A Failure to Return: John Montague’s The Rough Field

Abstract

Like Thomas Kinsella, John Montague has remained consistent in his espousal of a poetic which is open to the influences of international writing — as is most explicitly clear in his essay of 1973, ‘The Impact of International Modern Poetry on Irish Writing’:

Like a composer or a painter, an Irish poet should be familiar with the finest work of his contemporaries, not just the increasingly narrow English version of modern poetry, or the more extensive American one, but in other languages as well.…I would say that my contemporaries are not just the Irish poets I admire, but those with whom I feel an affinity elsewhere, Ponge in France, Octavio Paz in Mexico, Gary Synder and Robert Duncan in San Francisco. I seem to be advocating a deliberate programme of denationalization, but all true experiments and exchanges only serve to illuminate the self, a rediscovery of the oldest laws of the psyche.¹