Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Dec 2012)
The Pictorialist Poetry of Thomas MacGreevy and the Aesthetics of Waste
Abstract
Irish poet, art and literary critic, Thomas MacGreevy (1893–1967) worked in the Intelligence Division of the Admirality during Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising, and served as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery at the Somme during the Great War. Many of his poems respond to the ruination brought about by war in Ireland and France through modernist poetic dissonance, and in his review of MacGreevy’s Poems (1934), Samuel Beckett notes a key paradox in the poet’s aesthetics of waste: ‘All poetry’, he wrote, ‘as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer’. Beckett quotes moments from ‘Gloria de Carlos V’, ‘Seventh Gift of the Holy Ghost’, ‘Crón Tráth na nDéithe’, and ‘Nocturne of Self-Evident Presence’, all of which contain fragmentary images of war and ruins, and all of which, at some point, reach a level of radiance which he characterizes as ‘Giorgionesque elucidations’.Through research into MacGreevy’s largely unpublished art criticism and close readings of selected poems, this paper explores the ways in which MacGreevy expresses these elucidations in the midst of tragedy by reference specifically to the visual arts (notably Bosch, Picasso, Giorgione, Titian, and Jack Yeats) and architectural ruins (Dublin city in the aftermath of 1916). In his poems, MacGreevy creates a void, signifying post-conflict disillusionment, only to then fill it with bright, glorious and colourful images. His reference to dark, fragmented art works thus creates a mechanism to set his moment of illumination or ‘prayer’ into relief, and clearly reflects his inability to reconcile his Christology to his experiences of war. Ruins thus inform and shape MacGreevy’s work on both syntactic and semantic levels, and his poetic responses range from formal attempts to re-enact sensual qualities, to invocations of tone, be they darkness and destruction or a jouissance.
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