Abstract
This chapter introduces the reader to the representations of Greek and Latin literatures inherited by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Eavan Boland, and which they would rework in the early part of their careers. The chapter first considers the representations and uses of ancient Greece and Rome in Anglophone Irish poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, and in particular in the work of William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. In a second section, it examines the role played by the poets’ education, and by the differences in their education in the Irish and Northern Irish systems in terms of their understanding of ancient Greece and Rome, which, it argues, would deeply shape their creative relationship with the material.
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Notes
- 1.
For example Robert Mahony, in ‘“Prince Posterity” as an Irish Nationalist: The Posthumous Course of Swift’s Patriotic Reputation’, shows how Jonathan Swift, despite associations with Irish patriotism, ultimately failed to fully include Irish Catholics in his vision for Ireland, other than as a subordinate group, marginal in his argument. Mahony writes: ‘since Swift’s patriotism was defensive, Irish Catholics hardly figured because they posed no threat to the Protestant nation or its interests. (…) Swift was always a strong Churchman, who generally identified Ireland’s best interest as that of the Anglican establishment’ (Mahony 1995, p. 45).
- 2.
Note the association of Greek and Irish mythologies, which Yeats would develop at the time of the Irish Revival.
- 3.
The classification established by Giorgio Melchiori in The Whole Mystery of Art: Patterns into Poetry in the Work of William Butler Yeats distinguishes between five main symbolical functions in the figure of Helen: she can either represent the ‘destructive power of beauty (fall of Troy)’, the ‘union of contraries: Love and War’, ‘physical decay, waning of beauty’, the ‘Unity of all beliefs, religions, folklores’, especially Greek and Irish, and ‘beauty as the bringer of madness and frenzy’ (Melchiori 1979, p. 115).
- 4.
Both ‘On Looking into E.V. Rieu’s Homer’ and ‘Epic’ were published in The Bell in November 1951.
- 5.
W.B. Stanford is more critical in his review of the play, saying that MacNeice has simplified the original (see W.B. Stanford (1974), ‘The Translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus’: 63–66).
- 6.
I am largely indebted to Alec Reid’s article ‘MacNeice in the Theatre’ for details about the production and reception of the play.
- 7.
Louis MacNeice would also a few years later evoke his sense of affinity with Horace in ‘Memoranda to Horace’, published in The Burning Perch (1963).
- 8.
See Michael Longley (2000), p. 123.
- 9.
In the 1949 edition. See A Pageant of English Verse, selected by E.W. Parker (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949).
- 10.
Derek Mahon also learnt Latin at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, but of the four poets, he is the only one not to refer to those years with fondness.
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Impens, F. (2018). The Classics in Modern Irish Poetry. In: Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68231-0_2
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