THE GIVEN Note: Traditional Music and Irish Poetry (Cambridge Scholars Publishing ) by Seán Crosson is a substantial book begun as part of Crosson’s research for his doctoral dissertation at the Centre for Irish Studies in NUI, Galway.
An idea central to The Given Note is that poetry is a kind of spoken music. Crosson refers to CM Bowra’s study of the songs of the pre-literate Yamana Indians: “composed of ordinary sequences of apparently senseless syllables, without meaning in the language of the Yamana tribe or any other.”
For Bowra, such “senseless sounds” constitute “the most primitive kind of song. They anticipate later developments by making the human voice conform to a tune in a regular way, but the first step to poetry came when their place was taken by real words.”
Consequently, Bowra argues that poetry is “in its beginnings intimately welded with music”.
Crosson uses this method to contextualise the work of Irish poets such as Patrick Kavanagh, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal O’Searcaigh, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Gearóid MacLochlainn.
Of most interest to Crosson is poetry as public performance for a given community, a kind of poetry version of the traditional Irish music ‘session’. The thrust of Crosson’s argument appears to question the self-obsession of much lyric poetry, with its relentless over use of the ‘I’ at the expense of the more community-minded ‘we’.
In chapter five Crosson seems to criticise Seamus Heaney. Although he leaves most of the talking to Desmond Fennell, who steps into the breach in the form of a quotation: “much of Heaney’s poetry in the 1970s could be regarded as private musing…with any general views censored out…But Heaney, with long Irish and English traditions of poetry as public speech behind him, had hesitated to commit himself to the ‘private meditation’ concept.”
Fennell argues that the praise of his “powerful champion”, at Harvard, Prof Helen Vendler, was the final ruination of Heaney as a public poet: “the result can be noticed in the increased self-absorption and indifference to readers…he has been consciously not speaking to us, even to say nothing.”
Now, while it’s undeniable that much contemporary lyric poetry with its more than occasional obscurity and foregrounded ‘I’ is in serious danger of disappearing up its own rear end; there are dangers also in the Fennell argument, which is presented uncritically here.
It is one thing for a poet to speak to his or her community in poems. It is something else to ask that poet to follow a particular political line, which is, I think, what Fennell had in mind.
Every community has lies it wants told. Sometimes, the poet’s role is to face down the community and tell them truths they collectively refuse to admit.
Without its audience poetry is nothing - Crosson’s thesis is spot on there - but the individual voice must be defended, however oblique or inconvenient its message. Anyone who doubts this should remember that one of the firmest 20th century advocates of accessible poems for the community was one Mr Josef Stalin.
This is a hugely erudite book which answers many questions but raises others.
