The footnote poets: Joseph Campbell 2b/4

Joseph Campbell 1879-1944

NB: This Joseph Campbell is not the prolific author of books on Mythology. In his youth this Campbell's poetry was published under the Irish form of his name, Seosamh MacCathmhaoil. He told Austin Clarke that he gave this up when he heard a young woman asking for the poems of Seo-Sam MacCatwail.

The Biography.

Born in 1879 in Belfast he seems to have spent his life on the margins. As a Catholic and Nationalist in Belfast, he was an outsider; later, as an Ulster Man in Literary Dublin, then as an Irishman in London and later New York,  or as a Nationalist who objected to partition; ‘an Irreconcilable’, he would face the same problems.

His father owned a road mending mending/building business. At 16 he became his father’s apprentice. There was an extended period of illness. Then, when his father died in 1900, Joseph and his brother John had to fulfill their father’s contract.  He spent the next two years with his laborers. He claimed; ’I gained, from intimate daily contact with them, experience that proved of more value to me than if I had spent time in libraries, or in aimless mooning about.’ Forty years later in a radio talk he described some of these laborers and concluded: ‘These ‘untouchables’ of the lowest caste, grubbers in clay and rock……I salute them as brave souls and as my masters, for they taught me a great deal of my craft-and particularly, its iron and integrity…’ 

He had written poems and prose pieces which had appeared in the papers, but his first major publication was in Songs of Uliad. He had been asked to write the words for a book of traditional airs his friend Herbert Hughes had collected from the North of Ireland.

Austin Clarke claimed Campbell was the first Irish poet to use free verse, a claim he repeated later with the qualification “effectively’ tagged on. But most of Campbell’s poetry, including that written in free verse, maintains the direct, compact lyric style of the ‘traditional’ folk song.

Having participated in various literary and dramatic activities in Belfast he moved to Dublin, where he was as much an outsider. He did have a play put on by the Abbey, but by ‘the second company’ and Yeats rejected his second play. Campbell went to London where he met Pound and Flint and the other ‘verse revolutionaries’.  Married, against the opposition of his wife’s parents, they returned to Ireland. After partition his nationalism landed him in Prison, which he describes in his Prison Journal, edited by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and published in 2001.

Out of prison, disgusted with Ireland, his faith in the church rattled, he went to New York where he set up a Centre for Irish Studies. This wasn’t a financial success but was taken over by Fordham University, where Campbell became an assistant lecturer. He had no formal academic qualifications and the director ‘regretfully let him go’ in mid 1938.  Although he tried to set up again on his own he lost money on the lectures and night classes he gave.

Campbell’s friends collected enough money for him to return home for a holiday.  Although he seems to have had every intention of returning to New York, he was once again unable to find a job and retreated to his cottage.  Although he continued to write and broadcast, he died alone in 1944.

Some Poems.

Night, and I Travelling 

Night, and I travelling.

An open door by the wayside,

Throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light.

A whiff of peat smoke;

A gleam of delf on the dresser within;

A woman's voice crooning, as if to a child.

I pass on into darkness.

When Rooks Fly Homeward

When rooks fly homeward

And shadows fall

When roses fold

On the Hay-yard wall,

When blind moths flutter

By door and tree

            Then comes the quiet

            Of Christ to me.

When stars look out

On the Children’s Path

And grey mists gather

On carn and rath

When night is one

With the brooding sea,

            Then comes the quiet

            Of Christ to me.

Priests

When he goes thin in leaky shoes

For lack of meat and marriage dues

Two moons will kindle in the sky

And drink the deep Atlantic dry

He built a chapel on the hill

And let the peasants foot the bill,

When Dagda cracks the Steeple down

The rooted oaks will come to town.

II

Walking the road between grey, litchened walls

To where the sick man or the sinner calls

You tread the path that Paul and Jerome trod

Dispenser of the mysteries of God.

The scholarship you know, the Latin, Greek

The books you write, the shining words you speak

Your silvered hair, your shaven face, your dress

Are but as shadows of your holiness.

I do not judge you, any more than I

Have judged another; but with Wisdom’s eye

I look, and count you worthy of high song

Who lift the fallen, bid the weak be strong.

III

Christ drank the wine of love feasts

Christ broke the leper’s bread

Christ let a fallen woman

Pour spikenard on his head

You put a mask on beauty

You bind the dancer’s feet

You bless the sad and bitter

And curse the gay and sweet.

The Road Mender

Life goes by, slowly by

Clouds, like sheep flocks in the sky

Tinkers, following for gain

The ancient craft of Tubal Cain

Red leaves whiled from autumn woods

Summer shadows, winter floods

Drovers, trampers, men in carts

From the two-and-thirty arts

Dawns that blossom, dusks that die

All go by, slowly by.

Only you, that mend the roads

Move not with the horses’ loads

Travel not with dusty feet

From mountain farm to city street.

Life goes by you and you feel

All the racket of the wheel;

Time flies past you, and you see

All its love and misery,

Stirring hardly from your place-

A needle point in boundless space.

Scattered inconclusive notes for the work bench:

The ‘problems’ with Campbell’s verse are not technical, certainly not by half way through the collected. So why is he a footnote? I think the answer comes down to the fact that he was parochial; the folk lyric is an attractive but dangerous model, and content and religion mitigate against the poems being popular.

One of the most obvious features of Campbell’s poems is that the frame of reference is Irish: not the acquired vague ‘Irishness’ of Yeats, but the natural Irishness of a man who is writing within a familiar framework of stories and ideas.

Patrick Kavanagh made the useful distinction between ‘provincial’ and ‘parochial’. For Kavanagh, parochial is not a term of denigration. The parochial poet knows his parish, and writes of it and to it. The provincial poet has his eye on what’s popular in the metropolis and cuts his cloth accordingly.

Campbell was parochial in the best sense. He knew what was going on in the literary world, he’d been a participant in the meetings of the ‘verse revolutionaries’ in London. According to his biographer he had taken an interest in Russian, French and German literature and had studied those languages. He’d become acquainted with the literary theories of the twentieth century. But while this might have lead him to use, occasionally, ‘Free verse’, he never took on the Modernist’s (dubious?) claim to internationalism. 

The subject matter of his poems is local, often localized. Clark claimed his collection 'Earth of Cualann’ was his greatest achievement and ‘…has been neglected because it pays no concession to popular taste or to that English Public whom some of poets always keep in mind.’

A collection like Irishry ‘a portfolio of portraits’ as one critic called them, from which the poems Road Menders and Priests are taken, presents verse portraits of the people around him. 

But reading the poems is like reading journalism about a place or period of history one has nothing invested in. I think Campbell suggests one answer to the question of ‘how important is content’….and the answer is, pace the arguments against… sometimes it’s crucial to the poem’s afterlife.

2

The folk lyric can be a seductive model; and it can teach some beneficial lessons, In Saunders’ words their influence was evident in ‘The note of restraint, of self-discipline in his later lyrics’.

But the danger is in missing how the words rely on the tune and their delivery. In the great songs the words march hand in hand with the tune and rhythm and the singer phrases them for effect. 

Word is to the kitchen gone

And word is to the hall

And word is up to Madam the Queen

And that’s the worst of all.

Or:

I am a King’s daughter

And I come from Cappoquin

I’m searching for Lord Gregory

 I pray that I find him.

Some great poems have been written using the model, but you can hear the difference between the lyrics above and the opening of Kavanagh’s Kerr’s Ass

We borrowed the loan of Kerr’s big ass
To go to Dundalk for butter
Brought him home the evening before the market
An exile that night in Mucker.

The difference lies in the way the poem substitutes sound for the melody and the rhythm of the words push you towards a way of reading. Stripped of their tunes and rhythm, a lot of folk lyrics die on the page. In the hands of a good poet you can have the simplicity of diction and syntax, mimicking a speaking voice, but it’s bound together by sound patterning and rhythm (which may be parts of the same thing).

Yeats and MacNeice were notable practitioners of this, as was Kavanagh on his good days and Heaney a lot of the time.  Graves was more hit and miss and reading his complete poems is an exercise in listening to which poems sing and which don’t.

Campbell’s poems rarely sing the way When Rooks Fly Homeward does. They feel like lyrics to which the tunes have been lost. 

3

His religion is present throughout, and this is another feature of the poems which separate him from the modernists. While poems like Priests are critical of the Church, it’s hard to imagine either Eliot or Pound writing the collection 'The Gilly of Christ' or a poem like When Rooks Fly Homeward.  Campbell had faith; Eliot had religion. While both are profoundly held, Eliot’s was intellectualised. In ‘The Gilly of Christ’ the poems explore religious folk lore, which is no less important for being folk lore.

There’s a conclusion lurking in here, but perhaps later.

Up Next as a Footnote, Richard Aldington, who I think deserves to be a footnote. But it’s taken me six months to get this far so it may be a while.

Kavanagh on Yeats..scattered notes

Moving from Geoffrey Hill or Christopher ricks as Critics to someone like Patrick Kavanagh there is a distinct shifting of gears. Downwards. What follows are scattered notes on Kavanagh's stated attitudes about Yeats.   References are to three books edited by Antoinette Quinn: CP  Collected Poems 2004, PK Patrick Kavanagh a Biography 2nd ed 2003 and APC A Poet's Country: Selected Prose 2003

Kavanagh's last printed poem.. (CPp259) first published in 1966

Yeats

Yeats, it was very easy for you to be frank,

With your sixty years and loves (like Robert Graves).

It was thin and, in fact, you have never put the tank

On a race. Ah! Cautious man who no sin depraves.

And it won’t add up, at least in my mind

To what it takes in the living poetry stakes.

I don’t care what Chicago thinks; I am blind

To college lecturers and the breed of fakes;

I mean to say I’m not blind really,

I have my eyes wide open, as you may imagine,

And I am aware of our own boys, like Ben Kiely

Buying and selling literature on the margin.

Yes Yeats, it was damned easy for you, protected

By the middle classes and the Big Houses

To talk about the sixty year old public protected

Man sheltered by the dim Victorian public muses.

Kavanagh was invited to talk at a symposium in Chicago in April 1965 to celebrate the Centenary of Yeats' birth (Quinn PK 428 ff). Quinn wrote that Kavanagh "Had serious reservations about appearing to do obeisance to Yeats".  He decided to take the free trip but treat the event with contempt. 

Friday 30^th April ‘All hell broke loose.’ Pk had asked to speak last.

By coming this long distance to speak about or around w.b.yeats it presumes that we think him a great poet and a great man. But I have always had reservations about Yeats. The fact he wasn’t Irish and never wrote a line that an ordinary Irish person would read is not against him. No true poet ever wrote for the ordinary man or woman…. (Qtd Quinn PK 430)

When asked in the ensuing debate what motivated his attack on Yeats Kavanagh replied:”Spite”. As insults were traded Stpehen Spender, the moderator intervened to say there was no point in continuing a discussion which amounted to little more than a trading of insults. (Quinn PK 430)

In his published writing Kavanagh was more ambivalent. Though the ambivalence may be a fault of style rather than attitude. 

From a Review of Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats in The Standard, 26^th Feb 1943 p.2 (qtd Quinn, APC p177)

The foundation of the Abbey Theatre, his reactions to 1916 and the constant delight of his poetry are rich compensations for having to suffer the crowds of silly women and charlatans in Yeats litany of saints. What a marvellous technician he was. He could produce magic in verse almost automatically. He was a brilliant poet yet somehow I feel that a truly great poet would not have been all his life the mere mirror of the phases of his time but would have spoken the unchanging beauty.

In an article called George Moore’s Yeats published in the Irish Times, Yeats centenary supplement, June 1965 after he had returned from Chicago, Kavanagh’s attitude is harder to pin down. He tends to ramble. He sounds like he’s talking to himself and can’t be bothered to go back and sort out exactly what is his opinion. Great critical literary intelligence he is not.

He reads as though he hasn’t got the material under control: has too much to say and in consequence never quite says anything clearly. And there’s a vein of sly spite which recalls the vindictiveness underlying ‘On Raglan Road’.

He begins with a fairly emphatic statement (182): I fear we are getting too serious about Yeats. There is no doubt now that he was a great poet and probably the last great poet the earth will produce. 

He then qualifies Great…It implies bad heroic art-like Rodin’s or even Michelanglo’s…I don’t think Yeats was great in that way, and that he had enough of small simplicity in him to be truly great.

And yet I wonder had he?

 ...

If I seem to be a bit wobbly about Yeats’ simple greatness,  it is not so much the detachment of his verse as his ability to integrate himself with Bourgeois society.  (184)

In presenting the grounds of his judgement Kavanagh reveals the weakness of his criteria and the limitation of his criticism.

 There is another defect in Yeats-his dislike of ideas. He maintained that ideas were for the pulpit, It may be that he knew his limitations. Reading De Quincey’s reminisces of the Lakers….Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey-I couldn’t think of him as a man in the intellectual class of these.

Nor has the written a poem as memorable as the least of these-Southey’s Blenheim. (184)

Kavanagh doesn’t quote the poem, but it begins…

IT was a summer evening,

Old Kaspar's work was done,

And he before his cottage door

Was sitting in the sun,

And by him sported on the green

His little grandchild Wilhelmine.

She saw her brother Peterkin

Roll something large and round

Which he beside the rivulet

In playing there had found;

He came to ask what he had found,

That was so large, and smooth, and round.

To argue that Yeats wasn’t on the same intellectual level as Coleridge is to say little: very few people were or have been on STC’s level. To lump Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey together as equally intellectual is ludicrous. To pretend Yeats never wrote anything as good as the verses quoted above is either evidence of stupidity or willful perversity.  

But then no poet writes for posterity except accidentally, And the worst one can say of Yeats is that he was a real man of letters. Real men of letters hardly ever produce immortal poetry, You could hardly call Shakespeare a man of letters, Pope was, in a an oblique sort of way, Not Swift.

Here the ground of the judgement has disappeared. In what way did Swift and Pope differ in their approach to writing, and how could their conditions compare with Shakespeare’s. What exactly is a ‘Man of Letters’ if  PK, who made his living from journalism of one sort or another, wasn't a “Man of Letters”? 

These are pub verdicts which might sound good over the Guinness but don’t stand scrutiny in print.

He finished by admitting his equivocation but he is certain of W.B.Y’s bad influence on Irish writers. “A common passport is not a common ground”

I know I have written equivocally of Yeats and yet I know that he was a nearly great poet.

He had compromised the ultimate integrity.”185

And what is the ultimate integrity we ask ourselves. And the statue refuses to respond:

Seamus Heaney's "Human Chain": coming home via three quotations

1)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Eliot: Little Giddings)

not “to Know”, if to know means the “real truth” of something will be revealed to us, but to see the once familiar differently, to react in a new way based on new knowledge or experience. Or to discover that what we thought before we left has been confirmed.

So in the past year, as part of the new project, I have worked my way though the major sequences/long poems of the twentieth century. (There are a more of them than I thought) . It reminds me of traveling home on the Trans Siberian: large swathes of time and landscape I don’t remember, punctuated by intense moments: seeing Lake Baikal, the grey water steaming in the sub zero temperature, surf coming in to smack into snowdrifts, the Narnian beauty of sunsets, small villages all but buried under snow, like illustrations for European Fairy tales, the Chinese family who spoke neither Russian nor French or English but who managed to talk me into sharing their breakfast of boiled chicken feet and home made vodka…

But somewhere east of the beginning of Zukofsky’s “A’, about “A 9” perhaps, the images changed. I was back on the trans Kazak express, staring at an unchanging landscape, imagining trying to walk across the steppe, a tottering survivor of a massacre plodding onwards because he’d forgotten how to stop.

A long long way from Kerr’s Ass. Time to go home

And there was Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain waiting to be read.
But I had also been reading aggressive poetics:

Quote #2
…Establishment poetry is approaching the condition of journalism—"a form of writing as harmless as it is ephemeral": A generic "sensitive" lyric speaker contemplates a facet of his or her world and makes observations about it, compares present to past, divulges some hidden emotion, or comes to a new understanding of the situation. The language is usually concrete and colloquial, the ironies and metaphors multiple, the syntax straightforward, the rhythms muted and low-key. Generic and media boundaries are rigorously observed: no readymades or word sculptures here, no zaum explorations of etymologies, no Steinian syntactic permutations. As for Eliot's objective correlative, it emerges, in the mainstream poetry before us, as little more than a faint echo, an ironic tic.

Having read enough of this type of criticism I opened Human Chain and the first poem begins:

Had I not been awake I would have missed it

And I shut the book.

It took a while to see beyond the criticism of the quotation. Reciting Kerr’s Ass helps. Perloff may be a great critic, but it’s not the paradigm of the lyric speaker itself that is the problem but the way it is so easily abused. In the wrong hands it’s too easy, requires no great art or thought to churn out the formulaic “poem”. But open any journal or book and you’ll find poems ticking boxes that prove the writer is “having a poetic experience”. (The PE may be aggressively modernist, avant garde or lyric depending on which poetic the writer hangs his or her hat: Sooner or later everything becomes formulaic).

Heaney has never seemed a box ticker. It’s true that Human Chain has an air of familiarity about it; some of the poems feel as though they’ve been here before. The “Heaney topics” of rural boyhood, school, family and religion are ever present. At times his habit of using an unattributed pronoun as the subject of a poem becomes irritating. The poet knows who “he’ or ”she” is or was but the reader has no chance and the overworked pronoun collapses the poem into vagueness. One of the great defining characteristics of the man’s work, the sense that a voice is speaking directly to the reader, at times lapses into a syntax that produces lines and a stanza like ”flattened back/ against themselves/ a bit stand-offish’. Or the whole of “Canopy” with its opening stanza:

It was the month of may
Trees in Harvard yard
Were turning a young green
There was whispering everywhere.


Which never rises above a literate diary entry.

But having said that:
Quote 3#

The sight quenches, like water
After too much birthday cake.
(Thom Gunn: “Expression”)

In The Wanderer, wisdom is understood as intelligence looking back on experience in age. It’s not a popular ideal these days in cultures driven by the cult of eternal youth, so in one sense to say that these are an old man’s poems may not convey the intended compliment. And to stick 'wise' in front of old would only sound even more anachronistic.

At seventy, having survived a stroke, you shouldn’t be too surprised if the poet is in retrospective mode. The collection is ghosted by a sense of summing up and coming to terms. Each recent Heaney collection has contained at least one poem in memory of dead friends. Some of them are very good poems. Like the Old English poet, he can produce memorable poetry out of the specifics of a common sense of loss. He does elegy well. In this collection: ‘The door was open and the house was dark” with its lift towards its final memorable image is a fine example in this collection.

There is also that familiar ability of his to see things awry as in “Miracle’ with its arresting opening:
“Not the one who takes up his bed and walks/But the ones who have known him all along/And carry him in-“

After all the theory, after the poetics, the gabble of disaffected voices, the struck pose and the learnt strut, it feels good to come back to poems sturdy enough to walk in the day time, that celebrate rather than whine or denigrate or disappear into their own self serving ideological smugness.

Human Chain my be uneven. But that says something about the poetry. Its successes and failures aren’t hidden behind a hedge of conceptualized waffle. As verbal artifacts they succeed or fail. I suspect the success comes from the sense of recognition, of a shared experience spoken aloud.

Bunting said he had tried to make poems that would give pleasure but stand on their own without prop of theory or the support of party. He succeeded. So does Heaney. If nothing else there are poems in this collection that challenge the generalsied condemnation of Perloff's statement.

The Great Hunger

No, not something Freudian, Kavanagh’s poem which I have been rereading. Digression first and second.

If I ask the musicians I know who they listen to or admire, they recommend performers and performances. If I ask them who they think is the greatest exponent of their instrument, chances are they will give me a list. It’s a recognized part of the learning process.

Ask people involved in poetry the same question and a lot of them start hedging their bets. (I don’t mean the bizarre “I only write poetry, I don’t read it” crowd. I mean those well-read practitioners.) You want to know their idea of “Major poems”, well, first define major? “Great poets”? Define great. And so on and so froth. Yes, we know literary values are contingent. Thank you. But if you can’t admit to your enthusiasms and hang your hat somewhere, then something is amiss.

So ”The Great Hunger” has to be “One of the Twentieth Century’s Major Poems”.

I have met Maguires. They were the self-contained characters who sat in the corner of rooms. The guy who came into the bar and drank three pints, never four, never spoke to anyone other than a few words and a nod. There but distant. And I knew the married versions, those men and women who had traded isolation for the possibility of “Living alone in half as much space” (Ralph Mactell’s line that). Silent men home from work, hiding down the garden shed. Bedrooms glimpsed in friends’ houses where there were two single beds in the parents’ room. The sense, even as a child, that some strange negotiations must have gone on for the engendering of children.

So why isn’t it touted as such?
Is it that you have to read it several times to notice how good the imagery is?
Is it that it is so uncomfortable to read? Kavanagh focuses squarely on his main character and traces his inexorable slide towards age and loneliness. The unrelenting misery of that life is unnerving as we watch it get wasted by forces beyond its control. The contrast between the cycle of growth in the farm and the frustrations of Maguire’s sterility never let you slide into the comfort of abstractions. Reading the Waste Land there is the release of feeling you’re not really sure what you’re reading but it sounds good. The Great Hunger is inescapably about a human being and his life. And I think that’s what makes it grand. And maybe because Kavanagh was accessing his own fears and couldn’t get the distance on it for flippancy it has a clout that his other attempts at long poems lack. The verse flies like a tattered sack on a bit of rusty barbed wire.

And you can’t help but think: “there but for the grace of God…”.

Another Dublin Detour

If ever you go to Dublin town/In a hundred years or so/Enquire me for me in Baggot street…

So Mr Kavanagh, I did. In a city littered with statues, to the great, the dead and the fictional I went looking for the one your friends put up for you. Up Grafton street, where my dad and his brothers had a flat before the war, past St Stephen’s Green ("our local park") along Baggot street to the bridge. And there you are.



Names are important. As you knew they have their own melodic resonance.


“O Commemorate me where there is water
Canal bank water preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Whereby a lock Niagarously roars.”


You and me both.

I know water. Rivers, canals, estuaries. Spent years training on the canal in Birmingham, so I know how it goes green in summer, when you can learn slalom trying to avoid the bloated carcasses of dead dogs. So “stilly greeny” always worked. Was never too sure about naigarously but here, well, the sound of water falling though the lock is a beautiful constant and naigarously works.






Mr. Kavanagh, it doesn’t matter to anyone but me, but you wrote several pieces that I wouldn’t be without. (You wrote a lot of bollocks too, if you don’t mind the observation.) I won’t bore you by naming them all, but long ago “Kerr’s Ass” moved itself into that odd space beyond any kind of critical possibility, where poems become old friends, or talisman’s, like Bloom’s potato.

Though “the straw stuffed straddle, the broken breeching’ has always tripped me. I love the incantatory quality of the details, and the way they build towards that magical last stanza which seems to slip into a different register:

…morning, the silent fog
And the god of Imagination waking
In a Mucker fog.

But before I start sounding like a critic I should point out I’ve recited those lines (did I tell you it’s one of the poems I carry round in my head) watching the morning happen on river banks all over the world, and in villages and towns from Sulawesi to Tashkent. So instead of the usual critical qualifications, I'm prepared to admit to an enthusiasm without bothering to qualify it.

Lady Godiva and me was partly inspired by a conversation Yeats is supposed to have had with Joyce. You were the historical irony of that conversation, the real rural deal tramping mud across Yeats’ carpet in your big Monahan clod hoppers. And perhaps the even greater irony was that the farmer poet ended up being the poet of city streets. Raglan road is just over there, isn’t it?

So I’m glad I got here. But your friends built this statue from metal. The day is hovering around freezing, so it’s not Kerr’s Ass that’s most on my mind. I’ll leave you to the water.