Abstract
A clear chronology of the evolution of classical presences in Irish poetry after 1960, this chapter draws attention to the origins and aftermath of the ‘classical revival’ in the 1990s. Discussing the work of Peter Fallon, Peter McDonald, and Theo Dorgan, it suggests that while younger poets too have drawn from ancient Greece and Rome, the ‘classical turn’ in Irish poetry may now have passed. Reading classical poems as part of the poets’ wider engagement with translation, it argues that classical rewritings have enabled the recent transition of Irish poetry towards a global outlook, and fuelled a vivid interest in foreign poets in Ireland. Playing a role in the unsettling of dichotomies in the early 1990s, the classics became texts that could be used to reach out to others: the other community in the North, as well as gradually other Anglophone and non-Anglophone cultures in the Ireland of the new millennium.
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Notes
- 1.
The death toll would reach up to 250 to 300 per year in the mid-1970s.
- 2.
For more details about the poems mentioned here, see the individual chapters on each poet.
- 3.
Nowhere in their work and published reflections on the classics do we see Heaney or Longley challenge the representation of the classics which they inherited from school. Neither of them has openly commented on the manipulation of ancient Greece and Rome to justify imperialism, nor on the fact that, despite the democratisation of secondary education, Classics remains the preserve of a middle- and upper-class education.
- 4.
Euripides’ Medea, first performed at the Oxford Playhouse in 2010, being the third and the exception.
- 5.
http://www.artscouncil.ie/Events/Traditional-Now/Sappho_s-Daughter/, last accessed 11 April 2017.
- 6.
Peter McDonald, email to the author, 20 May 2014.
- 7.
The fragment is itself identified by Peter McDonald in the notes to his collection. See Peter McDonald (2009, p. 228).
- 8.
The fragment is itself identified by Peter McDonald in the notes to his Collected Poems. See McDonald (2009, p. 229).
- 9.
Peter McDonald, email to the author, 20 May 2014.
- 10.
For more details about poetic translations by Northern Irish poets, see Rui C. Homem’s Poetry and Translation in Northern Ireland: Dislocation in Contemporary Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). In a wider Irish context, Dedalus Press, based in Dublin, deserves recognition for its instrumental role in broadening the landscape of poetry in translation on the island. The publication list of Southword Editions, associated with the Munster Literature Centre, is also worth mentioning for its translation series. Most of its titles were published in 2005, as part of the Cork Year of Culture translation project. See http://www.munsterlit.ie/Bookstore%20Translations.html, last accessed 12 April 2017).
- 11.
See Haughton (2007): 279–80 for a detailed and illuminating analysis of the poem.
- 12.
For a more detailed discussion of the role of intertextuality in The Yellow Book, see Florence Impens, ‘“A Very European Poet”: European Intertextuality in Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book (1997), Boundary Crossings: New Scholarship in Irish Studies, M. Marková, R. Markus, H. Pavelková & K. Jenčová Eds. (Prague: Charles University Press, 2012), pp. 74–86.
- 13.
The phrase was used by Eileen Battersby as the title of a brief article on Derek Mahon in The Irish Times on 10 November 1992.
- 14.
See Heaney’s ‘The Flight Path’ in the mid-1990s, where he remembers an encounter with an IRA sympathiser, who asks: ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write/Something for us?’ (Heaney 1996, p. 25)
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Impens, F. (2018). A Classical ‘Revival’?. In: Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68231-0_6
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