Alfred Corn hails the mastery of Irish poet Derek Mahon
by Ernie on 08/08/07 at 9:18 am
As most readers of the E-Verse blog know, I am the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. We publish twelve issues a year, and the current issue is always available for free for one month, after which the articles are added to the ever-growing archive, available only to paid subscribers.
This month, Alfred Corn hails the mastery of Irish poet Derek Mahon in the Contemporary Poetry Review.
Corn writes: Myths about poetry and its production resist rational criticism, and we may be wasting our time trying to deconstruct the fable that English-language poetry has unfolded under what might be called a presiding genius, a directive energy moving from place to place at different points in history. Instead of refuting this myth, suppose I summarize it and see whether any part of it has useful content.
The poetic power originating in England with Chaucer continued to thrive there through most of the nineteenth century; it began, after Whitman, to favor Americans more. Yeats, then MacNeice and Kavanaugh, were able to tempt it over to Ireland, partly because they all spent a lot of time in England.
Just after the close of the Second World War, it returned to the United States. There was a brief sojourn back to the homeland when Larkin and Hughes were writing their best poems. Then, in the 1970s, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Eavan Boland began to find an audience on both sides of the Atlantic, with the result that the genius of poetry performed a straddling maneuver.
It seemed simultaneously Irish and American, a reflection of the intermittent or permanent residence of these admired figures in the States. Of course there are strictly American poets who still command international attention, and in recent decades there have been applause and respectful nods in the direction of the Caribbean and Australia; but only for individual cases. The nation now apparently beginning to win the favor of English language’s presiding genius is Scotland. For the moment, though, it still lives in what could be called Ireland’s America, or America’s Ireland. If Heaney is the traditional bard and elegist of rural experience, and Muldoon the dazzling, rock-my-world metaphorist, and Boland the bell-clear translator of family experience, Mahon is a bit harder to characterize. Learned, cosmopolitan, ironically humorous, realist, and a classicist in aesthetics, he seems the least Irish of them all.
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