Sir, - The review of Fran Brearton's The Great War in Irish Poetry by W.J. McCormack (Books, August 26th) is oddly pitched. Although it sounds a note of disdain for what it calls the "hand-to-hand fighting" of contemporary literary dispute in Ireland, the brief notice manages its own, somewhat abrupt, postures of entrenchment.
McCormack seems to be reviewing a book Dr Brearton did not write; more seriously, he also simplifies and misinterprets what she does write. As far as the treatment of W.B. Yeats is concerned, the review's brevity appears to have aided misconstruction. To assert that Yeats had a contempt for actual human lives is, if seriously meant, a grave and unwarranted accusation: "contempt" does not answer to the reverie over supernatural distraction which McCormack quotes, and it is distinct from the mood of principled indifference towards a hazily-generalised notion of common humanity which Yeats did, on some occasions (and then not consistently) adopt in relation to the war.
Of course, this is a serious subject: it is of real and pressing consequence in an Irish history that is still seeking to come to terms with its literature. But in this context McCormack's accusation of contempt is facile, and falls far short of the subtlety and searching intelligence with which the book under review approaches the complex matter of Yeats, the Great War, and war in general.
Other strategies in the review appear equally ill-advised. Looking over the titles of chapters, McCormack gives a list of poets' names which, he informs us, includes only one non-Protestant; he then mentions the "decidedly Northern perspective" of the book, claims (incorrectly) that it "endorses Ulsters claim on the Somme" - a "claim" which in fact Brearton contextualises and examines clear-headedly - before finally seeming to drop hints about the name Longley: a chapter on Michael Longley is both "generous" and in too prominent a position, while "few whom Edna Longley dislikes survive in this report from the battle zone." But surely this kind of attack depends on unexamined and reflex associations for its impetus: Protestant poets; Protestants who have the wrong history; Protestants who run a division of obedient critics. However ironically meant, a series of identifying labels is no substitute for engaging with an argument.
The Great War and Irish Poetry is not a work of hand-to-hand fighting, but McCormack's misrepresentation of both its scope and its argument is, if not an act of effective combat, at any rate a botched critical mugging. Criticism is something quite apart from reeling off lists of things which your subject has not included, and it requires instead acuteness of attention, breadth of understanding and courage of evaluation. McCormack will know all this well enough; he ought, even so, to be uncomfortable about using Edna Longley's name as what seems an implication of others' supposed parti pris. No one is well served by such shorthand.
Perhaps it might be possible to imagine a literary culture in which poets have importance in proportion to their merits, not in relation to their confessional origins, nor indeed to their academic backers? Ireland deserves such a culture, but McCormack's review sends out melancholy signals that it remains only one among a number of possibilities. - Yours, etc.,
Peter McDonald, Christ Church, Oxford, England.