It is almost a truism of Irish literary history that the work of Austin Clarke (1896-1973), one of the Irish poets of the greatest range and achievement since Yeats, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Somehow it still hovers both in and out of the canon, frequently more honoured in the breach of oversight than in the observance of university syllabuses, summer schools, anthologies and bookshop poetry sections. Clarke was excluded by Yeats from his Faber Book of Modern Verse in 1936; but while he was restored in most anthologies between The Oxford Book of Irish Verse in 1958 and Patrick Crotty's Modern Irish Poetry of 1995, it was still possible for Yeats's snub to be repeated half a century later in (or out of) Paul Muldoon's Faber Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1986). Clarke remains in print, yet precariously; a Selected Poems edited by Hugh Maxton, which was published in 1991, is still available, but the only Collected is the 1974 edition prepared by Liam Miller of Dolmen Press with the poet himself. The contrast with, say, Patrick Kavanagh (for whom complete and selected poems are currently, and recently, in print), is marked.

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.

If, as Seamus Heaney says, quoting Borges, 'poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on pages', then we might recognise that the issues involved in the depiction of violence may differ from reader to reader or, more generally, from one national readership - in this case Irish, British, or American and other Anglophone readers - to another. We know readers have registered their approval of Heaney's poetry in the sales figures of Waterstone's, Barnes & Noble's, and other booksellers, and this popularity has been confirmed by most of the prizes. Yet reviewers who might represent these readerships have differed widely in their responses to what the Swedish Academy praised as Heaney's 'analysis of the violence in Northern Ireland'.

The global reputation of the Irish poetry world can be attributed to many things including, at the risk of sounding too uncritical, its great variety and quality. The sociology and politics of the reception of Irish poetry, particularly in the United States, has been the subject of various levels of critical speculation. Critics have mapped the influences of the literatures of many nations on a range of contemporary Irish poets. This chapter will explore the ways some contemporary Irish poets have reached beyond Ireland to imagine and define their poetic practice. Irish poets have been greatly interested in the achievements of American, Eastern European, French and Greek poets, from Dickinson, Whitman, Williams, Frost and Lowell to Herbert, Milosz and Mandelstam, to Nerval, Cavafy and Seferis. The hold these writers and others have for a number of contemporary Irish poets - Boland, Heaney, Mahon, Kinsella, Muldoon - springs from a desire to establish human identity out of the tensions, debates and violence about national traditions and national identity.

Introduction: the position of Irish in contemporary Irish poetry

Irish literature has historically possessed what Thomas Kinsella calls a 'dual tradition', and continues to be written in the country's majority and minority languages, English and Irish, respectively. As the two languages keep up what Kinsella terms their 'dynamic interaction', many Irish readers have increasingly turned at least one of their two ears to Irish language literature, in the original, in translation, and via critiques that take into account both languages for a more comprehensive representation and understanding of Ireland's art and eras. Therefore, whereas in some quarters a narrow, monoglot view of Ireland's poetry still exists, recent critical studies of contemporary work recognise the need to account for the polyphony of voices which make up what Sean O Riordain called the 'fuaim na habhann' / riversound of the living stream of Irish writing.

Derek Mahon and Michael Longley have been publishing verse since the mid- 1960s. Both born in Belfast (Longley in 1939, Mahon in 1941), educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (or 'Inst', as it is known) and at Trinity College, Dublin (where Longley read classics and Mahon French, English and philosophy), they emerged as poets in a period marked both by a remarkable growth in artistic and literary activity in a province long regarded as inimical to the arts, and by the stirring of political energies in Northern Ireland that inaugurated decades of violence and radical change. Their careers as poets display similarities and differences as they have responded to lives lived in a period when the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom has been in constant question. Michael Longley has lived in Belfast since the 1960s, spending summers in Co Mayo. In the same period Mahon has lived in London, Dublin and New York with sojourns in France and Italy, having spent only a brief period in Belfast after graduation. The historical and personal experience with which their work engages, however, is certainly related (whatever their differing career trajectories) to the political crisis of a period in which the relationship between Britain and Ireland has been profoundly affected by the Northern Irish problem. How they both relate imaginatively to the North, to Ireland and the rest of the world in such a period, when violence was endemic, takes the critic to central aspects of their work.

In an Irish context it may not be possible to imagine poetry in relation to the 'body' of the 'nation' without evoking the still-existent border to which Medbh McGuckian starkly alludes, a political and historical fact that divides 'Ireland' into two states and at least two bodies politic. Neither is it possible, despite the growing popularity of these three women poets, to imagine the term 'Irish poet' without picturing the foregrounded and masculine body emerging from the landscape which Eilean Ni Chuilleanain challenges. Bringing together both implications, the phrase 'body of the nation' implicitly recalls the nationalist literary text to which Eavan Boland, probably Ireland's most influential feminist, alludes in her essay 'Subject Matters', The Spirit of the Nation. Concerning these 'sixpenny booklet' anthologies of nationalist ballads compiled by The Nation newspaper from 1843, Boland writes: 'in its pages the public poem and the political poem were confused at the very moment when the national tradition was making a claim on Irish poetry which would colour its themes and purposes for a century'.

The poetry of dissent, indeed the dissenting position in literature as a whole, has a long and distinguished tradition in Ireland. For reasons of political and personal sensitivity, writers have found themselves in, and often cultivated, a marginalised, observing status. The presence of aesthetic and political tensions can be linked closely to Ireland's continuing absorption of differing influences and experiences: these can both conflict with and build upon existing ideas of tradition and continuity. The adversarial position adopted by Irish writers earlier in this century focused on oppositional relations such as those between Ireland and England or between individual freedoms and the Catholic norms of the evolving state. Now violence, materialism and social exclusion have become the focus of attention and with these forms comes a complex matrix of affects neither easy to define nor to address. The poets dealt with in this chapter - Brendan Kennelly, Paul Durcan, Rita Ann Higgins and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill - are aware of the tensions inherent in these issues and of the fact that they are never fully subject to artistic or personal control. Indeed it is this lack of control that heightens the risks taken by these poets to allow their voices to be heard. All four poets are widely read, in a culture where the critical attention to poetry still far exceeds popular readership, and all the poets use vibrant humorous language and frequent public performance to maintain the dissenting voice within contemporary Irish poetry.

According to Paul Muldoon, Irish writers experience an often disabling tension between the urge to express private concerns in their work and the compulsion to address identity politics, inherited atavisms and the legacy of sectarian strife. His comments restate the competing definitions of what Seamus Heaney terms 'the government of the tongue'. This is an obligation to 'concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality'. Yet it is also a liberating manifesto, allowing the poet to submit to 'the jurisdiction of achieved form', with poetry 'as its own vindicating force'. Heaney has consistently attempted to address these apparently conflictual imperatives. In Wintering Out and North, he engaged with what are euphemistically termed 'the Troubles' by advancing images of bodies drawn from the bogs at Tollund, Grauballe and Windeby as archaeological emblems of victimhood. This poetic reflex, whilst deep-felt and instinctive, was interpreted as providing decontextualised analogies (if not unintentional justifications) for the killings in Northern Ireland. Heaney had become, according to his fellow-poet Ciaran Carson, 'the laureate of violence - a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for “the situation”, in the last resort, a mystifier'.

In an uncollected poem of 1995, ʿMacNeiceʾs Londonʾ, Derek Mahon imagines Louis MacNeice in wartime, in ʿA bunker of civilised sound, / A BBC studioʾ:

These lines capture, in a brilliant miniature, much of the complexity of Louis MacNeiceʾs cultural and historical situations. While the adjectives here - ʿmeditativeʾ, ʿclassicʾ, ʿaloneʾ, ʿwell-bredʾ, ʿdryʾ - seem to map out the distinctive qualities of the poetʾs voice, that voice is also working as ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ while it speaks from the wartime BBC to the world. Mahonʾs final line-break allows the reader to sense the distance between the intimacy and solitude of the poet and the prepared voice of the public writer: as ʿthe voiceʾ turns into ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ, we feel a mild and complicating shock of something ʿoutside time and spaceʾ that suddenly locates itself in a specific moment and situation.

Natural philosophy was “the most widely taught discipline at the medieval university.” We may get an idea of the extent of the subject in what has been called its classical century, 1277-1377, by looking at the contents of John Dumbleton's mid-fourteenth-century Summa of Logic and Natural Philosophy. After a first part on logic, the major headings are

1. II. First principles, matter and form; opinions about substantial forms; how qualities are intended and remitted.

2. III. On motion in the categories of place, quality, and quantity. On the causes of motion. How velocity is produced and caused. How alteration and augmentation are measured. The definitions of motion and time.

3. IV. On the nature of the elements and their qualities. If each element has two qualities in the highest degree. The action and reaction of elements on each other. The relations of elemental and qualitative forms. Density and rarity and their variation. How the powers of natural bodies depend on their magnitudes. The relative weights of pure and mixed bodies.

4. V. On spiritual action and light. Whether light belongs particularly to some element or compound. On the nature of the medium receiving spiritual action, such as light. On the variation of spiritual action in a medium. Whether spiritual agents act instantaneously or in time.

5. VI. On the limits of active and passive powers. On the difficulty of action. On the limits of the powers of natural bodies by their natural places. [...]

What was it like to do philosophy in the Middle Ages? In this chapter I will try to answer that question by looking at relevant sociopolitical and economic circumstances, specific institutional settings for practicing philosophy, and several competing or cooperating intellectual currents. At the end of the chapter, I will say something about the place of authority in medieval thought, the philosophical sources available to medieval thinkers at different points in the period, and the literary genres into which they put their own ideas.

Briefly, the story runs as follows. What we know as medieval philosophy emerged in the late Roman Empire from a surprisingly complete mutual accommodation of Christian belief and classical thought. It then passed through centuries of dormancy in the West, while at the same time it began afresh in the Islamic world. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries philosophy reemerged in a new Europe, in altered formand against resistance. Then, both augmented and challenged by the work of Islamic and Jewish thinkers, it enjoyed in the thirteenth century a golden age of systematic analysis and speculation corresponding to a new degree of rationalization in politics and society. And finally? The significance of fourteenth-century thought remains contested, despite substantial recent scholarship demonstrating its brilliance. As my narrative ends, therefore, readers will need to move from context to content, acquainting themselves in succeeding chapters with the ideas and arguments on which their own assessment of medieval philosophy, not just the fourteenth century, must depend.

Histories of medieval philosophy often conclude with chapters on the disintegration of the scholastic synthesis or the defeat and neglect of scholasticism. From the standpoint of the present volume, where scholasticism and medieval philosophy are not seen as identical and where synthesis is not regarded as incontestably the supreme philosophic ideal, the situation is more complicated. An adequate history of the presence of medieval philosophy in later thought would require a volume in itself. In what follows some major points are touched on, including those bearing on defeat and neglect, but the story concludes with an account of the revival of interest in medieval philosophy of which this Companion is itself an effect and which it hopes to augment.

THE RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (P. J. FITZPATRICK)

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Oxford scholar would sooner have volumes of “Aristotle and his philosophy” than worldly attractions. For Bacon in 1597, philosophers of that tradition were cymini sectores – “hair-splitters,” say – whose writings can help us to draw distinctions. And for Molière in 1673, they were people who explained how opium induces sleep by saying that it has a “dormitive virtue.”

As I write these words, I can see on my shelves an attractively bound set of sixteen volumes, each bearing on its spine the words “J. Duns Scotus Opera Omnia.” One would be tempted to assume that these are The Complete Works of John Duns Scotus. Unfortunately, in medieval philosophy things are rarely so simple. Some of the works included in this set are not by Scotus at all, but were once attributed to him. Some of Scotus's genuine works, including his early Lectura on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, are not included. And what this set presents as Book I of Scotus's late (and very important) Reportatio is actually not the Reportatio at all, but another work whose authenticity and authority are vigorously disputed.

And there are further problems. The attractive modern binding belies the age of the edition itself. Open up any of the books, and what you will see is a photographic reprint of an edition first published in 1639. That edition (known as theWadding edition, after its editor) is not a critical edition, made by weighing all the manuscript evidence according to established principles of textual scholarship in order to determine, with as much precision and certainty as possible, exactly what Scotus said or wrote. In many cases the editor simply looked at the one or two manuscripts he had handy and transcribed what he found there, sometimes without much attention to whether the resulting text even made good sense.

From the dawn of the Middle Ages to their end, moral theorists struggled to explain what makes a person good by human standards, what it takes to merit happiness in the afterlife, and what, if anything, the two have to do with each other. Some inveighed against the worldly ethics of ancient philosophers; others praised the ancients for important moral insights. Yet every leading medieval thinker worked to develop an account of the moral life far more comprehensive than most professors of philosophical ethics or moral theology today would attempt. The idea that a serious theologian could dismiss classical ethics as unworthy of study and debate was no more acceptable than the idea that a serious philosopher could dismiss questions about the immortality of the soul and the nature of God as irrelevant to moral life in human society.

I shall begin by sketching Augustine’s pioneering work in ethics, along with some of the puzzles it creates. After a look at respectful but significant revisions of Augustine by Anselm of Canterbury, I turn to the brave new world of universities, where the pagan Aristotle soon emerged as an authority to be reckoned with. Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, efforts to weave together his insights with Augustine’s became at once highly complex and the occasion for passionate academic dispute.

Reflection upon human happiness was pursued by a number of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, working sometimes as theologians, primarily at least, and sometimes as philosophers, though in more than one sense of the word. The most notable theories of what happiness is and how human beings may obtain it were formulated by three very great minds: Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. I will explore the ideas of each of these and will also examine a short treatise on happiness and the philosophical life by Boethius of Dacia (fl. 1270), since it strikes a note of contrast with its most notable predecessors. Other significant writers and thematic developments will also be touched on.

Friendship belongs intimately to happiness. All ancient schools of philosophy would have maintained this, even though each one placed the emphases just as seemed appropriate in view of its own characteristic approach to philosophy. Thinkers of the medieval period would not have disagreed about the close connection between friendship and happiness. Sometimes that relationship was made explicit (in particular by Augustine and Aelred of Rievaulx), but sometimes it was left unthematized. The account given here will be led by the texts. I will discuss happiness and friendship together in examining the thought of Augustine, who interrelates the two themes on more than one notable occasion. In considering Boethius and Aquinas, I will for the most part treat each topic separately.