Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Andrew Carpenter Cork University Press 623pp, £40/ £15.95
When the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing appeared in 1991, we were quickly promised a fourth volume (rather like a fourth green field) to make up for the lamentable absence of women's work. Andrew Carpenter, co-editor of the original project, has kept a different promise by bringing out an extensive collection of poetry from the Irish 18th century. He makes no claims to have found an unknown genius, male or female, but he has certainly extended our access to a body of writing which provides much wit, a great deal of advice, and some wisdom.
The anthology is divided rather awkwardly into five sections, each devoted to a portion of the century. The exception to this is found in the second part, entitled "Jonathan Swift and His Irish Contemporaries, 1713-1745". Within this, Swift's work is further divided into five sub-sections (with other authors intervening), not to mention a sixth in which Swift features along with Patrick Delany, Thomas Sheridan and others as the composer of riddles and street cries. This does not make for easy browsing, and the arrangement of the book looks more like a record of Dr Carpenter's methods of research than an aid to the reader's enjoyment.
With such complaints out of the way, however, we can get down to business. About twenty women are included, of whom the most notable are Esther Johnson and Charlotte Brooke. On the other hand, the inclusion of James Eyre Weekes's "Two Poems" will raise the ire of all good feminists - they are not to be overlooked. Brooke features as the translator of Turlough O Carolan's "Song for Gracey Nugent", a piece which played a powerful but coded part in Maria Edgeworth's novel, The Absentee (1812). Her father, Henry Brooke, is represented by an excerpt from the very long "Universal Beauty" (1735).
The existence of the Gaelic language is fully acknowledged, thanks to Dr Carpenter's happy collaboration with Diarmid O Muirithe and Alan Harrison, both colleagues in UCD. For example, Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain is represented, not by his eulogy in English of Admiral Rodney, but by another piece in English describing the merits of hedge schools. Art Mac Cumhaigh from the Fews in Armagh supplies a macaronic piece in which the Church of Rome (speaking in Gaelic) and the Protestant Church (in English, perhaps because it is termed An Teampall Gallda, or the foreigners' church) exchange views. Popular verse, including political songs and anonymous ballads, is also here a-plenty, the orange as well as the green.
By looking at macaronic and translated work, together with political and topical pieces, the reader has no difficulty in seeing the Irishness of all this. As with the Field Day project generally, Irish writing is implicitly accepted as writing about Ireland. For this reason, perhaps, hymn writing - indeed, all religious poetry - is poorly represented. Tate and Brady's extraordinary metrical versions of the Psalms are noted but not included. Further difficulties arise, of course, when one looks at Brooke's "Universal Beauty" (which Dr Carpenter somewhat rashly describes as "the most significant philosophical poem written by an Irish writer in the eighteenth century". Surely Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" or Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr Swift" - oddly omitted - have as good a claim to be philosophical and a better claim to be poetry). However, as Dr Carpenter has met the difficulties positively, by including rather than excluding the likes of Brooke, and one hymn by Nahum Tate, no further complaints are in order.
Consideration of Brooke raises another, more technical issue. "Universal Beauty", like John Toland's "Clio" - and Lady Ann Clare's "Motto Inscribed on the Bottom of Chamber Pots Beside a Portrait of Richard Twiss" - is written in rhyming couplets. To judge from this anthology, blank verse hardly got a look-in during the Irish 18th century, neither in its Miltonic form nor in the early romantic mode of Wordsworth. Nicholas Browne's "The North Country Wedding" is one of the very few instances represented by Dr Carpenter of Irish blank verse writing in this period. Why should this be? The acknowledged exclusion of dramatic verse (but for incidental songs occurring in plays) indicates that the practice of Irish poets may not be fully reflected here. Nor is the issue directly confronted in the substantial Introduction to Verse in English. However, the pages therein devoted to Gaelic metrics and their influence may imply an answer, however partial. It is depressing to think that no sufficiently large audience exists for an anthology in which both languages (not to mention Latin or French) could be directly represented.
Hugh Maxton's new collection of poems, Gubu Roi, will be published later this year