Modernism and Ireland

Notwithstanding Joyceʾs representation of the Irish capital in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Dublin is not generally perceived as having been a vibrantly productive location of avant-garde experimentation, as were Paris, Berlin, London and New York. While the Irish Literary Revival is arguably a strand in the knotted skein of early modernism, in the eyes of writers as dissimilar as Thomas MacDonagh and Samuel Beckett its Celticism appeared remote from the dissonant tones and epistemological preoccupations of the historical avant-garde. In Literature in Ireland (1916), MacDonagh had proposed that it was not the Revivalʾs ʿCeltic Noteʾ, but poetry written in the ʿIrish Modeʾ - a style that preserved in English some of the sound-patterns of Gaelic verse - that was to some extent comparable in its disjunctive effects to Italian Futurism. In the light of this thesis, MacDonagh's translations might be profitably read alongside those of Ezra Pound - an admirer of Literature in Ireland - whose revolutionary ʿtranslationsʾ from Chinese poetry, Cathay, had appeared the year before MacDonaghʾs critical book. But MacDonaghʾs poetic and critical career was brutally truncated in 1916, when he was executed for his part in the Easter Rising; and it was to be in the poetry of his successor as lecturer in English at University College Dublin, Austin Clarke, that the Irish Mode was most rewardingly developed during the 1920s.