John Montague: ‘Circling to Return’

Abstract

Commentary on Montague’s career is divided between those who emphasize his rootedness and ‘Irishness’, and those who see him as an Irish modernist, responsive to international, especially American influences, a figure of rootlessness and exile. As spokesman for the first point of view, Heaney argues in his essay ‘The Sense of Place’ that ‘when Montague asks who he is, he is forced to seek a connection with a history and a heritage; before he affirms a personal identity, he posits a national identity, and his region and his community provide a lifeline to it’.¹ American critics on the other hand tend to emphasize Montague’s ‘double vision’ and ‘dual inheritance’. Daniel Tobin, for example, believes that the ‘profound reciprocity between the imaginative poles of his dual inheritance is lost on those who perceive him merely as an “invoker of powers”, “the poet as oracle”, bound by mythic and ancestral ties to his home’.² Gregory Schirmer goes further to make quite remarkable claims for Montague’s transformative influence on a provincial Irish aesthetic:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the poems that Montague published in the 1950s and 1960s almost single-handedly led Irish poetry out of the Sargasso Sea of provincialism, in which Montague found it and into the increasingly cosmopolitan world of post-war poetry beyond the shores of Ireland … The extraordinary flowering of Irish poetry during the past three decades, built in part on the foundation laid by Montague, has produced a literary environment in which worldliness, sophistication, and a generally pluralistic view of Irish culture are more or less taken for granted, part of the cultural air that the contemporary poet, Montague included, breathes almost unconsciously.³