Week 4 slides for students studying EN3604: Writing Ireland at Brunel University.

1. Writing Ireland
Week 4: “All changed, changed utterly”:
Poetry of Revolution and Resolution

2. The War of Independence/The Anglo-Irish War
21st January 1919–11th July 1921

3. The Irish Civil War (1922-3)
‘The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 11th
July 1921 precipitated civil war between
the Free Staters under Collins and
Griffith who accepted the Treaty, and the
Republicans under de Valera who
refused to take the oath of allegiance to
the Crown and refused to concede the
six counties of Ulster.’
(Elmer Andrews, p.103)

4. The IRA
‘Men joined the
Volunteers/IRA for
recreational and social
reasons as well as political
ones. It provided a
colourful alternative to
the monotony of small-
town life: many veterans
were to look back on
these years as the
happiest of their lives.’
Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence
(Dublin, 2002), p.106.

5. Relevance to Irish Writing
• ‘In such circumstances, autobiography, or the writing
of a memoir […] is always going to reproduce, in some
variation, those ultimately disturbing queries about
the issue of identity, national or personal.’
Seamus Deane et al. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, (Derry, 1991), p.380.
• ‘The elision of the personal and the national, the way
history becomes a kind of scaled up biography, and
biography a microcosmic history, is a particularly Irish
phenomenon.’
R. F. Foster, The Irish Story : Telling Tales and Making It up in Ireland, (London, 2002), p.xi.

6. O’Connor: Nation and Self
‘It was a period of political unrest, and, in a way,
this was a relief, because it acted as a safety
valve for my own angry emotions. Indeed, it
would be truer to say that the Irish nation and
myself were both engaged in an elaborate
process of improvisation. I was improvising an
education I could not afford, and the country was
improvising a revolution it could not afford.’
(O’Connor, p.184)

7. O’Faolain: Reality of War
‘In my six years as a rank-and-filer of the
IRA I shot nobody and was briefly under
fire once. I have no war memories to
record except ‘Were those the Troubles?
And if so was it a revolution?’
(O’Faolain, p.137)

8. “There was only one thing each of us knew he could do well, and must do
O’Faolain: Reality of War
well if called upon to do it, the least active rank-and-filer, the humblest
citizen. If arrested and condemned for any or no reason, each man knew
that he could die – “For Ireland!” This is not romanticism; the time for being
romantic about those years has long since gone; and any young man of
those years, and they were enough, who died facing a firing squad may well
have been white and terrified at the end. But it must surely have helped
him to know that he was dying for something as fervently as we believed in
Ireland then. I wish to God I could believe in anything as fervently now”
(O’Faolain, 138).
“Nobody wanted to contemplate being stripped, having his testicles
rhythmically beaten with a swinging revolver butt, his eyeballs persistently
rapped with the ends of fountain pens, bayonets stuck in him, his feet
stamped to a pulp, his toenails pulled out, and more; all the things that
English gentlemen just do not do, nor French, nor Jews, nor Irish, nor
Americans, nor anybody, but are done by them all, are being done, one
need have no least doubt, somewhere at this moment, and will always go
on being done in time of war” (O’Faolain, 138).

9. ‘Life through a veil of literature’
‘Nowadays I merely wonder at my own behaviour and
remember with revulsion that I once wore a dead boy’s
blood-stained cap. It was not merely that I couldn’t afford
to lose a cap. I fancy the truth is that nothing of it was real
to me, and it never once occurred to me that the boy
whose cap I was wearing had that day been as living as
myself, and perhaps loved his mother as much as I did
mine. It was all as if I had read about it in War and Peace.’
(O’Connor, pp.223-4)

10. ‘Impaled on one green corner of the
universe’
‘By the end of the Civil War life had
presented itself to me, forever, under the
form of a number of ineluctable challenges,
or experiences, densely compressed into
the one world, Ireland.’ (O’Faolain, p.174)

11. The ‘Spirits’ of the ‘Ages’
‘From the 1950s, such bread and butter issues as wages,
standards of living, and social reform began to outflank the
‘national question’ and the old civil war divide as electoral
priorities, while some older assumptions about authentic Irish
identity and Ireland’s place in the world underwent far-
reaching revision.’
Senia Paseta, Modern Ireland : A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford, 2003), p.128.
‘The passage of time in between also shapes the telling of a
story, and the vantage point from which it is told may
determine whether it is opening up, or in fact sealing off, a
troubled past […] the cultural spaces from which they are
retrieved have as much to do with now as then.’
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, (Cork, 1996), p.96.

12. Lasting Impact
‘So traumatic was the rearrangement of relations with Great
Britain, and so powerful the emotions and beliefs needed to
negotiate those changes, that the revolutionary period
maintained a hold on the Irish imagination long after 1922. […]
Who am I in relation to the groups and the beliefs and the
political affiliations I perceive around me? Who am I in relation
to the past from which I believe myself to have emerged and
the future towards which I believe myself to be moving?’
Gerry Smyth, The Novel & the Nation, (London, 1997), pp.3-4.

13. W.B.Yeats
.

14. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 : The Lake Isle of
Innisfree [from The Poems (1997) , Scribner : The Rose 1893 ]
The Lake Isle of
1 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
2 And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Innisfree
3 Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
4 And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
5 And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
6 Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
7 There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
8 And evening full of the linnet's wings.
9 I will arise and go now, for always night and day
10 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
11 While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
12 I hear it in the deep heart's core.

15. 1 Know, that I would accounted be
To Ireland in the Coming Times
2 True brother of a company
3 That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
4 Ballad and story, rann and song;
5 Nor be I any less of them,
6 Because the red-rose-bordered hem
7 Of her, whose history began
8 Before God made the angelic clan,
9 Trails all about the written page.
10 When Time began to rant and rage
11 The measure of her flying feet
12 Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
13 And Time bade all his candles flare
14 To light a measure here and there;
15 And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
16 Upon a measured quietude.
17 Nor may I less be counted one
18 With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
19 Because, to him who ponders well,
20 My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
21 Of things discovered in the deep,
22 Where only body's laid asleep.
23 For the elemental creatures go
24 About my table to and fro,
25 That hurry from unmeasured mind
26 To rant and rage in flood and wind;
27 Yet he who treads in measured ways
28 May surely barter gaze for gaze.
29 Man ever journeys on with them

16. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 : No Second Troy [from
The Poems (1997) , Scribner : The Green Helmet and Other
No Second Troy
Poems 1910 ]
1 Why should I blame her that she filled my days
2 With misery, or that she would of late
3 Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
4 Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
5 Had they but courage equal to desire?
6 What could have made her peaceful with a mind
7 That nobleness made simple as a fire,
8 With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
9 That is not natural in an age like this,
10 Being high and solitary and most stern?
11 Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
12 Was there another Troy for her to burn?

17. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 : Easter, 1916 [from The
Poems (1997) , Scribner : Michael Robartes and the Dancer 1921 ]
1 I have met them at close of day
Easter 1916
2 Coming with vivid faces
3 From counter or desk among grey
4 Eighteenth-century houses.
5 I have passed with a nod of the head
6 Or polite meaningless words,
7 Or have lingered awhile and said
8 Polite meaningless words,
9 And thought before I had done
10 Of a mocking tale or a gibe
11 To please a companion
12 Around the fire at the club,
13 Being certain that they and I
14 But lived where motley is worn:
15 All changed, changed utterly:
16 A terrible beauty is born.
[…]

18. Meditations in Time of Civil War

19. Chapman, Wayne K. “Joyce and Yeats:
Easter 1916 and the Great War” New
Hibernia Review, Volume 10, Number
4, Geimhreadh/Winter 2006, pp. 137-
151

20. Next Week
Week 6: “No
Surrender”?:
Conflicts within
and Beyond
MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal (London:
Cape, 1983)
Peter Mahon, “Blood, Shit, and Tears
The Textual Reinscription of Sacrifice, Ritual, and
Victimhood in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal” ELH,
Volume 77, Number 1, Spring 2010