expressionistic way of going deep into psyche and

trying to express the deepest feelings, the surrealist way of creating the mood of madness, and

so on. Another important element is the use of new and wide range of subjects and themes.

While traditional poetry was limited to subjects of universal significance, in modernist poetry

there are poems about any topic and theme. Sometimes even a single poem can be about many

things at the same time. Modernist poems never have single and fixed meaning as in
 Karmeli 4

traditional poems. Also, modernist poets violated conventions and established rules of literary

tradition in the form, style, stanza, rhythm, and other technical devices of poetry. The old

metrical systems, rhyme-schemes, and traditional symbols and metaphors are no longer

dominant; each poet makes his own rules.

Thomas MacGreevy

Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967) was an Irish poet, art and literary critic. He is

considered as Irelands first modernist poet, yet he is one of Irish most neglected poets.

Although many consider his work slight as he published only one volume of poetry, his

original poetry paved the way for younger poets such as Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey and

Denis Devlin. Beckett described Thomas MacGreevys collection Poems (1934) as probably

the most important contribution to post-war Irish poetry. However, MacGreevy stayed

unknown in Ireland and elsewhere. His marginal position could be due to the fact he was in

association with several of the major figures of modernism: Beckett, Joyce, and Stevens. His

name occurs more often in the biographies and letters of other writers than on its own. Brian

Coffey argued that the persistence of religious belief in MacGreevys poetry made him

unfashionable.

To say something about his biography, Thomas MacGreevy was born in Tarbert in

1893. He studied privately for the Civil Service and moved to Dublin. One year later he was

transferred to London. Shortly before the outbreak of the war he was transferred to the

Intelligence Department of Admiralty. In 1917 he began active service and was promoted to

second lieutenant. He served at Ypres salient and the Somme, where he was twice wounded.

Many of his poems respond to the consequences of war in Ireland. Beckett in his review of

MacGreevys Poems said all MacGreevys poetry s prayer. In 1919 he was demobilized and
 Karmeli 5

attended Trinity on a scholarship for ex-officers and serviceman of the First World War. He

took Honours Degree in Political Science and History. In 1925 he began writing critics and

became assistant editor of a journal of the arts. During 1925 and 1926 he wrote some of his

most anthologized poems, including Homage to Hieronymus Bosch. He was using his life in

Tarbert, Dublin and the Great War as an inspiration. Most of his poetry concerned events he

witnessed. In 1934 his only collection of poems was published by William Heinemann in

London and by the Viking Press in New York. Reviews were mixes Ireland was not ready

for modernist poetry yet. He was influenced by Eliots The Waste Land and other Imagist

poets, but he managed to come as original. He also had interest in art and was director of the

National Gallery of Ireland for thirteen years. Also, he served the first Irish Arts council. He

died in 1967 of heart attack.

Homage To Hieronymus Bosch

Homage to Hieronymus Bosch is a more or less typical modernist poem. It is surreal

poem occasioned by an incident, the hanging of National University student Kevin Barry

during the Irish War of Independence. He was the first Irish republican executed by the British

during the Easter Rising. He was sentences to death for his part in an Irish Volunteer operation

during which three British soldiers died. Kevin was only eighteen when he was executed and

became symbol of escalation of violence in the Irish War of Independence. MacGreevy fought

in the World War I and had petitioned for the nursery governor, that is Kevin Barry in the

poem. Hieronymus Bosch in the title was a 15th century painter from Netherlands who

specialized in deeply surreal imagery. Bosch created a strange world of dreams and

nightmares in his pictures. Same nightmarish imagery is present in Homage To Hieronymus

Bosch where surrealist allegory stands for his experience of war time.
 Karmeli 6

Picture 1. The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, c.
1495-1505, Bosch

The poem opens with image of a woman with no face coming to light and a boy in

brown suit without hands holding her skirt. They both stop in fear. The narrator now notices a

group of shadowy figures behind the woman. Without lips she said to the shadows: The book

must be opened / And the park too. The narrator is in fear while looking the words she

pronounced on the floor twisting. One of the figures comes out of his effigy. He wanted to say

something to the woman but the nursery governor flew up out of the well so he stops and

stares. He says as if apologizing to the nursery governor: Say nothing, I say, say nothing, say

nothing! Then he reluctantly goes back into his effigy. Next image occurring is innumerous

number of sewage rats coming out from the drains obediently bowing to the shadowy figures

then going dancing. The figures look horrified and the woman cries and collapses but the rats

continue to dance on her and on the words on the floor. The nursery governor goes back to the

well, this time taking the boy without hands with him.
 Karmeli 7

The poem is formlessness which is characteristic of modernistic poems. Stanzas and

lines are of different length and there is no rhyme. However, rhythm is achieved by

assonance, alliteration and repetition of words, for example: She stopped / And he stopped, /

And I, in terror, stopped, staring. Or to give another example: I might have tittered / But my

teeth chattered. The main difficulty during reading this poem was to find out what it actually

is about as I did not know who Hieronymus Bosch or Kevin Barry were. To understand the

poem some information are needed beforehand. After seeing pictures of Bosch the atmosphere

of the poem was much easier to visualize. This is obvious modernist preoccupation with

dreams. Tone is nightmarish, almost as in horror; dark and frightening images are described.

The ugly images are there to emphasize the true nature of war.

The words are personified in the poem. And I saw the words, as they fell, / Lay,

wriggling, on the ground, The word went ping! like bullets, The rats danced on her / And

on the wriggling words. He is giving words qualities of a person; they are wriggling on the

floor.

The way I understood it the woman with the boy are people frightened by the

circumstances of war. She has no face, and he has no hands as they lost everything to the war.

Shadowy figures are the dead whose lives were taken in the war. The well of Saint Patrick,

according to the legend, refers to a pit or a well that was an entrance to Purgatory. Kevin as

the nursery governor comes out of the well only to go back with the boy. I assume the boy is

dead too. He is reoccurring motive introduced at the beginning of the poem and ending the

poem as a circle. The rats I interpreted as bullets taking away lives, they come in huge

numbers and dance irregularly as bullets fly around. The woman collapses in fear when sees

them and they just continue dancing on her body smirking.

 Karmeli 8

The interesting tercet is: High above the Bank of Ireland / Unearthly music sounded, /

Passing westwards. I believe MacGreevy is referring to horrors happening in Ireland are

being heard in America. USA supported the Ireland and $5 million was raised in the US by

Irish Americans and sent to Ireland to finance the Republic.

Conclusion

To conclude with my own opinion, I loved MacGreevy and Homage To Hieronymus

Bosch. Even though reading it was difficult and I could not find any analysis available I

enjoyed it. Hearing the poem being read out loud and searching for Boschs paintings made it

much easier to understand. His minimalistic style, dreadful shocking images, and originality

of his work had a quite effect on me.

 Karmeli 9

Homage to Hieronymus Bosch

A woman with no face walked into the light;

A boy, in a brown-tree norfolk suit,
Holding on
Without hands
To her seeming skirt.

She stopped,
And he stopped,
And I, in terror, stopped, staring.

Then I saw a group of shadowy figures behind her.

It was a wild wet morning

But the little world was spinning on.

Liplessly, somehow, she addressed it:

The book must be opened
And the park too.

I might have tittered

But my teeth chattered
And I saw that the words, as they fell,
Lay, wriggling, on the ground.

There was a stir of wet wind

And the shadowy figures began to stir
When one I had thought dead
Filmed slowly out of his great effigy on a tomb near by
And they all shuddered
He bent as if to speak to the woman
But the nursery governor flew up out of the well of Saint Patrick,
Confiscated by his mistress,
 Karmeli 10

And, his head bent,

Staring out over his spectacles,
And scratching the gravel furiously, Hissed -
The words went pingg! like bullets,
Upwards, past his spectacles
Say nothing, I say, say nothing, say nothing!
And he who had seemed to be coming to life
Gasped,
Began hysterically, to laugh and cry,
And, with a gesture of impotent and half-petulant despair,
Filmed back into his effigy again.

High above the Bank of Ireland

Unearthly music sounded,
Passing westwards.

Then, from the drains,

Small sewage rats slid out.
They numbered hundreds of hundreds, tens, thousands.
Each bowed obsequiously to the shadowy figures
Then turned and joined in a stomach dance with his brothers and sisters.
Being a multitude, they danced irregularly.
There was rat laughter, Deeper here and there,
And occasionally she-rats grew hysterical.
The shadowy figures looked on, agonized.
The woman with no face gave a cry and collapsed.
The rats danced on her
And on the wriggling words
Smirking.
The nursery governor flew back into the well
With the little figure without hands in the brown-tree clothes.

Thomas MacGreevy