Hurt Into Poetry: The Politics of Sentiment in Northern Irish Poetry, 1966-1998 Public
Kress, Simon Burr (2010)
Published
Abstract
Abstract
"Hurt Into Poetry: The Politics of Sentiment in Northern Irish
Poetry, 1966-1998"
By Simon B. Kress
When W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats "Mad Ireland hurt you
into poetry. / Now
Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes
nothing happen" he
aligned three strands that dominate twentieth-century aesthetics:
sentiment, the nation,
and poetry's apparent lack of political efficacy. Reconsidering the
role of politics in
Northern Irish poetry of the Troubles, this study argues that with
its aspirations to
rehabilitate human sensitivity, to advance an aesthetic ideal of
order, and to foster public
affections, Troubles poetry is paradigmatic of modern
aesthetics. Moreover, I argue that
Ireland itself is central to this development. In mapping out an
"Irish" aesthetic, I posit
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), Thomas Moore's Irish
Melodies (1808), and the poetry of W.B. Yeats as foundational
texts for the aesthetic
contemplation of political events and contexts.
While focused on the specific case of Ireland, my project also
points toward a
general paradigm for understanding the relationship between
aesthetics, postcoloniality,
and the rise of contemporary human rights. At the center of this
nexus, is the radical
contrast between the claims of individual subjectivity and the
impersonal force of
violence. Combining postcolonial theories of cosmopolitanism and
eighteenth-century
theories of moral sentiment, my project explores how this complex
dynamic informs the
adamant commitment of Northern Irish poets to aesthetics as an
antithesis to political and
sectarian violence. I argue that the poetry of Michael Longley and
Seamus Heaney, and
that of Northern Irish poets more generally, establishes an
alternative politics, in which an
affective politics grounded in sympathy is used to critique more
abstract modes of
political reasoning that may promote violence. Finally, I suggest
that Troubles poetry
contributes to the contemporary discourse of human rights by
finding in literary
sentiment a kind of aspirational basis for universal justice.
Specifically, by recasting
national political conflicts as sources of moral feeling for
international audiences,
Troubles poetry suggests a model for the role of postcolonial
literatures in shaping the
current discourse of human rights.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION:
A TROUBLED POETIC: NORTHERN IRISH POLITICS, AESTHETICS,
AND
POSTCOLONIALITY
1
CHAPTER 1:
HURT INTO POETRY: TROUBLES POETRY, SENTIMENT, AND
WOUNDING
52
CHAPTER 2:
HEARING IS BELIEVING: THOMAS MOORE, SEAMUS HEANEY, AND THE
FIGURE OF
MUSIC
101
CHAPTER 3:
SELF-QUARRELING: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE PUBLIC POEM,
1966-1975
142
CHAPTER 4:
LOVERS' QUARRELS: LONGLEY, YEATS, AND THE POLITICS OF
LOVE
192
WORKS CITED
238
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