Ango-Irish literature

Music and song are both important influences on, and themes in, the poetry of Thomas Kinsella. His poetry also features several individuals associated with music, none more frequently than his close friend, the composer Seán Ó Riada, a central figure in the revival in popularity of Irish traditional music since the 1950s. This paper charts some significant developments in Kinsella's work from the late 1950s, and indeed, intriguing parallels, and shared emphases, apparent in the comments and work of both Kinsella and Ó Riada. For Kinsella, his experience of traditional song - described in his poem 'The Shoals Returning' - preceded the incorporation of Gaelic literature into his poetry while his recurring emphasis on the audience's role in the act of communication echoes his own identification of a central characteristic of the performance of traditional song, or sean-nós, in Irish.

Ciaran Carson has established a reputation as one of Ireland's most important poetic voices. However, Carson is also an accomplished musician whose work reflects the liminal borderland that has always existed between Irish music and Irish literature. Music is a prominent theme throughout Carson's work with songs and musical allusions frequently a feature of his poems. While music has influenced Carson's work thematically, it has played a formative role in one of the most distinctive features of his poetry until recently - that is his use of the long line. This paper argues that it is even possible in some of his poems to find comparable metres with those found in forms of traditional Irish music. Carson's use of the long line is part of his attempt to recreate what he has called the urgency of traditional Irish music in his work through an audience-aware poetic that attempts to recreate the immediacy of the live sessions Carson has partaken of as a musician. For Carson, the crucial moments of communication and understanding are those shared between the performer and the audience, an audience that can sometimes include fellow performers. However, this conviction is reflected in understandings of musical events one finds in ethnomusicology, an audience-orientated approach increasingly shared by literary theorists.

This paper proposes that at a time when Northern Ireland increasingly descended into civil strife and crisis, Seamus Heaney looked to landscape, and to a lesser but comparable, extent traditional music, to articulate a distinctive voice, beyond the claims of tradition and community, ‘to use the first person singular’ as he has remarked, ‘to mean me and my lifetime’.  Indeed, Heaney has faced a crisis of identity that has preoccupied Irish poets since at least the time of Yeats, a crisis brought on by the discontinuity in the Irish literary tradition, by an unresolved postcolonial condition and a struggle between the pull of community and tradition and that of the individual artiste. Heaney’s work has been challenged by the tensions that underlie relations between each of these elements and a quest for motifs, including that provided by traditional music, adequate to his own predicament. In this context, while traditional music and song would appear to have provided Heaney with what he interpreted as an appropriate metaphor for artistic inspiration, his portrayal often avoided the political and social complexities associated with this music. Poems considered in this analysis include 'The Given Note', 'The Tollund Man', 'Broagh', 'Digging', 'The First Flight', 'Belderg', 'The Singer’s House', 'In Memoriam Sean Ó Riada', and 'Song',  and the album The Poet and the Piper, a collaboration between Heaney and the acclaimed traditional musician, uilleann piper Liam O'Flynn.