Joseph Campbell 1879-1944
NB: This Joseph Campbell is not the prolific
author of books on Mythology. In his youth this Campbell's poetry was published under the Irish form of his name, Seosamh MacCathmhaoil. He told Austin Clarke that he gave this up when he heard a young woman asking for a the poems of Seo-Sam MacCatwail.
For over a century young people ‘interested
in writing’ or ‘wanting to be writers’ have signed up for university literature
courses, only to discover it’s like an English speaker travelling to France to
study English in French. For anyone who wants to learn how to write poetry,
current academic approaches to it are not helpful.
One of the products of an interest in a
poet like Campbell is how visible this becomes. So first I want to use him as an example of
something, and then consider some of his poems.
If you go looking for Campbell the poet in
the literary histories of the time: The Pound Era, A Colder Eye, you won't find him. Although a quote from a letter stands at the head of
Forster’s second volume of Yeats’ life, Campbell has no other appearance, although other sources suggest Yeats tried to get him out of prison in the
1920s. He turns up twice in Moody’s first volume of Pound’s life, but in neither
case is his poetry mentioned. He was one of those poets, including Hume, Pound,
and H.D who met in London at the Tour Eiffel café, meetings which lead to the later ‘Imagist’ movement or
Non-Movement. According to Moody, Pound
remembered him more for his conversation and Moody remembers him for the fact
he recited Pound’s terrible ‘Ballad of the Goodly Frere’ at a public meeting.
Campbell died alone in his cottage in
1944. Austin Clarke, himself more a
sidelined poet than a footnote, edited a collected poems in 1963 arguing a case
for Campbell’s poetry in his introduction and claiming he was the first Irish
poet to use free verse effectively. A
volume of ‘The Journal of Irish
Literature’ was dedicated to him in 1979 and a biography written in 1988 by
Norah Saunders and A.A. Kelly. Helen Carr, in her magnificent The Verse
Revolutionaries pulled his early life out of the footnotes and into the main
body of her text. But that book is unusual for a lot of reasons.
His presence in The Cambridge Introduction
to Modern Irish Poetry 1800-2000, written by Justin Quinn, is more
characteristic. It’s a fine example of why the academic study of literature is
a bad way of trying to learn how to write a poem.
Campbell appears three times in the index:
Tyanan and Carbery, along with other poets
such as Lionel Johnson, Joseph Campbell, Padriac Colum, George Russell, James
Stephens and F.R. Higgins followed the poetic templates forged by W.B.Yeats
(p50).
The world may indeed have been falling
apart, but that was all the more reason to assert and maintain the cultural
integrity of Ireland. Poets such as F.R. Higgins (1896-1941) and Joseph
Campbell (1879-1944) prosecuted exactly this programme (P80).
…this figures MacNeice as a flash in the
pan, beside Revivalist poets such as Joseph Campbell and Lyle Donaghy, both
subsequently and justly consigned to the oblivion of literary history (p90).
The last first.
It
is the job of Historians to select what is of importance to their narrative and
no one can object to them either selecting or voicing judgments. What I always
object to is a judgment like this one that never makes the grounds of the
judgment available to the reader. Is Cambell 'justly' consigned to the oblivion of literary history because his poetry was mediocre, or because he was a Catholic from Northern Ireland, or because he never played the twinkly eyed mystical Irishman to the English Gallery? Or because he was a white heterosexual male and they are currently out of favour, though in Campbell's case the phrase 'white male privilege' could only be ironic?
Campbell is never quoted in the Cambridge
History. However the criteria for inclusion can be seen in the pages that follow his
first appearance.
Tyanan
and Carbery, along with other poets such as Lionel Johnson, Joseph Campbell,
Padriac Colum, George Russell, James Stephens and F.R. Higgins followed the
poetic templates forged by W.B.Yeats (p50).
These poets are named, but grouped
and set aside. You could dispute the accuracy of the statement but what follows
this magisterial summation and implicit dismissal is a full page and a half of
discussion of the work of Eva Gore- Booth.
If Campbell has been ‘justly
consigned to the oblivion of literary history’ then the implication is that Eva
Gore-Booth’s work deserves our attention. As it becomes obvious that as Poetry
it doesn’t, then some other criteria must be driving this history.
Yeats wrote a poem about her, and Quinn
reprimands him: ‘Gore-Booth’s political and cultural involvements were much
more complex than Yeats admits and his poem is inaccurate in its assessment of
her subsequent career'. The criticism, that what seems to most readers to be personal
reminiscence fails as objective political/biographical/ historical analysis, should alert the reader to what comes next.
Quinn quotes from three of her poems, which
presumably do not deserve to be condemned to the oblivion of literary history.
To be fair I’ll include all three quotations in the order they are given.
1)
How a great Queen could cast away her crown,
The tumult of her high victorious pride,
To rest among the scattered fir-cones brown
And watch deep waters through the moonlight glide.
The tumult of her high victorious pride,
To rest among the scattered fir-cones brown
And watch deep waters through the moonlight glide.
2)
They brought her forth at last when she was
old:
The sunlight on her blanchèd hair was shed
Too late to turn its silver into gold.
‘Ah shield me from this brazen glare!“ she said.
The sunlight on her blanchèd hair was shed
Too late to turn its silver into gold.
‘Ah shield me from this brazen glare!“ she said.
3)
For thee Maeve left her kingdom and her
throne
And all the gilded wisdom of the wise
And dwelt among the hazel trees alone
So that she might look into Niamh’s eyes.
And all the gilded wisdom of the wise
And dwelt among the hazel trees alone
So that she might look into Niamh’s eyes.
No sorrow of lost battles anymore
In her enchanted spirit could abide;
Straight she forgot the long and desolate war
And how Fionavar for pity died.
In her enchanted spirit could abide;
Straight she forgot the long and desolate war
And how Fionavar for pity died.
Ah, Niamh, still the starry lamp burns
bright
I can see through the darkness of the grave,
How long ago thy soul of starry light
Was very dear to the brave soul of Maeve.
I can see through the darkness of the grave,
How long ago thy soul of starry light
Was very dear to the brave soul of Maeve.
These are competent poems, the kind that
were written in vast quantities by intelligent, literate people at the turn of
the last century when writing competent poems was an acceptable pastime. But do these poems rate a place in history
except as an example of the kind of competent poems written by intelligent
literate people?
I
would say no, this is not good poetry worthy of attention at this distance and
my reasons for saying so: it has the
usual problems.
An ornate diction strives to be ‘poetic’
with its ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ and phrases like ‘The tumult of her high victorious pride’. Needless adjectives pad out the line to meet
the metre’s demands: in the first quote
‘brown’ in the third line, ‘deep’ in the fourth, The straining for rhyme which
involves inversions or distortions of the natural word order or the addition of
superfluous information all contribute to a lack of precision in the
diction: do we need to know the fir cones are brown, or that the waters are
deep?
The poems have a superficial
attraction on a first reading but won’t bear scrutiny. A phrase like ‘the gilded wisdom of the
wise’ in this context seems to be doing very little. As a description of the
emotion that lead Maeve to throw it all away and live in the forest gazing into
Niamh’s eyes, (how does she do this when we’re told she’s living alone?), ‘very dear’ is simply inadequate.
Quinn
introduces the first extract by claiming that Gore-Booth used mythology to get
back to the real world, but there is nothing recognizably real about this.
It’s obvious that Gore-Booth is not being ‘justly
consigned to the oblivion of literary history’ because a) she’s female and b)
according to Quinn the third extract has something to do with lesbianism and
its delicate expression:
‘This does not openly express Lesbian love,
but like a lot of gay poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it
tactfully gestures towards it…’
Historians write history according to their
own versions of what’s important. I think it's important to keep this in mind. If the book is about the poetry written by
women during the first quarter of the century, then it doesn’t matter if it’s
good or bad poetry, it is evidence to make a point. If the purpose is to track
the ways in which non-heterosexual passion is covertly expressed in verse, any
verse will do. The danger lies in assuming that this academic use of poetry is
the only thing that matters. Identity poetics are popular; I don't think they are a good thing.
If academic education is about learning to
read like a critic, then learning to read like a writer is a different skill
and not often taught.
2 comments:
I looked him up in David Perkins and found this: https://books.google.com/books?id=lCU7r07Nb-UC&pg=PA263&dq=%22and+his+writings+have+a+special+interest+for+Irish+readers%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjSxOzrjs3KAhWHWCYKHV2fDd8Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=%22and%20his%20writings%20have%20a%20special%20interest%20for%20Irish%20readers%22&f=false
Many of Campbell’s early volumes are available on www.archive.org — TG4 carried a nice documentary on Joseph two years ago. he is an unique poet of the dank earth and half-hidden lights.
Post a Comment