Thrills & Difficulties

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Angebote / Angebote:

This essay was my project for the ghastly first months of 2021. Unlike most of what I write, it was not written in one sprint but piecemeal, three or four hundred words at a time. Usually when it was dark outside. During the lockdowns I found time to read a huge amount of literary theory. This essay is in part my small attempt to add to Marxist literary theory by using my no doubt idiosyncratic understanding of it to give recent developments in Irish poetry a fairly robust autopsy. What does it mean to be a Marxist poet? It has nothing to with wanting to impose communism on the known world, though that sort of thing can be fun. What it really means is being someone who both interprets the world poetically and knows that if you don't understand what capitalism is doing to humanity, and this planet we for now call ours, then you don't really understand very much at all. It also means being prepared most of the time to be in a small minority in the literary world which, particularly in its power wielding upper echelons, is dominated by liberals who broadly sympathise with the Barack Obama / Katherine Zappone / Kathy Sheridan of The Irish Times wing of things as they are. To paraphrase Travis Bickle: I don't hate these people, I just think they are silly. And that this silliness could, if the cards fall the wrong way over the next few years, lead us towards a Postmodern version of the disaster that was the1930s and early 1940s. The essay is written in the polemical style I favour. It will annoy many. And I will view their annoyance as a compliment. It is also personal. Ultimately, it is the story of how I didn't end up like William Wordsworth, though of course I haven't ended yet. Wordsworth was a young enthusiast for the French Revolution - "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" - who in later years became a fossilised reactionary, even writing a pretty awful poem, 'Protest against the Ballot', in which old Willie declaimed his opposition to the Chartists and their crazy notion of giving working class men the vote. There has been much such turning of the coat by literary gentlemen down the past couple of centuries. Saul Bellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Conor Cruise O'Brien, John Doss Passos, Max Eastman, Robert Southey, and John Osborne- to name just a clutch -all started out as radicals of one stripe or another and ending up as shrieking right wingers who, did things like vote for Nixon/Thatcher/Reagan, or support the use of torture by the Gardaí against...