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 15 tempt. Wordsworth instinctively, and before the time of its explicit defi­nition, embodied the role of one of the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world', whereas Heaney was forced to take the position as the Northern Irish poet cannot escape the obligation of being a spokesman for the community. * The autobiographical persona is one of Wordsworth's major innovations: 'Tintern Abbey' and later The Prelude are unprecedented in their preliminary supposition that autobiography may sustain major poetry. This is especially revolutionary in the case of The Prelude: any earlier attempts at poems of similar length took some myth as a framework —Wordsworth was brave enough to build his monument on the foundation of his own experience. The personal universe of the poet as the essential scope of experience gained prominence in the 20 th century. Contemporary Irish poetry abounds in pieces explicitly growing out of personal experience, featuring a persona who is easily identified as the poet. There is an important relationship between the persona and the poetic voice. In Heaney's view the poetic voice is always connected with the poet's natural voice —this implies the formative influence of the tradition of the autobiographical persona. The personas of Heaney and of Derek Mahon are mainly such ones; Heaney started his poetic career exploiting his early experience as a child on a County Derry farm (the poems in Death of a Naturalist), whereas Mahon's experience of being displaced and alienated even from his own background animates his speakers. In one extreme case he reports his own homecoming in the third person singular, as an outsider ('Homecoming'). The autobiographical experience, however, is often turned into something symbolic in poetry; as Edna Longley puts it, poetry 'trans­mutes the autobiographical into the symbolic.' 6 Romanticism is once again a beginning for an important element of modern literary works through another 'innovation', the capturing of the epiphanic moment which enables us to 'see into the life of things.' This vision or as Frank Kermode labels it, the Romantic Image, 7 has had a long history ever Longley, E. The Living Stream. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994, p. 154. 7 Cf. Kermode, F. Romantic Image. 1957. (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986).

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