FROM THE ARCHIVES:The Merriman Summer School set galaxies colliding in 1968, according to this anonymous report, as poets Thomas Kinsella and Brendan Kennelly clashed and the event coincided with Miltown Malbay's horse fair. –
JOE JOYCE
With a clash like the collision of two galaxies, the Merriman Summer School and the Miltown Malbay horse fair met yesterday in a splendid confusion of people, music and animals.
The Summer School, which had come to hear traditional music at Jimmy Ward’s, found itself dancing Clare sets in the main street, while the business of horse trading gradually shrunk into second place.
The atmosphere was typical of that which has permeated the Summer School ever since its inception. Earlier, literary reputations were demolished and re-erected, and lines of poetry splintered like lances, as poets discussed the influence of Irish on Anglo-Irish literature.
Tomas Kinsella criticised the Anglo-Irish poets of the 19th century for the waste which marked their approach to the Irish tradition. Describing the change from Irish to English as one of the most fundamental which had happened in this country in poetry, he suggested that there has been an important breakdown between old and new.
Bringing his remarks up to date, after a quick gallop through the works of people like Moore, Callanan, Mangan, Ferguson, and Allingham, he suggested that Patrick Kavanagh had not been a great poet. His, he argued, was an example of a minor talent which could be diminished by the lack of control which might have been provided by a living tradition if there had been one.
Minutes later, he was taken up on this by Brendan Kennelly, of Trinity College, who said that Kinsella’s assessment of Kavanagh was “cockeyed and completely off the track”.
Expressing his confidence in the condition of Irish writers and in the strength of their traditions, he said: “I feel that any admission of failure should be shoved down the throats of those who utter it.”
Kinsella suggested that if human intensity could have produced great poetry the Anglo-Irish poets would have done it, but it wasn't enough. Mangan and Ferguson had something to say – as had William Allingham in certain passages of Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland,which he regarded as excelling poems like The Deserted Villagebut frequently their best passages were embedded in poems of great tediousness. Kennelly singled out three ways in which Irish had influenced the Anglo-Irish tradition – stress on mythology, technique, and translation.
Pointing to various modern Irish writers as examples of what he was trying to say he suggested that Austin Clarke’s mythology had failed because, unlike Yeats, he had not made it personal. He also criticised Clarke’s attempt to recreate Irish verse forms as “a very dicey and very dangerous thing”. One felt, he said, that where he attempted this Clarke was too frequently involved in mere painting and decorating.
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