The Ages of a Woman and the Middle Ages

This essay springs from the experience of translating the Old Irish ‘Song of the Woman of Beare’, and from researching its reception in the twentieth century. The poem was rediscovered in the 1890s and the scholarly reaction is tinged with Victorian preoccupations, including the bohemian cult of François Villon. In Ireland it is aligned with Pearse's ‘Mise Éire’, and with the work of later poets such as Austin Clarke. But as well as voicing the ancient text, the Woman of Beare appears in folklore in both Ireland and Scotland, and there are interesting parallels and divergences between the traditions of scholarship and the figure in the popular imagination. My account of the impact of both text and myth shows a development through the mid-twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in the work of poets writing in both Irish and English. In recent decades the work of women poets has engaged with the myths of the Cailleach as Goddess, and they have thus confronted questions of the legitimacy of treating the past, and especially mythology and folk beliefs, as a source for poetry. I believe it would be foolish for a poet who has the knowledge and critical intelligence to do it properly to ignore such a resource.

‘The Dolmen Poets’: Liam Miller and Poetry Publishing in Ireland, 1951–1961

With the publication of The Dolmen Miscellany (1962) and the inception of Poetry Ireland the same year, Liam Miller's Dolmen Press came to represent artistically and commercially Irish poets and their works within the Republic of Ireland and abroad. In Miller's publishing practice, the liberal notion of ‘Poetry Ireland’ had come to supplant a narrower one: the idea of the ‘Dolmen Poets.’ As the nineteen fifties drew to a close, the Dolmen Poets were Padraic Colum and Austin Clarke (but not Patrick Kavanagh), Richard Murphy, John Montague, and especially Thomas Kinsella. In Dolmen's earliest years, however, the notion of the ‘Dolmen Poets’ had entailed other figures – David Marcus, Donald Davie, Valentin Iremonger – as well as a “group” editorial method and small, economical print format suited to Dolmen's elementary technical facilities. When, in the ‘Dolmen Poets” format Miller printed the programme for the famous, three-way reading by Murphy, Montague, and Kinsella at the Royal Hibernian Hotel on 3 February 1961, both the occasion and the souvenir programme signalled Miller's embracing of the concept of ‘Poetry Ireland’.

‘Our own fastidious John Jordan’: Poet, Literary Editor, Critic

For more than three decades, John Jordan (1930–88) was one of the most astute and perceptive literary critics in Ireland. As editor of the magazine Poetry Ireland in the Sixties he helped to revive Dublin as a significant literary centre, maintaining friendships with Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Austin Clarke. Himself a poet in the late modernist mode and a writer of witty and idiosyncratic short stories about the bohemian Dublin of the Forties and Fifties, Jordan was equally well-known as a drama critic, a staunch advocate of the later plays of Sean O'Casey, a defender of Joyce and Beckett, and a champion of the work of women authors including Kate O'Brien and the playwright Teresa Deevy. A child prodigy who corresponded with the famous English drama critic James Agate and evaluated play scripts for Edwards and MacLiammóir at the Gate Theatre, where he also acted, John Jordan distinguished himself as a scholarship student at Pembroke College Oxford and at UCD, where he lectured brilliantly on English literature. He was also a noted broadcaster on radio and TV programmes such as the Thomas Davis Lectures, Sunday Miscellany, and the TV book programme Folio.