drawn between an aesthetics of privacy and a public politics, as each
informs the other. This is merely the first contradiction that exists
between Willsís investigation of Paulinís poetry and Walking a Line.
Following her argument that Paulin cannot be a postmodern poet,
Wills chooses not to view his scepticism as an example of how, unlike
his essays, Paulinís poetry acknowledges the inherent duplicity of
language and the failure of representative politics in the North of
Ireland. Rather, she emphasizes how the duplicity of Paulinís poetic
language is an example of how Paulinís political intentions of creating
a rational discourse necessarily fail. She comments that although his
poems are
in part acknowledgements of the need to include, desire, sensuousness, and
particularity within the classical Enlightenment ideals of reason and justice [Ö]
his model of politics remains weighted towards the masculine, Protestant,
Enlightenment tradition.^11But how far does Paulinís poetry slip away from the rational stance of
his critical essays? Answering such a question will involve identifying
tensions within Paulinís poetry between sense and sensibility, the
sensible and nonsensical, Enlightened thought and Romanticism,
which are raised within the eighteenth century context of work by
William Hazlitt on whom Paulin has lectured and written.^12
Walking a Line is written a year after Willsís essay on Paulin,
and it runs like quicksilver from the grasp of Paulinís prose. In spite of
Paulinís statement that the postmodern is ëa black hole as a conceptí^13
and his rigorous denial of the value of contemporary critical theory,
Walking a Line comes closer to avant-garde art theory than the
Enlightenment ideology of a secular republic that drives Writing to the
Moment. Walking a Line does not provide readers with an expression
11 Ibid., p.143.
12 Paulin, William Hazlitt: T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, delivered at The
University of Kent, December 1996 and published by Faber. Also involved in
this eighteenth-century debate over sense and sensibility were Frances
Hutcheson, Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.
13 Sarah Fulford, an interview with Tom Paulin, Tuesday 26th November, 1996 at
Eliot College, UKC. Cf. ëThe Strangeness of the Scriptí, Irish Studies Review,
No.19, pp.2ñ5.