Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Péter Dolmányos: An Outline of the Relationship Between Romanticism and Contemporary Irish Poetry
ROMANTICISM AND CON TEMPORARY IRISH POETRY 21 his present as 'the immense panorama of futility' called for no less organising principle than mythology. The two seminal texts of Modernism, Ulysses and The Waste Land are the par excellence examples of the importance of myth in (modern) art. The Irish scene offers a number of examples of the use of myth in poetry. One of the preoccupations, of the Revival was the mythologising of the peasant and the rural world; side by side with this went the incorporation into poetry of mythological figures from the Irish past. The chief exponent of the. latter strain is William Butler Yeats. As far as the former is concerned, though it suggests a different treatment of the mythic, it is equally important: Patrick Kavanagh, in his poem entitled 'Epic', relates his local Monaghan world to the experience on which Homer based his work, and John Montague turns the rural world into a myth of continuity and tradition. Contemporary poetry also returns to myth on certain occasions. The most well-known Irish instance of this is Heaney's bog-motif, his attempt at finding a mythic framework which could enable him to interpret the contemporary outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. Heaney's myth is a complex one, bringing together the Iron Age fertility ritual of the goddess Nerthus and the figure of Mother Ireland. Heaney's myth lives its own life after a time and fails to provide any rational explanation for the violence —it is similar in this sense to Eliot's complex myth, which also proves abortive in bringing the required salvation for the wasteland of the early 20 t h century. The fact that these myths fail to provide solution for the problems may justify the Wordsworthian 'revolution' of using autobiographical experience instead of mythology for his major poetic enterprise. The return to myth and the subsequent experience of its inadequacy as an explanation for the present conflict suggest and create a sense of loss, and a deep sense of loss is a pervasive element of modern poetry. Blake is the main Romantic antecedent, and Wordsworth's poetry also contains moments of loss —though the adult finds compensation for the loss of the child's way of experiencing nature, the political disappointment following the French Revolution is a lasting wound. The theoretical dimension of the problem is expressed in Friedrich Schiller's anxiety
