Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (Bloodaxe Books, 1985). Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 1984) pp. 144.

Abstract

Around 1980, Tom Paulin sensibly stopped believing that Northern Ireland ought to stay “permanently wedded” to Great Britain. So he tells us, at least, in Ireland and the English Crisis. He lost his faith in Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Civil Rights movement, and started sympathizing with John Hume and reading Irish history again. He became committed, he writes, “to an idea of identity which has as yet no formal or institutional existence. It assumes the existence of a non-sectarian, republican state which comprises the whole island of Ireland”. The change of heart led to Liberty Tree, and some new departures in Paulin’s poetry. Ireland and the English Crisis can partly be read as a companion piece to Liberty Tree, which it repeatedly illuminates. But it is itself also full of Paulin’s new convictions. It covers a wide range of different kinds of topic, from Edward Thomas and Henry James to Paisley, O’Brien and the language question. But the various different essays are animated by common concerns. Above all, they are an expression of a distinctive but fragile republicanism — fragile, at least, in that it takes its bearings from a dream that has no immediate prospect of being realized. The result is a book that offers not only literary but cultural criticism. That criticism is perhaps the more acute for what must at present seem to be its forlornness.