John Montague and Derek Mahon: The American Dimension

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Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations Volume 3.1

Michael O’Neill

John Montague and Derek Mahon: The American Dimension

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Publication Data © Symbiosis 1999, 2007 all rights reserved The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in SYMBIOSIS Volume 3.1 April 1999, pp.54–62 2nd electronic edition published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks LLP http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Essays published in Symbiosis are subsequently digitized for the benefit of the author (80%) and the Journal (20%)

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ISSN: 1362-7902 A cumulative index of Symbiosis essays and reviews is online at http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk

Michael O’Neill

John Montague and Derek Mahon: The American Dimension A westward gaze can be found in the poems of many twentieth-century Irish poets as they look to American poetry and culture for imaginative confirmation and enlargement. The present essay explores the effect of this gaze on the work of two of the finest post-war Irish poets: John Montague, famously an internationalist trailblazer, and Derek Mahon, equally famously a poet of restless exile and uprooted search for ‘home.’ In his autobiographical piece ‘The Figure in the Cave’, John Montague writes with a sense of gratitude about the course of his career that might seem unguarded or fulsome, were it not for a saving wit and awareness of pain. As he thinks of his manuscripts going to some great archive in the sky—or at any rate to Buffalo—he recasts his life as ‘a fairy-tale, the little child who was sent away being received back with open arms’ and finds ‘astonishing and heartening’ ‘the way the American dimension is being restored to my life in my later years.’ Yet this dimension is associated, for him, with the great trauma of his life, the separation from his mother, which he describes as being ‘at the centre of my emotional life, affecting my relationships with women, shadowing my powers of speech.’1 In his poem ‘A Flowering Absence’ Montague confronts directly the passage from experiential ‘hurt’ to poetic ‘grace’ and these states, the poles between which his more confessional verse moves, are described in ways that owe much to his study of American poets.2 At the same time his work could never be mistaken for imitation or pastiche.

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‘The Figure in the Cave,’ in John Montague, The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput, 1989), 17–18, 16, 17. The poem is quoted, as are all Montague’s poems, from John Montague, Collected Poems (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1995), 180.