It was back in 1971 that New Writers' Press published Thomas McGreevy's Collected Poems. That edition included all of the poems from McGreevy's only previous collection, Poems, published by Heinemann in 1934, and five more poems which had been diligently sought out by Thomas Dillon Redshaw. McGreevy's posthumous poetic reappearance at the time took a lot of people by surprise. Although a couple of his poems had regularly appeared in anthologies of Irish poetry, his little book of Poems had never been reprinted, and it was either unknown to, or long forgotten by, most readers of Irish poetry. Now his work has become canonical. And yet one wonders if the real lesson of McGreevy - his modernism - has yet been learnt here in Ireland.
But it is necessary to go back a bit. I think it would be fair to say that as a poet Thomas McGreevy had no real existence on the Irish poetry scene until the publication of his Collected Poems by New Writers' Press in 1971. Throughout the 1960s, the Irish poetry scene was dominated by Kavanagh and Clarke as well as the younger Thomas Kinsella, John Montague and Richard Murphy. The bugbear for almost everyone then, as indeed as it had been for a considerable time before, was the ghost of Yeats. How could one be an Irish poet without being indebted to Yeats and all things Yeatsian. Kavanagh solved the problem for himself by dispensing with masks and writing an intensely personal poetry based on his own firsthand experience of Irish life. Clarke was bravely leaving behind the mists of the Celtic Twilight and writing powerful satirical verse and exploring the traumas of his own psychology. Kinsella was looking to Auden, and Montague was learning to handle Irish experience with techniques learnt from the US. Apart from Irish material, Murphy's work was not clearly distinguishable from the work of many British poets of the time.
Although this is obviously a very simplified picture of how things were then (one should not forget such worthwhile poets as Padraic Fallon and Lyle Donaghy), it would be true to say that no poet of any prominence in Ireland seemed to be engaged in any kind of radical experimentation with poetic techniques. In reaction to the depersonalised formalism of Yeats, everyone seemed intent on discovering the personal voice, with Kavanagh as the main exemplar. Like many young Irish poets of the time, I felt a sense of literary claustrophobia. I did not share Kavanagh's rural background though I greatly admired his trenchant honesty; and while I admired Clarke's biting satire on modern Ireland, his method of writing was far too idiosyncratic and peculiar to himself to provide a model. The others were too engaged in discovering their own voices to be of help to even younger poets.
Then in 1963, the University Review, at the instigation of that wonderful and much neglected literary mentor, Dr Lorna Reynolds, brought out a special number devoted to the Collected Poems of Denis Devlin, edited by Brian Coffey. This appeared the following year in book format from Liam Miller's Dolmen Press. The appearance of Devlin's poetry was a revelation to me and others. Here was the work of an Irish poet that was deeply experimental. Why was his work so little known, I wondered. And who was this Brian Coffey, Devlin's friend and also a poet? My curiosity put me in contact with Brian Coffey, and through Brian I came into contact personally with Niall Montgomery. Other contacts followed. Out of all of this I came to discover, among other things, the work of Thomas McGreevy and what the academics now describe as Irish Poetic Modernism but which at the time struck me as no more than a willingness and freedom to go beyond the accepted conventions of mainstream Irish poetry of the time - and that was a great deal.
McGreevy was a man with a rare talent for many and deep relationships. The list of his friendships with writers, to speak of no others, is astonishing: Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Richard Aldington, to name but a few. These are some of the big names. McGreevy also befriended young unknown poets, among whom were Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Niall Montgomery.
Now I am not about to suggest that McGreevy can be seen in any sense as the founder of a school of poetry which some might like to call Irish Poetic Modernism. He had written far too little for that, and one must bear in mind that his Poems of 1934 had never been reprinted. His literary importance to Devlin, Coffey and Montgomery lay in his exemplary reach beyond the anglophone poetry world. Here was an Irishman and a poet who had been in Paris during the heyday of modernism in all the arts and who despite his traditional personal values was open-minded to all kinds of literary experimentation, though he was not unfortunately writing poetry himself at the time. Still, he had done it in the past; and he was to do it again one last time in two marvellous poems, possible his best, Moments Musicaux and Breton Oracles which first appeared in Poetry (Chicago) in 1961.
Having said all of that, it would be a mistake to make too much of McGreevy's modernism. He was not James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Yes, he did translate modern French and Spanish poetry (he was perhaps the first to translate poems by Antonio Machado into English), but it was the work of Eliot and Imagism, more than any other poetic movement, that most influenced McGreevy. As Anthony Cronin years ago astutely pointed out in an article on McGreevy's poetry, the cadence of his free verse has the fine delicacy of Eliot's poetry; but what McGreevy learnt from the Imagists, especially from Aldington, was the use of the image to articulate experience. In fact, it seems to me that it is the combination of his fine ear for rhythm and his skill in selecting the telling image that most distinguishes McGreevy's poetry. He dispenses with narrative plot and emotional gush. By contrast, Aldington could find the images but he had no ear for poetic cadence and was often extremely clumsy in his use of language in poetry (though not in prose).
Here is McGreevy:
Then, from the drains,
Small sewage rats slid out.
They numbered hundreds of hundreds, tens, thousands.
Each bowed obsequiously to the shadowy figures
Then turned and joined in a stomach dance with his brothers and sisters
(From Homage to Hieronymus Bosch)
And here is Aldington:
One frosty night when the guns were still
I leaned against the trench
Making for myself a hokku
Of the moon and flowers and the snow.
But the ghostly scurrying of huge rats
Swollen with feeding upon men's flesh
Filled me with shrinking dread
(Living Sepulchres)
I have the impression that attempts are being made to present Thomas McGreevy as a European Irish poet. McGreevy would have laughed at that description because he thought of himself as European simply by being Irish, just as a Frenchman is European simply by being French. McGreevy's Europe was above all a cultural entity in which all can participate and in which he believed the Irish throughout the centuries had participated. It is what could be learnt from this that was important to him. What McGreevy would not have accepted was any notion of Irishness that formed a barrier to the greater European cultural heritage which he, as an Irishman, considered his birthright. And poetic modernism was an essential part of that.
However one speculates on why McGreevy ceased to write poetry, one must grievously lament the fact when reading the following from Moments Musicaux:
You thought she had left you alone,
She of the Second Gift,
Save for belief in her.
You thought she had left you alone
When, the struggle at end,
The god went, silent, away
Through the flames that leaped and sang.
When he wrote these lines, it had been more than 25 years since McGreevy had been visited by his muse. This muse may not have been the White Goddess of Robert Graves, but she was a muse nonetheless, and perhaps a superior muse. The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit according to Isaiah (11:2) are Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Strength, Knowledge, Piety and Fear of the Lord. Taking into account all we know of the man, the poet and the art connoisseur, Understanding, in the profoundest sense of the word, would certainly be Thomas McGreevy's principal attribute.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher