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We Irish: essays on Irish literature and society
National Review, Dec 31, 1986 by Thomas P. McDonnell
We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society What Do Ancient Greece, modern Ireland, and our own New England have in common? Though each is relatively small, the influence of its literature remains disproportionately great. One still drinks from the clear springs of Hellenic thought and epic in the poetry of Ireland, for prime example, though in the United States the neo-Gnostic Emerson and his followers have long since corrupted the Aristotelian heritage.
This kind of assertion is not altogether irrelevant to Denis Donoghue's latest volume, We Irish, a fascinating study of a highly individualistic culture that still confronts the dilemma of having to write in the language of another. In fact, it is by now a standard observation that none have used the English language betteR, or more resourcefully, than writers born into the culture of modern Ireland. So it is no surprise that Donoghue's chief essays in We Irish have to do with Yeats and Joyce. Though Yeats had the ear of an angel, his Shelleyan concepts are of little use to us in today's demonic and self-destructive world. Indeed, angelism is what got us where we are. The epic poet of modern Ireland--if not of the modern age itself--is not YEats but Joyce. It is the supreme irony of literary history that Joyce, an Irishman, wrote the greatest English prose of the century, and that we continue to call it prose when it is really poetry. There was, moreover, as Donoghue points out, the actually "European Joyce," who eventually absorbed the Irish one. We Irish also contains delightful and perceptive essays on Sean O'Casey, Flann O'Brien, James Stephens, Frank O'Connor, Austin Clarke, Sean O'Faolain, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. Ireland's writers, they amply demonstrate, are her sweetest revenge.
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