The politics of poetry

ALTHOUGH the sun has decided to stay high over the Glens of Antrim, one cloud did threaten the Hewitt Summer School, as bewilderment generated by Sonia O'Sullivan's distressing loss of form upset the attendance. The consensus here was that the Irish athlete has already established her credentials and even non-Irish delegates were united in sympathising with her in this trial.

Meanwhile, away from the Olympics but still well within a long jump of the television set, the inevitable, unavoidable relationship between literature and politics was raised by critic Terry Eagleton. In a paper which exudes the practicality and constant good nature of his historically based literary criticism, even when at its sharpest, Eagleton argued "Poetry concerns itself with the inward, emotive, original, sensuously particular, with the stuff and texture of personal experience." He continued "Politics is a question of abstract notions, impersonal institutions, collective entities. Politics involves well defined, determinant ideas, whereas poetry thrives on indeterminacy and ambiguity."

The mild, slightly otherworldly Eagleton quotes in his new book, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger Studies in Irish Culture, Hartley Coleridge's remark about Ireland being a paradisal place were it not for the Catholics and Protestants. It is still a timely comment.

Intent on urging his audience not to overlook the inter-relationship of politics and poetry, he nonetheless argued their differences.

"Politics is a local transient business in which a week is a long time, whereas poetry, or at least the better sort, is universal and enduring." According to Eagleton, we are all "unwitting post Romantics whether we like it or not, just as we are all closet Darwinists and card carrying post Freudians".

While pointing out that poetry is emotive or affective while politics isn't, he nonetheless quickly countered this by saying "Well, truer no doubt of Dorking than of Derry. The truth is that some politics is a lot more emotional than some poetry. Nationalism, whether the Irish or British variety, deconstructs the distinction between the social and the symbolic, as myth, icon, trope, symbol, narrative, rhetoric come to play an active role in processes of power, and the frontier between fact and fiction is ceaselessly transgressed."

Aware of the essential contradictions ready to undermine any absolute thesis posing as literary theory, Eagleton said. "The classical conception of culture, in any words, is the very opposite of partisanship politics are partisan, but poetry isn't. Doctrine and determinant views are the enemy of feeling a view which would have come as a mighty surprise to Dante, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Yeats, Pound and most major poets you care to name.

The purpose of the apparent pointlessness of poetry is to remind us that we don't have a point, which, according to Terry Eagleton, is the whole point of us. With a mathematician's often perverse logic, he then announced. "Poetry has become a sort of political Utopia, through its very lack of function.

Determined to stress the closeness between a poem as an individual entity and the same poem as a product of political history, he said. "The truth is that the very stuff out of which poems are made up language is itself historical to its core.

Language stands between poetry and history as a vital link he argued, just as it stands between the aesthetic and the political. "If you are not tracking its historical allusions, then you are just not paying attention to the words on the page."

Although stressing the folly of poetry falling into a hectoring role or confusing itself with rhetoric, he did acknowledge rhetoric's position as one of the most "venerable literary forms in human history".

Rhetoric as well as comic timing, irreverence and a vast store of historical cross references certainly contributed to historian Owen Dudley Edwards's entertaining exploration of the muddled and complex interwoven history of the Scots and the Irish. Before launching into his colourful race through hundreds of years of history, Dudley Edwards paid tribute to John Hewitt, not only as a poet and a critic, but as an enabler and an evangeliser of literature.

Hewitt, he said, saw the importance of 19th century Ulster literature as clearly as he saw the value of its 20th century form. Somewhat Shavian in appearance, Dudley Edwards shares the baroque tones of many a Dublin barrister in over drive, yet his opinionated delivery is firmly dictated to by his leave em-laughing approach, accompanied by hilarious historical anecdotes, asides and feats of memory, which certainly help soften the sharpness of his views.

A CONSUMMATE performer, Dudley Edwards attacked the readiness of people, the Irish in particular, to adopt stereotypes, considering the defiance with which they react to the stereotyping of themselves. He pointed out that the Scots are inclined to "inform" rather than "tell", also they "require" rather than "need". The Scots and the Irish permeate the culture of Ulster. And while availing of a geographic poetic licence, he described Scotland not as an island, but as thousands of islands he said there is not one identity, "but a thousand identities".

John Montague read several new poems as well as established works such as A Grated Tongue, A Water Carrier, The Trout and All Legendary Obstacles. However, throughout his week at the Hewitt School, he appears to have been more preoccupied by the Olympics.

Many who witnessed a Norwegian athlete, Vebjoern Rodal, take the men's 800 metres title in a race in which the first four men finished under 1 minute 43 seconds, also gathered to hear poet and critic, Tom Paulin, deliver the inaugural First Trust Bank lecture in which he spoke, about William Hazlitt's relationship with Ireland and in particular his obsession with Edmund Burke. As with Terry Eagleton, Paulin highlighted the overwhelming influence of history on literature and its interpretation.

Tomorrow morning delegates will enact another Hewitt School ritual, a group poetry reading in the hilly field in which a stone monument to the poet stands opposite the famous megalithic court cairn known as Ossian's Grave.