This is a valuable contribution David and explains a lot on the issues under discussion. The differences between writers are rarely addressed on here and on literary forums often kept under the carpet often for fear of litigation. Heaney found Ted Hughes more congenial than most writers in Britain but he was on good terms with others such as Peter Porter. Indeed Heaney gave the eulogy for Ted Hughes at his funeral in Exeter and Robert Lowell died suddenly in 1977 after a holiday visit to the Heaney home in County Wicklow not long after arriving back in the U.S.A. Clearly Larkin and Heaney had differences as they were totally different personalities with contrasting writing styles and views.
The anthology point on the Georgian poets is indeed apt and I regret its virtual demise or maybe it is just outdated? Anthologies at their best provide us with a real insight into a particular genre and we must not allow Keith Tuma to hog the "Modernist" anthology form or Andrew Duncan dominate the quick mode glossary into "avant garde" writers on these islands. They have both done work of value but are too prone to be guided into all too familar pastures all of us have witnessed before. A new balanced Irish anthology is long overdue to open up what has been going on since the fifties and I would love to see someone like yourself David undertake this task?
A previous effort edited by John Goodby and Maurice Scully in1999 turned into a proofreading debacle titled "Colonies Of Belief" and whoever did the proofread for Andrew Duncan's Angel Exhaust defied belief! Andrew claimed "being depressed" but he created even more depression by not pulping the book which is still on sale from commercial outlets online.
On Jamie's contributions I admire his loyalty to Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon but surely after a ten month hiatus we should simply agree to differ? I am pleased Jamie rates Fiacc and would like to know what other Irish poets he rates and his rating of John Jordan Ewart Milne and Eugene Watters?
from AOL Mobile Mail
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From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
To: BRITISH-IRISH-POETS <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tue, Oct 7, 2014 05:56 AM
Subject: Heaney and Larkin
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At the risk of sounding controversial where no controversy exists, i would respectfully suggest there was a literary relationship between Heaney's practice and Larkin's. Heaney wrote, not without reservations, about Larkin several times in prose, but most memorably in 'The Journey Back', the opening poem of 'Seeing Things', which though deftly written also conjures the strange comparison of Larkin to Dante, representing as it does a supernal vision of Larkin's shade a la Dante's appearance to firewarden TSE.
</div> Larkin himself made some not entirely flattering comments on Heaney, a 'Gombeen man' being the most notorious, but most pointedly suggested that 'Heaney &co.' represented a retreat to the 'literary'. I think he says in a letter that they 'where we were when we first started out'.
</div>Perhaps I could not so respectfully suggest that, rather than 'neo-Movement' and the like, the term 'neo-Georgian' be employed, as did Spender in his c.1960 attack on Larkin, Hughes etc.I don't think it entirely satisfactory, nor do I entirely condemn the 'Georgian' poets, who were really a series of anthologies anyway, rather than a literary movement, but the key element of critque is also I recall right also summed up by Spender: 'cultivating their own back gardens' - in literary terms that is.
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I also recall US American critics applying it some of their own post 1960s generation, though at this distance in time I'm not sure of whom.
Yours
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David Joseph Bircumshaw
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