Sir, – Further to Joe Cleary’s fascinating article “TS Eliot, The Waste Land and Ireland” (Books, November 1st), I think it is useful to note the greater engagement between the poet and Thomas MacGreevy, and the ripples that resonated out from this relationship to another Irish literary giant.
MacGreevy had been introduced to the American poet by Jack B Yeats, and in 1929 was given a job as reviewer in the Criterion magazine which Eliot edited. It was during this time in London that MacGreevy completed his epic poem Crón Tráth na nDéithe before beginning his monograph on Eliot.
In this deeply allusive poem, a narrator ponders the aftermath of the Irish Civil War and imagines the possibilities for the new nation. MacGreevy openly acknowledged the great debt to Eliot’s masterpiece.
At the same time, MacGreevy was having an enormous influence on the formal aesthetic education of a young Samuel Beckett, who was still considering himself a poet above all else. In his first published collection, Beckett adopted the form of a long poem of symbolic allusion suggested by the images encountered in a short journey, as a basis for seven of his pieces. This method was wholly coloured by what MacGreevy had fashioned in his Crón Tráth na nDéithe, and which the Dubliner had admired in their correspondence.
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Although he abandoned the technique subsequently, for a while it seemed to be “the form to accommodate the mess” that Beckett constantly searched for throughout his career.
– Yours, etc,
Dr FEARGAL WHELAN,
Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies,
Trinity College Dublin.