Major Irish Authors: Introduction

Some Quotations

Thomas Davis
‘Make Ireland a nation and you will do more for national art than if you mortgaged your estates for pictures and turned your own halls into drawing school. Make Ireland a nation and the Irish artist will feel himself a partner in your toils, your ambition and your renown; he will be nourished upon great sights and thoughts of liberated people - he will be surrounded by men vying in nationality and worshipful of national genius. He will dedicate that genius to honour the influence that inspired it.’

(From The Nation, 1843; quoted in Editorial, The Dublin Magazine, Spring 1966 - with remarks, ‘Alas for Davis’s hopes! ... from the cultural point of view Ireland is a disgrace’, p.5).

W. B. Yeats
‘Ireland is between the upper and the nether millstone - between the influence of America and the influence of England, and which of the two is denationalising us more rapidly it is hard to say. Whether we have still to face a long period of struggle, or have come to the land of promise at last, we need all our central fire, all our nationality.’ (In United Irishman, 14 May 1892).

James Joyce (reviewing William Rooney’s sentimental verse in Poems and Ballads)
‘For a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character; he enters into a region where there is a question of the written word, and it is well that this should be borne in mind, now that the region of literatures is assailed so fiercely by the enthusiast and the doctrine. […] And yet he may have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy.’ (Daily Express, 11 Dec. 1902; rep. in Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1965, p.85, p.87.)

Note that Arthur Griffith reprinted a good deal of the review in his own paper, United Irishman, (20 Dec. 1902), omitting any comment other than to add the word ‘Patriotism’ in brackets after Joyce’s phrase ‘one of those big words’. (Ibid., p.84.)

Samuel Beckett
‘What constitutes the charm of this country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without the help of the meanest contraception, is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces. These are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession. Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Elysium of the roofless.’

(First Love and Other Shorts, London: Calder 1973, pp.1-30; p.21; also cited in Colm Tóibín, ‘New Ways to Kill Your Father: Historical Revisionism’, in Karl-Heinz Westarp and Michael Böss, eds., Ireland: Towards new Identities? (Aarhus UP 1998), pp.28-36; p.34.)

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Patrick Kavanagh
‘I would say not that the so-called Irish Literary Movement which purported to be so frightfully Irish and racy of the Celtic soil was a thorough-going English-bred lie’ (“Autobiography&q#148;, in Collected Pruse, 1967, p.13)

Further: ‘[The writers of Ireland [are] no longer Corkery and O’Connor and the others, but Auden and George Barker. Saying this is liable to make one the worst in the world, for a national literature, being based on a convention, not born of the unpredictable individual and his problems, is a vulnerable racket and is protected by fierce wild men.’ (‘Waiting for Godot’, in Collected Pruse, p.266; cited in Edna Longley, ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, 173-95, p.178-79.]

Francis Stuart
‘National literature is to my mind a meaningless term. Literature can’t be national. Literature is individual. Nationality has nothing to do with it.’ (Quoted in Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in New Irish Fiction, London: Pluto 1997, cp.15.)

Seamus Heaney (on Irish literature and culture today)
‘[E]mpowered within its own horizons, it looks out but does not necessarily look up to the metropolitan centres. Its impulses and possibilities abound within its boundaries but are not limited by them. It is self-sufficient but not self-absorbed, capable of thought, undaunted, pristine, spontaneous, a corrective to the inflations of nationalism, and the cringe of provincialism.’ (Preoccupations, 1980, pp.131-149).