Irish women poets from Líadan to the present

Romantic-Era Irish Women Poets in English, edited by Stephen Behrendt, Cork University Press, 613pp, €39; A History of Irish Women's Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley, Cambridge University Press, 476pp, £84.99

In 1791, two women in Dublin corresponded in iambic tetrameter couplets. Henrietta Battier, a published poet later to become a well-known satirist, wrote to Eliza Ryan, praising her poem Contentment. In subsequent letters, each woman commended the other’s poetry as superior to her own, so that in a sequence of 10 epistles, each saw her own work applauded whenever a new letter arrived.

Ryan thought Battier’s poetry should be disseminated more widely: “It should not to a friend confine,/ But please the public with each line.” And Battier was happy that “every trifle thus I write/ Brings back some verses that delight.”

In later epistles, however, the two husbands chimed in, each disparaging his wife’s poetry and praising the other woman’s. Battier wrote,

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My husband (now a critic grown)
Desir'd I'd let the pen alone;
For in your letter, ev'ry line
In merit, took the lead of mine.

The words of the Rev Edward Ryan, prebendary of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, were reported by his wife:

A little idle imp like you,
May write who've nothing else to do,
But thus to trespass on her time,
Is truly what I call a crime….
…..she answers every line,
With graces that so far outshine
Each weak and poor attempt of thine…

But the verse letters continued, as in three subsequent poems Battier and Ryan discussed – politely but insuppressibly – the men’s attempted suppression of these poetic epistles. Each woman continued to acknowledge the other as her muse: “…my grateful lyre/ Receives from thine electric fire”, Battier wrote to Ryan in the final lines of the correspondence.

Battier followed Ryan’s advice, not confining the epistles to friendship but publishing them, and so we have them today, in Stephen Behrendt’s Romantic-Era Irish Women Poets in English, a monumental anthology comprising generous selections from 52 poets and a detailed biography of each.

The biographies do more than supplement the poetry: their accounts of the “field of cultural production” explain why these women’s work requires anthologising more than two centuries after most of it was published.

Famous writers such as Charlotte Brooke and Sydney Owenson appear, but so also do those most people have never heard of, such as Ellen Taylor, “daughter of an indigent cottager”, who wrote her poetry while working as a housemaid. Her poems, Behrendt remarks, “comment poignantly on the inevitable checks on poetic aspirations that come with penury and servitude”. There is also Eliza Mary Hamilton, whose “attitudes towards gender and same-sex relationships may have contributed to the fact that she seems not to have participated in mixed literary or social circles”.

Some women did not have a great enough gift of flattery: Thomas Moore “initially liked” the talented Battier, but “his sympathetic interest faded with time”. For some few, cultural production was a family activity, linked to political activism: At the age of 17, the Quaker Mary Birkett wrote A Poem on the African Slave Trade, Addressed to Her Own Sex; her uncle had been a founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Activist feminism

Following in the spirit of the two massive volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions; The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry 1967-2000; the recent History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature; Patricia Haberstroh’s Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets; Lucy Collins’s Contemporary Irish Women Poets; and much other recent work, Behrendt’s anthology and Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley’s essay collection A History of Irish Women’s Poetry constitute forms of activist feminist scholarship and intervene in the dominant practices of Irish literary history.

Given the continued prevalence of male-dominated literary calendars and other tchotchkes, not to mention academic curricula, the need for such interventions remains.

Darcy and Wheatley’s collection is especially valuable in the way its 24 essays by leading feminist scholars expose what may variously be called the infrastructure, the system, or the field of cultural production in which over the centuries Irish women have written and disseminated their poems.

The two bookending essays reveal how that system has developed. In Women in the Medieval Poetry Business, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha explains the complex hierarchy of medieval poets: the category “fili” was used for “the trained, professional poet”, while “the term bard…was mostly reserved for the amateur”. There were seven grades of filid, of which the highest was the ollam. The baird also had classifications; the larger division was into “noble” and “base”, and female baird were generally placed in the third from the bottom category of the noble bards.

As Ní Dhonnchadha observes of shifts in these rigid categories in the 13th century, “Outstanding literary talent was appreciated across categories, but acknowledging it in women was exceptional”. Complicating this already complex ranking system was of course the category of class, because noble women were more likely than others to be literate.

As the client of a lord or king on whose patronage he depended, the ollam “did much to uphold the moral outlook of an endemically violent society”, and at feasts he “communicated the lord’s power” through his poetry. In the final essay, Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, beyond the Now, Anne Mulhall describes an utterly different poetic field defined to a large extent by movements for social justice and “the need for institutional and structural change”.

A 12th-century ollam would not recognise as literary formations the poetry readings sponsored by movements such as the artists’ campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment; Jessica Traynor and Stephen Rea’s Correspondences: An Anthology to Call for an End to Direct Provision; or Poethead, “a platform dedicated to the work of women poets founded by poet Christine Murray”. These modes of dissemination are especially welcoming to the work of the many “new Irish” women poets Mulhall discusses here.

A similar rejection of the rigid, the hierarchical and the exclusionary drives the contents of the entire volume. Emphasising the existence of “foremothers” for Irish women poets, the two poet-editors in their introduction cite Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin citing Speranza, all in this lineage interrogating “the conventional narratives of the nation”.

The widely varying methodologies of the essays show a resistance to the notion that there is a single “tradition” in which all or most or even a few Irish women poets can be situated. A reader of the entire volume discovers that a model such as that envisioned in Tradition and the Individual Talent would be impossible when so many poems by women never existed in manuscript form, were only circulated in manuscript form among a few people, were rejected by editors or published but barely noticed (or never noticed), were panned by reviewers (and then forgotten), or never made it into important anthologies.

Words such as “gapped” and “discontinuous” feature often in describing the absence of an accepted literary lineage, but the many poets mentioned or discussed in this history indicate that the foremothers existed nevertheless.

As part of its insistence on a plurality of views, A History of Irish Women’s Poetry has two introductions. The second introduction, Anne Fogarty’s essay The Reception of Irish Women Poets, emphasises the need to uncover the “patriarchal presumptions” in systems of cultural production in order to understand the careers of women poets.

Matthew Campbell’s essay, The Eclipse of Dora Sigerson, and Moynagh Sullivan’s on Carla Lanyon Lanyon show how these poets missed becoming canonical, though with histories such as those in this book, a new canon is being formed or perhaps the notion of a fixed canon is being rejected altogether.

Chapter by chapter, new perspectives reconfigure the way women’s literary history, and therefore all literary history, can be imagined. Friendships, networks, writing groups, and small traditions become visible. Daniela Theinová mentions Aíne Ní Fhoghlú, Máiréad Ní Ghráda and Máirín Ní Mhuirgheasa as “notable precursors” of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and as Danielle Clarke and Sarah McKibben show in an original and illuminating essay on Seventeenth-Century Women’s Poetry in Ireland, connections may exist between groups of women poets unaware of each other’s presence.

Even the writings of Irish-language poets and “Anglophone, Protestant women of the propertied class” have features in common. Focusing on “formal/aesthetic and rhetorical norms”, the authors prove that “by decoding women’s persistent, if very different, poetic assertions of the necessity and right to speak, it is possible to see the ways in which the Irish context of literary production informs key poetic choices”.

Other kinds of associations also emerge from the essays: both the Irish/English bilingual poet Celia de Fréine and the Xhosa/English bilingual poet Mimmie Malaba have written poems titled Mother Tongue, poems that form parts of a series, if not exactly a tradition, including Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s classic Ceist na Teagan, Anne Hartigan’s Long Tongue and Rita Ann Higgins’s Tongulish.

Women poets’ focus on the male Irish hero, a theme developed in Lucy Collins’s essay Masculinity, Nationhood, and the Irish Woman Poet, 1860-1922, has a precedent in Caitilín Dubh’s elegy for Donnchadh Ó Briain, a poem discussed in Clarke and McKibben’s chapter.

The radical originality of A History of Irish Women’s Poetry exists not only in its comprehensive subject matter, its mix of celebrated and forgotten poets, and its devotion of almost a third of the book to Irish language poets, but also in novel and stimulating analyses such as Tríona Ní Shíocháin’s discussion of lullabies in The Oral Tradition or Fogarty’s feminist interpretation of Pangur Bán, surely the first such ever.

Chapters by Sarah Prescott, Catherine Jones, Behrendt, Sarah Bennett, Jaclyn Allen, Daniel Tobin, Patricia Coughlan, Wheatley, Kenneth Keating, Catriona Clutterbuck, Kit Fryatt, Maria Johnston, Guinn Batten, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Tara McEvoy and Nerys Williams also enrich this book, which will inspire reading and provoke debate for years to come.

The epistolary poetics of Battier and Ryan find their significance in the context of all Irish women poets. In their creation of a small but sustaining friendship, in their encounter with male deprecation of their work, in their professional perseverance, in their relative but not complete obscurity, Battier and Ryan now appear as foremothers. If by an anachronistic miracle I could have intervened in the correspondence when their husbands disparaged their poems, I’d have written:

With friends like that, who needs to please
Your most insulting enemies?
Anthologies of later ages
Will welcome you into their pages.
Write on! Your words will be completely
Redeemed by Behrendt, Darcy, Wheatley.

Lucy McDiarmid’s most recent monograph is At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916. She is completing a book on recent Irish poetry