Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition

by Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman (Editor)

Thomas MacGreevy was born in Tarbert, Co. Kerry, in 1893. Between the two world wars he worked as a critic, essayist, translator and lecturer in Dublin, London and Paris. His poems and articles appeared in many leading European journals and a collection of poetry, titled simply Poems, was published in London in 1934. He wrote several books of art and literary criticism and in 1950 was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland, a post he held until 1963. He died in Dublin in 1967, and his Collected Poems was published in 1971.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1991

About the author

Thomas MacGreevy (born Thomas McGreevy) was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the first Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon).

Reviews

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas MacGreevy wrote most of his poems in the 1920s and 30s and the collection is not especially large, which of course makes it a manageable task to read it all. They are very attractive and interesting poems and they are presented here with an excellent introduction and generous notes for every poem. This ensures that they are perfectly accessible despite their age, with much to enjoy and appreciate. He wrote in a modernist style, was respected by the American poet Wallace Stevens with whom he had an extensive correspondence, was championed in Ireland by Samuel Beckett, while he had a close association with James Joyce over a number of years when both lived in Paris.

Yet he was under-valued in his day and today his poetry seems to be out of print and hard to find (ruinously expensive too; I got the last affordable copy on the net thanks to Pigeonhouse Books ) and I cannot work out an adequate reason for this neglect. Whatever the reason, he lost his voice as a poet after 1934, and a few later poems bemoan this situation, happily for us in verse of great beauty.

...crouching at the foot of a renaissance wall,
A little Cupid, in whitening stone,
Weeping over a lost poetry.

Perhaps I can start by asking what relevance his poetry has for a reader today. His chosen topics are a century old now and often very specific to the concerns of the emerging Irish state; this might lead one to expect them to be parochial and archaic. Yet he lived in interesting times and his poems highlight incidents that are captivating by any standard. In so far as these events included the emergence of a new nation state from colonial (mis)rule, he addressed issues that are of immediate significance to other post-colonial writers. Ultimately, however, what matters is that he wrote from his own life and experience, and it is surely well established by now that the pathway to universal significance is through the private and the subjective. If being local or being dated were grounds for neglect, then Greek poetry would have vanished long ago; if subjectivity were a crime, then Sappho would have to be condemned.

MacGreevy was born in Kerry in 1893, but he lived a cosmopolitan life in cities – London, Paris, and Dublin. There is no trace in his poems of the rural peasant so beloved among the leaders of Ireland’s Literary Revival and he does not use rural imagery in the [patently insincere] manner of the nationalist movement.

After he finished school, he worked for the British civil service in Dublin and then London, moving to the Admiralty Intelligence Department when the First World War broke out, before volunteering with the artillery and serving in the front line of the Ypres Salient and then the Somme. A very brief poem, Nocturne, marks the death in action of a good friend, aged 19, who drew the short straw in his assignments, while De Civitate Hominum is surely a brilliant poem in the true sense, depicting the death of an airman over the trenches; these are the opening lines:

The morning sky glitters
Winter blue.
The earth is snow white,
With the gleam snow-white answers to sunlight,
Save where shell-holes are new,
Black spots in the whiteness –

A Matisse ensemble. ...

After the war, he was able to take a degree in political science and history at Trinity College Dublin, and was in Dublin to witness the Irish war of independence and then the civil war. He was alert to the irony of having fought a war supposedly for the rights of small nations, only to witness the violent oppression of his own country by the forces of the British empire. The poem “Six To Be Hanged” marks the hanging of six Republicans at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin on 14 March 1921, in a brutal ritual, extended over three hours, while hundreds of mourners prayed outside the prison walls. A later poem, Homage to Hieronymous Bosch, is a more tormented work, concerning the hanging of the seventeen year old Kevin Barry, for whom MacGreevy and a large group of other ex-officers of the British army – only a few being Irish nationalists – had pleaded for clemency, largely because Barry had been tortured by the Black and Tans. The poem expressed his despair that Britain continued to treat the Irish as an inferior category of people.

His nationalism and his visceral dislike of the Black and Tans, which recurs in other poems in this collection, is based on his direct experience and on what seems to be a profound disappointment – bearing in mind that he and many other Irish Catholics had served Britain so well. It is a very personal, realist account of his own perspective, quite unlike the rather mystical appeals to a mythical Irish nation which was favoured by the literary establishment in a reactionary period of Irish history.

Tired of sorrow,
My sorrow, their sorrow, all sorrow,
I go from the hanged,
From the women,
I go from the hanging, ...

As an aside, it is interesting that MacGreevy’s career was primarily built on his involvement with the visual arts. There was no profound separation of the visual from the verbal arts in the evolution of Irish post-colonial culture: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
This is not explored at all in the notes to this book, but it does mention that MacGreedy published a book about the painter Jack Yeats, for whom a poem in this collection is also dedicated, which includes these lines:

...
I thought how this land, so desolate.
Long, long ago was rich in living
...
I meditated,
Feared
The thought experience sent,
That the gold years
Of Limerick life
Might be but consecrated
Lie,
Heroic Lives
So often merely meant
The brave stupidity of soldiers,
The proud stupidity of soldiers’ wives.

It is fascinating that he found no conflict between his commitments to modernism and to his Catholic faith; no need to apologise on either side. He notably explored the role of Catholic theology in Joyce’s writing and made the provocative comment that one must expect a Catholic writer to write about hell as much as about heaven: “Catholicism in literature has never been merely ladylike and .. when a really great Catholic writer sets out to create an inferno it will be an inferno. For Ulysses is an inferno.” When provoked, he also produced a tribute to Ulysses which I copied out below because i love it. In defending Joyce’s status as a Catholic writer, he was attacking the shallow hypocrisy of conventional moral preaching in Ireland, where Joyce was banned, and claiming that a serious faith was capable of addressing life as it really is, rather than shrinking from it.

More to the point, I imagine, is his refusal to settle for being a mere provincial. This is the mad thing about poetry and probably about art as a whole. The more honest the writer is to their own particular experience, the more universal is their appeal. It is not that MacGreevy fails to make generalised appeals to the idea of Ireland for example, but that he does so from a solid platform of a tangible lived experience. That ceases to be parochial – many other peoples have endured the colonial experience and the challenge of learning to form an autonomous identity that is no longer colonial, and no longer merely a reaction against being colonial, but the Irish did explore many of these topics earlier than many others and for that reason the Irish experience is interesting far beyond Ireland’s still disputed borders.

While he never turned his back on either his country or his religion, he was certainly outside of the mainstream of nationalist art – what Beckett referred to as “The Antiquarians” who were in a “flight from self-awareness” - and that, perhaps, is the real key to the neglect of his poetry, which dealt in a very direct and immediate sense of the real in an age when the mainstream was promoting ever more unrealistic myths. His delicate art seems to have provoked fear when it should have been loved. I love it – I think it’s great.

For an Irish Book, 1929

A rich fig tree
The large leaves lovely to see
The fruits delicious to taste

It was manured with a dung of English Literature
And a slag of Catholic theology
But these have been tried elsewhere
Here the earth was fertile
The root strong
The gardener knew how to entrap the sun
And to anticipate the listing
Of even the gentlest wind