pressure the Enlightenment assumptions implicit in modernity.^69 It is
significant that Paulin and Klee are artists who lived in a context of
war. Paulin co-founded the ëField Day Theatre Companyí with other
artists who hoped to establish a more positive identity and culture, for
themselves and the society in which they worked. Klee was part of the
Bauhaus in Weimar which was broken-up by the Nazis. He wrote:
ëThe more fearful this world becomes, the more abstract its art.í Klee
painted imaginative and colourful pieces at a time of war and within a
context where he felt that these were ëunsettled timesí which had
ëbrought chaos and confusioní.^70 For Klee, the more the world was
dictated by oppressive politics the more he sought to remove his art
from this reality into something unrecognizable. Comparably, in the
final poem of Walking a Line, Paulinís speaker sees things differently,
moving beyond preoccupations with the Irish landscape, the ëLine on
the Grassí, or the ideological realities in the North of Ireland.
Deflecting from a context of war is not particular only to Paulin.
Contemporary poets from various communities in the North of
Ireland, including Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, have in their
different ways produced poetry which still deals with the devastation
of war but less overtly. The speaker in Muldoonís poem ëLunch with
Pancho Villaí (1977) satirically questions the relevance of writing
about ëstars and horses, pigs and treesí when ëaround you/ People are
getting themselves killed/ Left, right and centreí.^71 Without forgetting
Edna Longleyís urge to see poets from the North of Ireland as
individuals with differing politics and poetic practices, what these
poets hold in common is their creation of an artistic world that is less
preoccupied with the carnage of sectarian violence as they attempt to
view an alternative reality or a different way of seeing things so as to
provide impetus for a better present.^72 Such an alternative view of the
world is alluded to by Lyotard in his appraisal of Kleeís art: ëArt does
not imitate nature, it creates a world apart, eine zwischenwelt, as Paul
69 Jean-FranÁois Lyotard, ëNote on the Meaning of ìPost ñ îí, Postmodernism: A
Reader, ed., Docherty, p.48.
70 Klee, On Modern Art, p.53.
71 Paul Muldoon, ëLunch With Pancho Villaí, Mules (1977), New Selected Poems
1968ñ1994 (London: Faber, 1996), pp.25ñ7.
72 Edna Longley, ëStars and Horses, Pigs and Treesí, Crane Bag, 3:2 (1979),
pp.54ñ60.