The Landscape of Three Irelands: Hewitt, Murphy and Montague
The Landscape of Three Irelands: Hewitt, Murphy and Montague
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三个爱尔兰的风景:休伊特、墨菲和蒙塔古
DOI:
10.1007/978-1-349-80425-2_8
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发表时间:
1992
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
J. Foster
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
J. Foster
Baffled, like all of us, by the divisiveness of Irish life, Seamus Heaney has recently seized in desperate hope upon a remark by the Irish historian J. C. Beckett: ‘We have in Ireland an element of stability — the land, and an element of instability — the people. It is to the stable element that we must look for continuity.’1 I am afraid, however, that in literature — and I suspect in history (that is, in the retelling of events) — landscape is a cultural code that perpetuates instead of belying the instabilities and ruptures Beckett the Protestant chronicler and Heaney the Catholic writer would prefer to escape. I would like to try to demonstrate this with reference to the work of three contemporary Irish poets, John Montague, John Hewitt and Richard Murphy. As it happens, all three poets are conscious of their representative status as, respectively, native, Planter and Anglo-Irish. A few years ago, Hewitt and Montague jointly gave in various parts of Northern Ireland a poetry-reading entitled ‘The Planter and the Gael’. In their poems, the land is a sustained metaphor for the cloven Ulster psyche. Naturally we would expect to find different landscapes in Hewitt and Montague by mere virtue of the fact that they hail from different Northern terrains.