Charles I. Armstrong

The Mundane and the Monstrous: Everyday Epiphanies in Northern Irish Poetry

In the poem ‘The Journey Back’, Seamus Heaney uses this closing epithet to sum up his own perspective on Philip Larkin: ‘A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry’ (Heaney, 1991, p. 7). Arguably, it captures a crucial dimension of what the first generation of Troubles poets inherited from Larkin and the Movement. There is, on the one hand, the persistence of a Romantic or Symbolist desire to transgress or transcend the bounds of given experience,1 responding to a crisis of confidence in experience. On the other hand, though, one is simultaneously obligated by the exigencies of the quotidian: the everyday just won’t go away.

‘George Mitchell’s Peace’: The Good Friday Agreement in Colum McCann’s Novel TransAtlantic

The impact of the different parties and individuals involved in constructing the Good Friday Agreement has been much discussed. This chapter scrutinizes the role of the American negotiator George Mitchell, as it is presented in Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic (2013). It places McCann’s novelistic depiction of Mitchell’s role in the context of both Mitchell’s own autobiographical writings and other external political assessments. Mitchell’s domestic life—including his experience of fatherhood—is shown to play a crucial role in the fictional treatment of the negotiations. McCann’s own position as an Irish-American author with a globalistic bent is taken into account, as is the way in which TransAtlantic implicitly points towards parallels between the arts of negotiation and storytelling. Ultimately, McCann’s novel argues that peace can only come about through an inclusive understanding of how narratives shape our understanding of history and facilitate future communities.

Henrik Wergeland's Bouquet: Fredrika Bremer, Sentimentality and Nationalism in Jan van Huysum's Flower Piece

Henrik Wergelands poem Jan van Huysums Blomsterstykke (1840) is often characterized as a key work of Norwegian and Nordic romanticism. Where previous criticism has primarily focused on the poems ekphrastic dimension, this reading will draw attention to how it employs many forms and genres, at the same time examining neglected thematic strands in the poem. A key lead to the poems generic placement is provided by its oft-overlooked front-page, paratextual dedication to the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer. It will be argued that works by Bremer, such as Hemmet, not only provide some precedent for the ekphrastic dimension of Wergelands poem, but more importantly reveal the latter texts underestimated ancestry within the genre of the sentimental novel. Combined with the content of the text, this ancestry nudges the poem toward a pan-Scandinavian context, revealing some anxiety in relation to Wergelands position as a representative figure of Norwegian nationalism.

‘A Shabby Old Couple’: Seamus Heaney’s Ekphrastic Imperative

‘Ekphrasis’ is the name given to the description in words of a real or imaginary painting or sculpture. Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield and Keats ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are paradigmatic examples. Theorists of ekphrasis quite properly distinguish between descriptions of paintings, sculptures, or pots that really exist and descriptions of imaginary ones, such as the two examples I have given. Auden ‘The Fall of Icarus’ and Ashbery ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ describe (though that is of course not quite the right word; ‘read’ might be better) paintings by Breughel and Parmigianino, respectively. These paintings do really exist and can be set beside the poems. (Miller and Asensi 1999: 409)

Never Some Easy Flashback

Abstract This paper provides a close reading of Paul Farley’s 160-line poem, “Thorns.” The poem is read in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s celebrated Romantic ballad “The Thorn.” Special attention is given to Farley’s treatment of memory and metaphor: It is shown how the first, exploratory part of the poem elaborates upon the interdependent nature of memory and metaphor, while the second part uses a more regulated form of imagery in its evocation of a generational memory linked to a particular place and time (the working-class Liverpool of the 1960s and 1970s). The tension between the two parts of the poem is reflected in the taut relationship between the poet and a confrontational alter ego. Wordsworth’s importance for Farley is shown to inhere not only in the Lake Poet’s use of personal memory, but also the close connection between his poetry and place, as well as a strongly self-reflective strain that results in an interminable process of self-determination. Farley’s independence as a poet also comes across, though, and is for instance in evidence in his desire to avoid the “booby trap” of too simple appropriation of the methods and motifs of his Romantic predecessor.

Early Affinities: Friendship and Coleridge’s Conversation Poems

Those of Coleridge’s early poems that have been loosely grouped together under the common name of ‘conversation poems’ arguably constitute an early instance of the radical informality pursued by the modern lyric. With one exception, they were all written between 1794 and 1799, and were to have a considerable influence on Wordsworth. Yet Wordsworth is not the only figure who had a close link with Coleridge at the time. In a manner not completely unlike that of the romantics in Jena, Coleridge briefly had a group of friends and writers living close by in the West Country. At least intermittently, this group constituted something of a literary coterie or circle with close bonds of both friendship and writing. With Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and various spouses and relatives, Coleridge and Wordsworth formed a closely-knit unit, particularly during when Coleridge was living at Nether Stowey.1 This informal community was a shadowy remnant of Coleridge and Southey’s preceding and more ambitious plan to form a small, completely democratic society on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania — the so-called ‘pantisocracy’.

Prefaces to the New Gospel: Friedrich Schlegel and the Fragment

There are close links between idealism and the phenomenon known in Germany as the Fruhromantik. The latter term is primarily used to describe the writings of a circle of writers — including the Schlegel brothers, Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel, Friedrich Novalis, Johann Tieck and Friedrich Schleiermacher — associated with the Athenaeum journal in Jena, from 1798 to 1800. Both Fichte and Schelling had close contacts with the group, and they also had considerable influence on its thought. In the following chapter I will try to close in on Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of the fragment dating from this period, primarily by looking at its relationship to the absolute system-organism of idealism. The fragment will not prove to be a simple denial of the system, but rather a more inclusive operating of the manifold of possibilities evinced by the preconditions of the system. Simplifying somewhat, one might say that the fragment embodies the system’s dispersal from within.

Absolute Organicism in German Idealism: Kant, Fichte and Schelling

One of the major concerns of the texts that are collected under the term of German idealism, as well as those classified as ‘romantic’, is their sustained attempt to formulate the question of the whole. The nature of wholeness or unity is scrutinised with considerable urgency, in a manner that is far from taking its meaning for granted. Indeed even the meaning of meaning itself is intertwined with this question, as is made clear in an exchange that occurs early in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s fictional dialogue ‘The Painting’, published in 1799 in the Athenaeum: Reinhold: Every craft is blessed with a particular language that is provided with useful abbreviations [nutzliche Abbreviaturen] in which one can quickly make oneself understood. Waller: Unfortunately this specialised language is too often abused, so that one plays at being a connoisseur, while actually only proving that one knows one’s alphabet. Louise: The descriptions such glib, shoulder-shrugging connoisseurs give of the most elevated and divine matters, are in truth skeletons — images that are struck dead and subsequently hung up to dry in the vaporous store-rooms of their brains [totgeschlagne Bilder, in der Vorratskammer ihrer durren Kopfe in den Rauch gehangt].1

The Connections of Significance: Gadamer and the Vitality of Understanding

Modern hermeneutics has contributed a powerful meditation on how existence is embroiled in historicity and language. Hans-Georg Gadamer is widely recognised as one of its most accessible and influential proponents, in his attempt to surpass conceptually the fundamental limitations he believes to have been introduced by a dualistic, Cartesian world-view and the dominance of the mind-set of the natural sciences. The rationalistic isolation of the thinking subject has had disastrous consequences, Gadamer claims, and his grand opus Truth and Method represents a tripartite attack on its dominion. Not only in the fundamentals of philosophical ontology, which is the main provenance of Gadamer’s enquiry, but also within the theory of art and the methodology of the human sciences, this work attempts to provide a new and non-Cartesian footing. Inevitably, it has weighty ancestors — among other things, Gadamer is engaged in a continuation, albeit a transformative one, of romanticism. At the same time, he manifests considerable resistance to the romantic heritage, as is evident in his problematical relationship to figures such as G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey in particular.

On the Threshold: Wordsworth’s Architectonics of the Absolute

It is time to enter the temple. In the middle of Wordsworth’s large, narrative poem The Excursion, which again was to stand at the middle of his even more encompassing poem called The Recluse, one reads: ‘As chanced, the portals of the sacred Pile/Stood open; and we entered’ (V, 138–9).1 Chance is kind to the figures of the Solitary, the Wanderer and the Poet, and they can stride straight into the church. There is no pausing at the threshold, no description of the facade, not even a fascination for the tympanum: the church is simply open, ‘and we entered’. As in much of Wordsworth’s poetry, the swift and matter-of-fact nature of this entrance is beguilingly direct. Yet it is an entrance, there is a threshold to pass, in the form of a portal, and both the passage and the border leave their trace in the text, even if it is only through a most innocuous and brief mention.