Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

proves that post-colonial understandings of identity can provide
insight into the political and aesthetic concerns of Irish poetry. Asking
where do theory and poetry meet, and how far do they challenge one
another, the aim is not to privilege poetry and seal it in an artistic
vacuum as ëbeyondí theoretically motivated criticism. Rather, the
three parts of this book argue that Irish poetry and criticism can be
productively read in terms of the wider contexts of post-colonial,
feminist and post-nationalist theorization of identity.
The thrust of the argument may therefore be summarized by the
following question: How does contemporary Irish poetry relate to and
abandon the pathos of authenticity that informs discussion of what
constitutes gendered and national identities? The phrase ‘pathos of
authenticity’ is understood with reference to the cultural nationalism
of the Irish Literary Revival. That is, a nationalism that invented
particular versions of Ireland and Irishness by looking back to a
mythological past, whereby the nation was gendered as feminine and
is typified by William Butler Yeats’s representation of Cathleen Ní
Houlihan or Mother Ireland. As Colin Graham notices in his essay
‘Ireland and the Persistence of Authenticity’ (1999), Yeats claimed to
‘know’ an authentic Ireland:

Yeats’s collection of Irish ‘peasant’ tales is in one sense part of the continued

popularization of the antiquarianism which had begun in Ireland earlier in the

century; Yeats’s folk and fairy tales are not remarkable but typical in the way

that they attempt to construct an Irishness [...] As medium for the authentic his

knowledge of authenticity and his ability to recognize it ‘infect’ him with

authenticity too.^3

Nineteenth-century constructions of Irishness are also exemplified by
John Lavery’s (1856–1941) picture of his wife as ‘Cathleen’ who is
presented carrying a harp amid a romantic landscape of mists and
mountains.^4 But representations of pure Irishness are left behind as the
poets represent identity in more complex ways. Whilst examining the
question of identity formation, it is important to ask how far the poetic
experience of contemporary Irish poets is one of dispossession and

3 Colin Graham, ëIreland and the Persistence of Authenticityí, Ireland and
Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, eds., Colin Graham and
Richard Kirkland (London: Macmillan, 1999), p.16.
4 The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.