Abstract
Making a significant contribution to the ‘extension of the imaginative franchise’1 which Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion have identified as a salient feature of contemporary British poetry are those poets outside the dominant social wisdom — not necessarily in overtly political terms, but in the sense of having at their disposal historical or symbolic resources, allegiances and affiliations denied to those who write straight out of the depthless, dehistoricised English mainstream. This may be a matter of class (Dunn, Harrison) or race (Braithwaite, Markham) or gender (Selima Hill, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian) or region (Muldoon, Paulin). This essay examines three of the younger Ulster poets in whose writing the marginal becomes central, to both memorable and subversive effect. For the work of these poets may be seen to have a countercultural ambition, a transgressive function, in giving voice to what lies outside the law, outside the dominant (social and linguistic) value system. In their different ways, these poets open up, for a brief moment, onto disorder and illegality, tracing the unsaid and the unseen of culture, that which is silent, invisible, made ‘absent’ because it lies outside the dominant categories. Given the traditional rigidity of the Ulster social formation out of which these poets wrote, and seeing the disastrous consequences of such obduracy, there were perhaps added incentives for an Ulster poet to try and extend the ‘imaginative franchise’.
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Notes
Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British (London: Faber, 1987), p. 32. Hereafter, the abbreviation MB will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Paul Muldoon, Selected Poems 1968–1983 (London: Faber, 1986), p. 34. Hereafter, the abbreviation SP will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, translated by R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 101.
Tom Paulin, ‘Introduction’, Faber Book of Political Verse, ed. Tom Paulin (London: Faber, 1986), p. 43.
Tom Paulin, The Strange Museum (London: Faber, 1980), p. 44. Hereafter, the abbreviation SM will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Tom Paulin, ‘Martello’, Liberty Tree (London: Faber, 1983), p. 55. Hereafter, the abbreviation LT will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Tom Paulin, A State of Justice (London: Faber, 1977), p. 24. Hereafter, the abbreviation SJ will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Tom Paulin, Fivemiletown (London: Faber, 1987), p. 25. Hereafter, the abbreviation F will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Catherine Byron, ‘The Carpentry of the Sea’, Poetry Review, Vol. 78, No. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 63–4.
Medbh McGuckian, Venus and the Rain (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 32. Hereafter, the abbreviation VR will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Medbh McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 59. Hereafter, the abbreviation OBB will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
Medbh McGuckian, The Flower Master (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 42. Hereafter, the abbreviation FM will be used, and page references incorporated into the text.
S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, first published 1817 (London, J.M. Dent: 1965), p. 167.
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© 1997 The Editorial Board, Lumiere (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Andrews, E. (1997). ‘Some Sweet Disorder’ — the Poetry of Subversion: Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. In: Day, G., Docherty, B. (eds) British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25566-5_8
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