Speaker – Stephen Enniss, HARRY RANSOM CENTER<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early 1960s a talented group of Northern Irish poets emerged in Belfast, including the future Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. In the decades since, a popular myth has taken root about the Northern Irish Renaissance with some commentators linking the emergence of a new generation of poets to the outbreak of violence in the North. In fact, the Troubles would not erupt for several more years, and the sudden appearance of this new generation had more to do with the individual talents of this group of poets and an extended network of publishers, editors, and academics, many of them London-based. Stephen Enniss will provide a corrective reading of this chapter of literary history and explore the London origins of the Belfast Group. Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among other figures. He is a past recipient of a Leverhulme Fellowship from the University of London, and he is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon (Gill & Macmillan, 2014). Major acquisitions during his tenure have included the archives of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Arthur Miller, and Nobel Laureates Kazuo Ishiguro and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. Before coming to the Ransom Center, he held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University\u2019s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Stephen Enniss, HARRY RANSOM CENTER In the early 1960s a talented group of Northern Irish poets emerged in Belfast, including the future Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. In the decades since, a popular myth has taken root about the Northern Irish Renaissance with some commentators linking the emergence of a new generation of poets […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/02\/BSLS-18-11-02.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"47.84M","filesize_raw":"50160128","date_recorded":"16-11-2018","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[78,53,40,82,46,80,66,81,84,77,79,83],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-89","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-belfast","6":"tag-british-studies","7":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","8":"tag-director","9":"tag-dr-roger-louis","10":"tag-harry-ransom-center","11":"tag-laits","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-northern-irish-renaissance","14":"tag-seamus-heaney","15":"tag-stephen-enniss","16":"tag-university-of-london","17":"series-bsls","18":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":859,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 16:46:00","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:46:00","post_content":"\n Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among other figures. He is a past recipient of a Leverhulme Fellowship from the University of London, and he is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon (Gill & Macmillan, 2014). Major acquisitions during his tenure have included the archives of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Arthur Miller, and Nobel Laureates Kazuo Ishiguro and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. Before coming to the Ransom Center, he held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University\u2019s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Stephen Enniss","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"stephen-enniss","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 16:46:00","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:46:00","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=859","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Like to begin by pointing out that we finally have the results<\/p>\n of the five year project on selecting the 250 highly recommended<\/p>\n books that students should read or at least be familiar with before they<\/p>\n graduate. And there are other posters that people can pick up on your way<\/p>\n out. We’re very glad to have<\/p>\n Steve Enis with us as the director of the<\/p>\n Harry Ransom Center. He occupies, in the opinion of many of us, the most important<\/p>\n job at the University of Texas. He speaks in a long line<\/p>\n of Irish topics that we have had. I think it helps to have<\/p>\n George Bernard Shaw making sure that you’re accurately presenting<\/p>\n the facts. We go all the way back, of course, to mention only a few Oscar Wilde.<\/p>\n At one time we heard Michael Yates, who was the former chairman of the Irish Senate<\/p>\n and the only son of the poet, Sir David Williams, who was<\/p>\n the vise chancellor of Cambridge University, speaking on the troubles in Northern<\/p>\n Ireland last week. Kevin Kenny and David Liora.<\/p>\n And we have Larry Graham, who is also an expert on Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n So, Steve, we’re very glad that you have the opportunity to hear about Seamus<\/p>\n Heaney and the Belfast poets. All right. Thank you, Roger.<\/p>\n I want to thank Roger for that, for inviting me to speak to the British Studies Group.<\/p>\n I’ve enjoyed these these afternoon lectures and delighted to be with you today. Good<\/p>\n to see British studies, regulars. Colleagues from the English Department and from the ransom center as<\/p>\n well. A few comments about this talk before I before<\/p>\n I get underway. I’m interested in where poetry comes from<\/p>\n and not only the individual experience and the individual poet’s<\/p>\n distinctive vision, but also the social conditions and the networks<\/p>\n that enable poetry to come into being. And it’s really<\/p>\n that latter topic, the social world that enabled what we now<\/p>\n refer to as the Ulster Renaissance that began quite precisely in 1963<\/p>\n in Belfast. It’s those networks and those relationships that I’ll be talking about today.<\/p>\n There are really two things that you should know before I begin. And one of them<\/p>\n is the key role that an academic and<\/p>\n aspiring poet named Philip Hobsbawm played in this this series<\/p>\n of events that I’ll be referring to. Hobsbawm was for many years<\/p>\n based in London, and he organized at that time in London,<\/p>\n something that was called with a very bland title, simply<\/p>\n the group. This was this was before creative<\/p>\n writing programs had been established in America or in the UK.<\/p>\n And Hobsbawm convened in London from the mid 1950s up until<\/p>\n he left in fifty nine. The group to hear one another’s<\/p>\n new poems to comment on them to provide what he called practical criticism about them.<\/p>\n Hobsbawm left in fifty nine, and the group ends up being managed by<\/p>\n Edward Alusi Smith, Teddy, Lucy Smith newspapers. We we hold here at the Ransom Center<\/p>\n and Hobsbawm briefly took an appointment at Sheffield, where he remained for about three<\/p>\n years before taking a post at Queen’s University in Belfast.<\/p>\n And that’s where I want to take up the story. His arrival in nineteen sixty three<\/p>\n in that year, Hobsbawm and his successor<\/p>\n at the London group co-edited this anthology, a book that’s<\/p>\n long since been forgotten, which you’ll hear some reasons why it’s been forgotten. But they co-edited<\/p>\n this anthology that came out that year.<\/p>\n When Philip Hobsbawm and Edward Alusi Smith co-edited an anthology<\/p>\n of work by group poets in 1963, they unwittingly<\/p>\n set themselves up as targets of attack. Among the earliest reviewers<\/p>\n of a group anthology was one by Julian Simmons in The Spectator.<\/p>\n And while respectful of a number of the individual poems, Simmons introduced<\/p>\n a note of disapproval that would be echoed by many other subsequent reviewers.<\/p>\n He wrote poetry as an individual art<\/p>\n before posing the question What can be gained by a cooperative<\/p>\n view of poems? In other words,<\/p>\n in other words, the publication of a group anthology did two things.<\/p>\n It defined this community of poets who came together to discuss one<\/p>\n another’s work. It established an identity as a group and it also provided<\/p>\n a basis for criticizing them. Nothing provoked reviewers more<\/p>\n than the notion that there was, among the poets, a common group as authentic.<\/p>\n In the spring of 1963, Seamus Heaney was<\/p>\n teaching at St. Joseph’s Training College in Belfast. When he wrote a review<\/p>\n of this group anthology, it was his very first book review,<\/p>\n one that I would add has escaped the notice of his bibliography. And it was published<\/p>\n in an obscure student publication in Belfast called Interest.<\/p>\n Unlike some of the hostile reviews being directed at the anthology, the 24<\/p>\n year old Heeney was appreciative of the idea of a writer’s group.<\/p>\n He noted the way the group operated that poems would be submitted to Hobsbawm<\/p>\n or his successor, Lucy Smith, that they a selection would be made.<\/p>\n They would be run off on a mimeograph machine. They would be sent to<\/p>\n all of the group members to read and study before coming to this session<\/p>\n so that the those attending had some familiarity with the work they were hearing<\/p>\n and could respond more meaningfully about the poems.<\/p>\n He was appreciative of the idea of such a group. He noted the effective way it operated,<\/p>\n informing and encouraging informed responses to the<\/p>\n work. Yet he, too, noted. But in his case, without any explicit criticism,<\/p>\n the way the group’s method contributed to similarities among the points<\/p>\n quoting Heaney. Not surprisingly, the poetic process represented by the group writers<\/p>\n is empirical. All the poems begin with a remembered or imagined account<\/p>\n of incident or character, and this concrete situation resolves itself<\/p>\n into an attitude or statement about some central problem of living.<\/p>\n About love. About marriage. Belief, war or punishment.<\/p>\n The poem Heaney continued in a statement that could well stand as a coda<\/p>\n for his own early verse, acts as a lens<\/p>\n which focuses intelligence on personal experience and burnishes<\/p>\n it into public art. Hainey likened the social<\/p>\n conditions out of which the group poems were produced to that of the 18th century coffeehouse,<\/p>\n and he singled out for particular praise the poems of Edward Lucy Smith, who he called<\/p>\n the most authoritative voice in the collection. Hobsbawm,<\/p>\n who you see here, had recently arrived in Belfast to take up a teaching<\/p>\n position at Queen’s, and he sent a copy of Heaney’s review to his<\/p>\n coeditor, Lucy Smith in London, with whom he remained in regular communication.<\/p>\n And here you see Lucy Smith. Quoting<\/p>\n from that letter, here’s what seems to me a very bright review and one of Queen’s literary magazines.<\/p>\n It’s true it doesn’t reach quite so wide an audience as a spectator. But this is a reaction from<\/p>\n the rising generation, not from the old fuddy duddies of yesteryear. And therefore,<\/p>\n very heartening. I think Heaney had quoted in that review, Hobs bombs<\/p>\n call for the creation of writing groups up and down the country. But he<\/p>\n concluded the review with a note of skepticism. Writing Suppose it’s vain<\/p>\n to expect that Belfast will rally to his call.<\/p>\n Hobsbawm would have taken note of two poems also in that same issue of interest<\/p>\n to poems by Heaney, one called Essence’s, the other welfare state,<\/p>\n the latter a reflection on the passing of rural traditions that that<\/p>\n takes as a subject, an aging generation of peat diggers, not unlike the grandfather<\/p>\n Heaney would later immortalized in a celebrated poem digging. Almost<\/p>\n four months later, something surprising happened. And that is, Heaney republished<\/p>\n the same review, something that doesn’t happen often. He republished<\/p>\n the same review in a more widely distributed publication called Hibernia. But this<\/p>\n time he introduced some changes into the review. What had happened is that<\/p>\n between the first review and the second, Hainey and Hobsbawm had met. And following<\/p>\n that meeting, Heaney felt compelled to reconsider some of his earlier statements.<\/p>\n Years later, Hobsbawm would share his memory of that first meeting.<\/p>\n Quoting Hobsbawm, he seemed incredibly pleased to be noticed,<\/p>\n to be taken up and spoken to. He kept grinning, a trade I<\/p>\n didn’t understand at the time, but I think it was pleasure at being recognized.<\/p>\n And here you see a photo taken just two years after that meeting<\/p>\n of a grinning Seamus Heaney with some of the school age children<\/p>\n surrounding him. Following that first meeting, Heaney rewrote<\/p>\n his review of a group anthology, silently dropping the words of praise for Lucy Smith<\/p>\n and instead singling out for attention one of hobs bombs poems. Making a substitution<\/p>\n between the coeditors Hobs Bombs Coin has the unfortunate title journey round the<\/p>\n inside of my mouth and refers to recent dental work. He’s come under attack,<\/p>\n as I say the well, I will not read the poem.<\/p>\n The substitution was a direct response, though, to Al Alvarez’s recent<\/p>\n attack in The Observer, where Alvarez had charged that the group poets as a<\/p>\n whole shared a fixation on nastiness, on torture,<\/p>\n wounding defecation and rotting teeth.<\/p>\n More significant than the shuffling of poets, however, was Heaney’s newfound enthusiasm for<\/p>\n writing groups across Ireland. One can only hope, he wrote in the second version<\/p>\n of this review, that Hobsbawm suggestion is taken up. If there were a group in<\/p>\n Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Galway, our young poets would find it easier to meet an audience.<\/p>\n Beginners would have a benefit of criticism from the established, and above all, interest should increase.<\/p>\n Hobsbawm had, in fact, already shared with Lucy Smith that he intended to begin<\/p>\n a writing group in Belfast like the one he had run in London, and when he<\/p>\n got around to convening that group of community based writers and aspiring<\/p>\n writers. Heaney was among the very first that he invited while<\/p>\n these events were transpiring in Ireland. Other reviewers of the anthology<\/p>\n were taking aim at the London group. Ian Hamilton, who was then editor<\/p>\n of the little magazine. The review was particularly harsh in his condemnation.<\/p>\n The trouble with the most distinctive poems in a group anthology he wrote is that they seem to have been composed<\/p>\n and frigid decoration of a formula interpretation of human experience.<\/p>\n We live in violent times. They seem to say, and therefore this violence<\/p>\n must be reflected in our verse. The poet, with his task so<\/p>\n clearly defined, sits back, gathers violent images and<\/p>\n joins a discussion group to compete with other poets for gruesome effects.<\/p>\n Hamilton singled out Peter Porter’s poem, Annotations of Al SCHWIRTZ<\/p>\n and George Macbeth’s report to the director as reflective of what he called a death<\/p>\n camp theme. Sylvia Plath had taken her life only a few<\/p>\n months. Before, and the gruesome effects of poetry seem painfully clear to all.<\/p>\n Yet more than a particular effect. Hamilton was objecting to the group method itself.<\/p>\n The charge was that the group poets had a draw, adopted a group as authentic.<\/p>\n The very manner of the poem’s composition led to a sameness in the themes<\/p>\n and effects of the work. Lucy Smith, in a moment of some despondency,<\/p>\n wrote to his coeditor writing I began to see that we will both be very<\/p>\n many years in living this book down. So it was in this context<\/p>\n well, in the immediate aftermath of Hamilton’s review, and while<\/p>\n the two coeditors were besieged from similar attacks from other quarters that Hobsbawm<\/p>\n ironically sets out and convenes and gathers likely<\/p>\n participants for a Belfast group to begin meeting at his and his wife’s home<\/p>\n at the start of Queen’s Autumn Term. In addition to Haiti, among those<\/p>\n he invited was a Belfast based playwright and sometimes poet named Stuart Parker,<\/p>\n who was at the time studying for his M.A. He invited a local<\/p>\n poet and songwriter, James Simmons, and a young civil servant named Joan Watson, whom<\/p>\n he’d met when she attended one of his adult education classes. Several<\/p>\n Queen’s colleagues were early participants, among them the Catalan language scholar Arthur<\/p>\n Terry and the George Eliot scholar W.J. Harvey, chair of the English department at the time.<\/p>\n Joan Watson has recorded her response to Hobs Bombs<\/p>\n Overture an invitation. She was flattered by, quote, the beautiful, spontaneous letter<\/p>\n she received in her reply. She noted how her own writing had been hampered<\/p>\n by a lack of a supportive community in the past. She wrote I had given<\/p>\n my poems to several people, only to be rewarded with<\/p>\n an incoherent expression and comments such as very nice with the result<\/p>\n that I was beginning to write less. I’d love to join your writing group, she<\/p>\n wrote, and I hope I can fulfill your expectations. Hobsbawm<\/p>\n asked Stuart Parker to launch the new Belfast group at its first meeting in October,<\/p>\n and Simmons later wrote that the evening hadn’t been bad that a young woman would have been. Joan Watson<\/p>\n was marvelous. Quoting Simmons. She didn’t say a word during the only meeting I’ve<\/p>\n been at, but Hobsbawm issues cyclers styled copies of one poet’s work for the next<\/p>\n week’s session, and it was hers, very stark and strong and wise.<\/p>\n Simmons was about to travel to Nigeria where he was going to spend<\/p>\n the coming year, but he attended the first meetings of the group regularly and he later<\/p>\n reported that he found the very stimulating after much lack of contact with poets.<\/p>\n He was particularly pleased when on the 19th of November, it came his own turn to read, and<\/p>\n Hobsbawm selected several of his most recent poems. Quite a fill up to my confidence,<\/p>\n he wrote. A close friend, Seamus Heaney’s first group<\/p>\n sheet included one of his most personal early poems,<\/p>\n midterm break, about the tragic death of his younger brother when his<\/p>\n brother was only four years old. While the date of that<\/p>\n group meeting went unrecorded, it would have been Michaelmas term in the autumn of 1963,<\/p>\n before Simmons had left for Nigeria. Heaney had only recently begun<\/p>\n submitting his work to local publications and the Belfast Telegraph,<\/p>\n and a few of these had begun a period including mid-term break in the Kilkenny magazine<\/p>\n that spring. And while the poem would be eventually<\/p>\n collected as first presented and its group sheet, other<\/p>\n poems from that first great group sheet would often undergo quite significant revision,<\/p>\n as did a poem called Turkey’s Observed or another early poem O Brave<\/p>\n New Bull, which would be retitled and undergo some revision<\/p>\n before a period in Haney’s second collection Door into the Dark. A number<\/p>\n of features of Haney’s mature work were a parent from the very beginning.<\/p>\n Many of the poems draw upon farming practices, upon rural speech<\/p>\n and customs that Hainey had witnessed and experienced in his youth. And three of<\/p>\n the poems from that first group, Chito Brave New Boule Mid-term Break and Turkey’s<\/p>\n observed introduce the first person I who who registers<\/p>\n experience and is in fact the real subject of these early.<\/p>\n Warms. Let me just share this point with you.<\/p>\n I sat all morning in the college sick bay, counting bells, nela and classes<\/p>\n to close at two o’clock. Our neighbors drove me home in the porch.<\/p>\n I met my father crying. He had always taken funerals in his stride and<\/p>\n Big Jim Evans say, and it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed<\/p>\n and rocked the pram. When I came in and I was embarrassed by old men standing<\/p>\n up to shake my hand and tell me they were sorry for my trouble,<\/p>\n whispers informed strangers. I was the eldest away at school. As my<\/p>\n mother held my hand in hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.<\/p>\n At ten o’clock, the ambulance arrived with the corpse starched and bandaged by the nurses.<\/p>\n Next morning I went in up into the room. Snowdrops and candles<\/p>\n soothe the bedside. I saw him for the first time in six weeks.<\/p>\n Pale are now wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple. He lay<\/p>\n in the four foot box. As in his cot? No, his scars, the bump or<\/p>\n knocked him clear. A four foot box of foot for every year,<\/p>\n while few contemporary accounts survive of participants responses<\/p>\n to these group sessions. Norman Bolar was working in the Careers<\/p>\n Advisory Service at Queen’s in 63 and also attending group meetings regularly.<\/p>\n He was impressed enough by Heaney’s reading of his poems to write Hobb, Hobsbawm and say-so,<\/p>\n quoting him This man Heeney. He’s got something. What he offers actually interest me<\/p>\n and makes me want to read more. Near the end of the autumn term, Heeney<\/p>\n presented a second selection of poems. An Advancement of Learning<\/p>\n had been published in the Irish Times some months before, and Fisher would appear there in<\/p>\n February. The group sheet also included a poem called Docker,<\/p>\n as well as the uncollected poems Amputation, National Trust and a Cistercian speaks.<\/p>\n Much has been made in the hindsight of the non sectarian makeup<\/p>\n of the Belfast group. But the reality of these societal tensions and<\/p>\n divisions outside the Belfast group were acutely familiar<\/p>\n to all its participants, and Hainey chose to address them directly, in particular<\/p>\n in his portrait of a Protestant dockworker. And<\/p>\n just a portion of this poem from the second stanza<\/p>\n in this descriptive poem describing the Protestant dockworker, that fist would drop<\/p>\n a hammer on a Catholic. Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again.<\/p>\n And then skipping down into the third stanza, a depiction of<\/p>\n something of the staunch ness of this brand of of<\/p>\n strict Protestantism that dominated and left left its influence over the whole<\/p>\n city. God is a foreman with certain definite views who<\/p>\n orders life and shifts of work and leisure. A factory horn will blare<\/p>\n the resurrection. The Belfast group offered<\/p>\n a safe space for these kinds of divisions to be discussed. And Hobsbawm,<\/p>\n who is Jewish, broaden the frame of reference even further.<\/p>\n Joan Watson opened the new term in January and she was followed the next<\/p>\n week by James Simmons, who brought along in a very uncharacteristic fashion for group<\/p>\n meetings, brought along his guitar and sang to the selection of his song, his poems.<\/p>\n The Belfast group was not yet attracting the kind of criticism that had been directed at<\/p>\n the London group, though the participants were beginning to share something of a group identity<\/p>\n around Belfast. In only a few months, Hobsbawm had, in fact succeeded<\/p>\n in identifying a group of young and talented Belfast writers.<\/p>\n He had put in place a structure for them to share their new work, and he had created, as Hany<\/p>\n would later write, an open house for poetry.<\/p>\n At the close of the term, before leaving for London for the summer, Hobsbawm posted his friend<\/p>\n and fellow poet Martin Bell a selection of what he thought were the best spring group<\/p>\n sheets writing. I’ve kept it down to the people I really feel have something.<\/p>\n Haney, Parker and Wharton and two story writers, McCafferty and Bond.<\/p>\n Following that summer break, Hobsbawm reported, quote, The<\/p>\n group here got off to a thunderous start. At the beginning of term, he<\/p>\n reported to be an inundated with with poems, stories and plays and<\/p>\n then said that he had quite enough to keep me going right through this term and halfway through the next.<\/p>\n There had been changes to the Belfast group over the summer. Stuart Parker had married<\/p>\n and left for a teaching post in America and Joan Warton, whom Hobsbawm thought<\/p>\n one of the most promising participants had moved to London. There were new additions<\/p>\n to the group as well. Harry Chambers had arrived in Belfast for a teaching post at Strand<\/p>\n Milice College, and he too began attending Hobsbawm, who was always the<\/p>\n networker. The connective tissue of this community invited John Boyd,<\/p>\n talks producer for BBC Northern Ireland, to attend to meetings<\/p>\n which he did. The poet Michael Longley,<\/p>\n one of Ireland, one of Ireland’s finest contemporary poets, Michael Longley,<\/p>\n had been living in London and had recently arrived in Belfast.<\/p>\n Having followed his future wife, Edna Broaddrick, to the city where she<\/p>\n had taken a teaching post at Queen’s Langley, when he reflected back<\/p>\n on group meetings, he would be dismissive and say I simply<\/p>\n followed Edna to group meetings. But in fact,<\/p>\n Michael Longley was already familiar with Hobsbawm his poetry and had reviewed<\/p>\n Hobs Bombs, previous collection for the Irish Times in April.<\/p>\n He’s in years. In subsequent years. Michael Longley would<\/p>\n talking about this history would express some ambivalence about his participation<\/p>\n in the group, and he had good reason to be ambivalent.<\/p>\n Because of that review he had written of Hobsbawm his work in<\/p>\n that review. He had called Hobsbawm a less accomplished Philip Larkin,<\/p>\n noting he shared something of Larkin’s interest and feelings of inadequacy.<\/p>\n Little wonder, then, if Longleaf attended his first group meeting in the Hummes Hobbs bombs home<\/p>\n somewhat reluctantly. While the group was resuming in Belfast,<\/p>\n a familiar debate erupted again in the pages of The Spectator, where<\/p>\n when Elizabeth Jennings made a passing reference to a group anthology noting that the volume has nothing<\/p>\n of the power or strength of a real literary manifesto, it was that a<\/p>\n side cast off line really in a piece largely focused on the movement poets.<\/p>\n But it nevertheless led to a month long Rahl in the letters column as one letter writer<\/p>\n after another condemned the London group or came to its defense. Hobsbawm,<\/p>\n writing from Belfast, was the first to step forward, pointing out matter of factly<\/p>\n that the group members shared no doctrine and that the group could more usefully be seen<\/p>\n as a forum for practical criticism. It was by now his standard<\/p>\n response to criticism of the London group or its more recent Belfast offshoot.<\/p>\n Hobsbawm had invited Seamus Heaney to read at the upcoming group meeting<\/p>\n that would coincide with the Belfast Festival, which was an annual arts festival in the<\/p>\n city. And in advance of that, Heaney gave Hobsbawm a sheaf<\/p>\n of poems, a substantial sheaf of poems for Hobsbawm to make a selection<\/p>\n for the group sheet. Hobsbawm, who is still in touch with Lucy Smith,<\/p>\n posted a letter about this, in his words, most<\/p>\n stupendous collection of poems. It was, he noted, almost enough for a<\/p>\n book and a very high quality throughout. It took me a considerable amount of<\/p>\n time to select the poems for the batch. As it is, I’ve allowed Heaney’s seven<\/p>\n poems one over the statutory number, which I’m sure you you. Lucy Smith<\/p>\n will agree is a dangerous precedent. Still, I feel<\/p>\n he deserves it, and I think this will be his annus mirabilis.<\/p>\n Unknown to Hobsbawm, Heaney had in fact already submitted that group of poems to<\/p>\n the Irish based Doleman Press and Dublin, and he was waiting word<\/p>\n on its acceptance. The Dublin based press was<\/p>\n making a good name for itself as a poetry publisher, Thomas Councillor’s. Another<\/p>\n September had been selected as a poetry book society choice, and Austen Clarke’s<\/p>\n later poems had received a Poetry Society recommendation. Recently,<\/p>\n a new distribution agreement with Oxford University Press promised a wider sales of Doleman<\/p>\n titles outside of Ireland. And Miller was known to produce a handsome,<\/p>\n well-made books. It was, in other words, a logical direction for Haney to turn.<\/p>\n But unaware that the manuscript was already under consideration by Doleman, Hobsbawm and Lucy<\/p>\n Smith were both both considering publishers that they could approach on Heaney’s behalf.<\/p>\n As to Heeney, presumably when he gets the collection together, you’ll recommend him to McMillan.<\/p>\n Lucy Smith wrote Hopp Hobsbawm, if you have no luck there. I’ll try Oxford.<\/p>\n In the end, the seven poems Hobsbawm shows from Haney’s manuscript included<\/p>\n well-known poems like Digging and Death of a Naturalist, Writer<\/p>\n and Teacher. Young Bachelor Scaffolding. Three of the poems had already been accepted<\/p>\n for publication in that student publication Interest, and four of them would eventually be collected<\/p>\n and death of a naturalist. His first his first collection, Hobsbawm<\/p>\n mailed Lucy Smith the group sheet with these seven poems<\/p>\n in advance of Lucy Smith’s visit for the Belfast Festival and under the direction<\/p>\n of the festival organiser Michael Emerson. Festival 64 was<\/p>\n a very ambitious programme of exhibitions and concerts and film<\/p>\n screenings and performances. The midday lectures, which were a feature<\/p>\n of the festival, included Anthony Burgess speaking on Finnegans Wake and Patrick<\/p>\n Cavin on the poet’s life at Hobsbawm Suggestion Poets.<\/p>\n The poet Martin Bell and Lucy Smith had been invited from London, and<\/p>\n Hobsbawm, writing to Belle of the preparations, reported that the entire place has been turned upside<\/p>\n down. Lucy Smith stayed with Philip and his wife Hannah when he visited Belfast,<\/p>\n and it was during this visit that he and Heeney met for the first time at<\/p>\n a dinner party, the hub at the Hobsbawm as Fitzwilliam Street House.<\/p>\n Lucy Smith had agreed to speak on modern poetry, a murderous<\/p>\n art. The title phrase a reference to Al Alvarez’s description of the final<\/p>\n poems of Sylvia Plath. Following that lecture, a group<\/p>\n of friends gathered at a nearby pub, and it was there<\/p>\n that Lucy Smith was shown a copy of the just published student publication Interest,<\/p>\n featuring three of Heinies workshop poems. He was scheduled<\/p>\n to read at the group meeting the next night, but Lucy Smith had to return<\/p>\n to London and missed that session. Looking back on the history, this history,<\/p>\n though, from a distance of some years, the poet Michael Longley would recall that it was<\/p>\n only the second or third group meeting that he Langly had attended.<\/p>\n Other than Langley’s brief mention, no record survives of that group discussion. However,<\/p>\n Hobsbawm did make several alterations to Heaney’s point writer and<\/p>\n teacher on his copy of the group sheet changes that Hainey would adopt when<\/p>\n the point was published in the Irish Times a couple of months later. That<\/p>\n three stanza poem offers a lesson in how to live and how to write.<\/p>\n It celebrates in characteristic caney fashion, simple virtues of humility<\/p>\n and honesty and the lessons that, quote, the humble master has to teach<\/p>\n his pupils in how to look with love and how to celebrate<\/p>\n each joy they meet hobs bombs copy of Heaney’s grip sheet<\/p>\n reveals his revision of Heaney’s lines and his breaking of the pattern of rhyme. At the start<\/p>\n of the third stanza, Haney had written a week’s chapter in the tale<\/p>\n where 30 boys drive towards the gale of living. Hobsbawm recast the lines.<\/p>\n More prosaically, a week’s A chapter in the story where 30 boys<\/p>\n imperceptibly grow into men. It’s a good example of what Longley would<\/p>\n later refer to as hobs bombs preference for unwritten prickle<\/p>\n utterance. Hainey no doubt had in mind<\/p>\n in this poem writer and teacher, his own young pupils<\/p>\n and his own vocational dilemma at the time. That is how to fuze his roles as<\/p>\n both writer or creative writer and as as teacher. But Hobsbawm<\/p>\n would certainly have read into the poem something of his Hobsbawm Zone mentoring relationship<\/p>\n with the younger group members. The poem concludes The pupils are his masterpiece.<\/p>\n The pupils are as masterpiece back in London. Lucy Smith<\/p>\n wrote Hobsbawm to share good news. I had a call<\/p>\n from Francis Hope just now, indicating that my approach to the New Statesman on<\/p>\n behalf of Heaney has paid off. The only trouble is I believe Haiti’s<\/p>\n already printed the very poems they want to use in that little magazine. I was shown in the pub<\/p>\n on Monday night. Lucy Smith did not have Heinies address, so Karl Miller,<\/p>\n who was literary editor of the New Statesman at the time, wrote to Hainey<\/p>\n Care of Hobsbawm. Dear Mr. Heaney, Edward Lucy<\/p>\n Smith has shown me poems by you, and I’m anxious to publish if possible. Some in<\/p>\n particular digging. I realize that you may be committed elsewhere, but I hope<\/p>\n not. And I would be very glad if you would let me know as soon as you can what the position is.<\/p>\n Just as the attacks on the London group in the letters column of The Spectator were beginning to<\/p>\n subside. Three of Heinies workshop poems appeared in the December<\/p>\n on the page, taking up the bulk of of that large format magazine<\/p>\n and squeezed below it. Two shorter poems Storm on the Island and Scaffolding. It was<\/p>\n a generous allocation of space, and it marked for the first time Heaney’s introduction<\/p>\n to London’s wider literary community. Hobsbawm<\/p>\n noted with some envy, quote, Even Ted Hughes never<\/p>\n got three poems in one issue. Digging<\/p>\n was a fitting debut, one of Heaney’s most beloved poems. It pays<\/p>\n tribute to and memorializes the poet’s father and grandfather,<\/p>\n while at the same time signaling his own break from those familial and rural<\/p>\n traditions. Between my finger and my thumb, the<\/p>\n squat pen rest snug as a gun under my window,<\/p>\n a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into gravelly ground. My father<\/p>\n digging. I looked down to his straining rump among the flower beds been<\/p>\n slow, comes up 20 years away, stooping and rhythm through<\/p>\n potato drills where he was digging the coarse boot nestled on the log,<\/p>\n the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall<\/p>\n tops buried the bright edge, deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked,<\/p>\n loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle<\/p>\n a spade just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf<\/p>\n in a day than any other man on toners bog. One side carried him milk and a<\/p>\n bottle corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up to drink<\/p>\n it, then fell to right away, nicking and slicing neatly heaving<\/p>\n swords over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf, digging<\/p>\n the cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and SLAPP of soggy peat. The kirt<\/p>\n cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no<\/p>\n spade to follow men like them between my finger and my thumb. The squat pen<\/p>\n rest. I’ll dig with it. Something of the<\/p>\n father’s craft of work well done persist<\/p>\n in the new lives. The poems suggest and will guide the poet in his new work,<\/p>\n its companion poem that appeared on the same page scaffolding. It, too, evokes<\/p>\n the inherent dignity of the laborers work and as in digging draws from those<\/p>\n associations lessons for the present day. We may let the scaffolds<\/p>\n fall, Haney writes in that poem, confident that we have built our wall<\/p>\n while Heaney’s stock was rising. Lucy Smith continued to be preoccupied<\/p>\n with the hostility is still being directed at himself. Hobsbawm and the London<\/p>\n group more broadly, and a new attack came when Ian Hamilton<\/p>\n reviewed Lucy Smith’s most recent collection that came out that same month.<\/p>\n Hamilton called Lucy Smith a publicist. He was working at the Notley Advertising<\/p>\n Agency at the time, but Hamilton also used the occasion to take a swipe<\/p>\n at the London group. More broadly, reading Lucy Smith’s poems, he<\/p>\n wrote, one is persistently troubled by the vision of one of those grindingly<\/p>\n solemn seminars. Individual poetic vision, in other words, had<\/p>\n been replaced, he suggested, by a kind of corporate thought epitomized, in his words,<\/p>\n by the BBC, the Arts Council poetry panel and the Lockwood<\/p>\n Memorial Library, a reference to the fact that SUNY Buffalo was actively buying<\/p>\n poets papers at that time. Lucy Smith was stung<\/p>\n by this latest assault, and as he did at such times, he shared his frustration with Hobsbawm.<\/p>\n I’m in fact, becoming very concerned about this aspect of the whole controversy<\/p>\n about the group, the way in which it seems to prejudice the poet’s chances of getting<\/p>\n anything like an unbiased review. I think it’s a matter which we will have to be.<\/p>\n Excuse me, a matter which will have to be looked at squarely. I mean, whether the group, by<\/p>\n becoming such a storm center, has lost its usefulness or whether the<\/p>\n disadvantages it offers to those who come now outweigh the advantages. Lucy<\/p>\n Smith canceled the regularly scheduled London group meeting later that week<\/p>\n and instead wrote to the members of the group asking them to consider two questions.<\/p>\n In view of the fact that the group has now become an extremely heated public issue, has its<\/p>\n usefulness come to an end? Alternatively, if its usefulness<\/p>\n has not come to an end, do the disadvantages of continuing outweigh the advantages?<\/p>\n He wrote. As I see it, the crux of the matter is that a known association with<\/p>\n the group now makes it very difficult for a poet to receive an unprejudiced reception from<\/p>\n reviewers. Those poets already labeled as group poets.<\/p>\n In my view, a meaningless term either through their inclusion in a group anthology<\/p>\n or for other reasons, will probably still find their work discussed in a group<\/p>\n context instead of entirely on its own merits. Hobsbawm<\/p>\n felt that his friend had shown too much of his own feelings in his letter, and she<\/p>\n and he should not have expressed his private doubts. So publicly,<\/p>\n my own feeling, he wrote, is that you should have trained a successor to take over the group<\/p>\n in the last couple of years. He was concerned that the group had become a distraction<\/p>\n to his friends own writing and emphasized the worry is that your own poetry<\/p>\n might suffer as a consequence. And it was in this context<\/p>\n of these attacks on the London group that Hobsbawm suggested his friend<\/p>\n take a break from the chairmanship and name a successor, adding,<\/p>\n I do this more or less automatically my successor here. And quite<\/p>\n possibly in the Queen’s English department will be Seamus Heaney. Thank you all very<\/p>\n much.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/89\/seamus-heaney-the-london-origins-of-the-belfast-group.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/89\/seamus-heaney-the-london-origins-of-the-belfast-group.mp3","audio_player":"