‘that dark permanence of ancient forms’ Yeats’s life-long enthusiasm for this type of ‘ring-giver’/heroic figure, for whom the
abilityto hate ‘well’ is essential, will lead him to refuse to include any of the English
combatant poets of the First World War, who are such canonical figures in English
anti-epic reading of warfare in the twentieth century, in hisOxford Book of Modern
Verse.More than purely aesthetic, this decision was, as his introduction showed, a
fundamental refusal to see his own heroic and epic vision of warfare questioned by
men who, though they fought, chose not go to their death with ‘joy’ and refused to
‘forget their suffering’ as Yeats felt they should.^6
In the thirty years after Yeats’s death the epic was pushed to the background as
Irish poetry withdrew from the public space into a more lyrical one, but when poets
did return to the public arena, Yeats’s particular construction of the epic would
haunttheirwork.AsPatrickKavanaghputitinhissonnet‘Epic’:
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’.
That was the year of the Munich bother.^7We see here how even in the work of poets who were used by the generation
of the Troubles as a counterweight against Yeats we find a similar world—the
world of theIliad. The sonnet (and this formal choice is no doubt ironically
significant) negotiates a series of marches—fought over frontier zones—as well
as the militarization of the foreign and domestic space. Kavanagh creates a text
in which resonate three different strata of ‘iron stones’, three different strata of
the problem of frontiers: first the local, or, in his terms, the ‘parochial’—the
boundaries between ‘plots’—itself haunted by the close frontier between Eire and
Northern Ireland; secondly, the historical (Munich); and thirdly the epic (Homer)
as foundational. It is the historical that is, in some ways, the most complex, for in
the mention of Munich we have the problem of military violence (Hitler’s march
on Prague and the need—or not—to confront it through war) manifesting itself in
places like the Iron Mountains (Erzgebirge) that separated (in German) Germany
from Czechoslovakia, with, pending in the background, the later terrible ethnic
cleansing of the Sudeten Germans who had inhabited this area for generations. If
‘Epic’ echoes the endemic violence of this part of Ireland, it does so in a much larger
context, and with a complex system of counterbalancing. But the paradox of this
(^6) Yeats, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 7
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Epic’, inCollected Poems(London: Allen Lane, 2004), 184.