From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry by Adam Wyeth
Bio:
Adam Wyeth was born in Sussex in 1978 and has lived in County Cork since 2000. His critically acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Silent Music (Salmon Poetry, 2011) was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. He was a runner-up in the 2006 Arvon International Poetry Competition, a prize-winner in the 2009 Fish International Poetry Competition, commended in the 2012 Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, 2013. His work appears in The Forward Book of Poetry 2012 (Faber, 2011), The Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword, 2010), Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2010) and Something Beginning with P (2004). He has made two films on poetry, A Life in the Day of Desmond O’Grady, first screened at The Cork Film Festival, 2004; and a full length feature, Soundeye: Cork International Poetry Festival, 2005. Wyeth’s debut play Hang Up, produced by Broken Crow, has been staged at many festivals, including the Electric Picnic, the Galway Theatre festival and will be performed in Berlin in 2014. A member of Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools Scheme, Wyeth also runs a series of international online creative writing workshops at www.adamwyeth.com.
Bio:
Adam Wyeth was born in Sussex in 1978 and has lived in County Cork since 2000. His critically acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Silent Music (Salmon Poetry, 2011) was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. He was a runner-up in the 2006 Arvon International Poetry Competition, a prize-winner in the 2009 Fish International Poetry Competition, commended in the 2012 Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, 2013. His work appears in The Forward Book of Poetry 2012 (Faber, 2011), The Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword, 2010), Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2010) and Something Beginning with P (2004). He has made two films on poetry, A Life in the Day of Desmond O’Grady, first screened at The Cork Film Festival, 2004; and a full length feature, Soundeye: Cork International Poetry Festival, 2005. Wyeth’s debut play Hang Up, produced by Broken Crow, has been staged at many festivals, including the Electric Picnic, the Galway Theatre festival and will be performed in Berlin in 2014. A member of Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools Scheme, Wyeth also runs a series of international online creative writing workshops at www.adamwyeth.com.
The Old Ways
We grew away from the old ways
familiar to us in childhood and fell
into a black circle of foreign habits.
We forgot the holy wells and places
where people gathered, without clearly
remembering the reason, on certain days; forgot
those old mysterious festivals for the different
seasons like fire-jumping on a summer hill;
ancient practices like blood-letting
on a new threshold and funeral games.
We said they were for superstitious old women
and we aped the ways of the foreigner.
Then we had nothing – neither a past
for precedent nor a future foreseeable.
With the old ways we had some idea
what the year held in store: with their help
we could face and endure it;
we knew a kind of visible security,
the security of a familiar ritual.
Without the old ways we became
loose straws in a black wind.
With what shall we now replace them?
Desmond O’Grady
Born in Limerick, in 1935, Desmond O’Grady is the most senior poet in this book. Known since the publication of, The Dark Edge of Europe (1967) as the ‘Poet O’Grady’, he has been a major force for decades in Irish poetry. He has published twenty collections of his own poems, including, Collected Poems, The Road Taken, 1956 – 1996. In 2001 he published The Wandering Celt, a poetic history of the Celts and Celtic influence. O’Grady is also one of the world’s most prolific and eclectic poetry translators since Ezra Pound – who became a close friend in later life – translating versions from Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Greek and numerous other languages. His eleven books of translations are collected in Trawling Tradition: Translations 1965-1994.
Just as there’s a thread of the ancient Celts running throughout the poem, O’Grady’s quest is to unravel the Cetlic thread that runs through European history. Concerned with journeys and origins, both cultural and personal, his poetry bridges the old world of the Celts and the new world of the modernists. ‘Born of a land natural with legend,/ in a backward place…’ he says in his poem ‘Start’. In another poem, ‘Exile from Exile’ he writes, ‘Each depart, returns a search for origin.’ This poem is also about origins. In many ways the poem summarises some of this book’s themes: The old ways of the Celts, its references to myth and folklore and how we now ‘replace them.’
As we move through the poem it appears to be a stream of polarity, shifting between contrasting words, ‘forgot’, ‘remembering’; ‘familiar’, ‘foreign’; ‘past’, ‘future’; ‘ancient’, ‘new’; ‘with’, ‘without’; and the first and last words in the poem, ‘We’ and ‘them’. The first person plural, ‘We’ flashes throughout the poem, the speaker is addressing himself and those ‘familiar’. It’s important to differentiate the plural from the singualar here. It could be, ‘I grew away…’ ‘I forgot…’ ‘I aped…’ which would make the poem sound more private. The plural ‘We’, includes the ‘foreigner’, encompassing us, the reader, making it both intimate and communal. The fact that it is ‘The Old Ways’ and not ‘The Old Irish Ways’, adds to the plurality and timelessness of the poem, hinting at Ezra Pound’s dictum, ‘Literature is news that stays news.’
The long vowel sounds in the first line, ‘We grew away’ ‘the old ways’, lulls us into a false sense of ‘security’, setting up a slow melancholic mood-music. This is a poem of serious reflection, an elegy of a kind, lamenting the dead, Irish folklore and their rituals. The elegiac mood is emphasized in the third line by the colour (or lack of) and imagery, ‘a black circle of foreign habits.’ While the forecast looks bleak, the abstract and striking turn of phrase evokes a mysterious magic of its own, stirring ‘superstition’ and suspicion of the ‘foreigner’. There’s a sense of foresight to the image too, which is picked up near the end of the poem, ‘loose straws in a black wind.’ The active verbs ‘grew’ and ‘fell’ give the sense of movement, the past tense showing that they are relevant to the notion of time long gone. ‘Childhood’ alludes to growing up, losing innocence, falling from grace perhaps? The placement of ‘fell’ at the end of the line gives the word extra stress and push as it falls off the edge of the line.
In contrast to the ‘black circle’ the old ways conjure purification, heat and evoke passion, ‘holy wells’, ‘mysterious festivals’, ‘fire-jumping’, ‘blood letting’, ‘funeral games’. The reds of ‘fire’ and ‘blood’ suggest the fiery nature of the Celts and a deep connection through ‘blood’ brotherhood. The Celts saw divinity everywhere in the natural world and worshipped in the open air. Rather than build temples their ceremonial sites were on hilltops – where great fires spelled the changing seasons – and at wells, which were honoured for their connection to a supreme goddess. The time of year and courtship ritual of ‘fire-jumping on a summer hill’ indicates that it is one of the four great annual Celtic festivals, beltaine, celebrated on May 1st, marking the beginning of ‘summer’. Beltain is believed to be named after the god of light, Belenus, ‘bel’ meaning ‘bright’, and was associated with bonfires lit before the festival, where many rituals and games including ‘fire-jumping’ would have taken place. The ‘funeral games’ is the last rite in the passage and perhaps is indicative of the death of the old ways.
Despite this deduction, the exact dates of those ‘mysterious festivals’ are kept hidden, ‘…without clearly/ remembering the reason’. Etymologically, ‘without’ comes from the Old English meaning ‘on the outside.’ Like their rituals, the ancient Celts have remained on the outside of recorded history. Although it seems the druids did have knowledge of writing, the ancient Celts honoured the spoken word, passing their history and mythology down word of mouth, so as the Celtic order died their history and knowledge went with them. Historians and archaeologists can only guess at what exactly these rites entailed. Here, the once sacred rituals and festivals of the ancient Celts are now undefined and confined to ‘superstitious old women’. This central line of disempowerment is also telling of how traditions change and may be a roundabout reference to the Celts possible matriarchal society.
The second half of the poem returns to the reality, ‘without the old ways…’ There is ‘nothing…’ We are outside in the dark again, without the past we can't make or imagine the future. The word ‘foreseeable’ echoes the word ‘foresight,’ the ability to see into the dark, referring to the Celtic poets’ gift of prophecy. In the final lines, we see the old ways become even more abstract, ‘a kind of visible security…’ we are blind to those rituals now. The imagery returns from the ‘black circle’ to ‘a black wind’. ‘Loose straw in a black wind…’ echoes the phrase, ‘a straw in the wind’ which is a sign of something that might happen in the future. Here the poet as file offers his own forecast on what happens if we are blind to our own kind. Without the knowledge of our past, the old ways are reduced to superstition, by forgetting ‘the old ways’ we diminish our knowledge and have no meaning.
On this level ‘the black circle’ connects to the Russian avant-garde artist, Kazimir Malevich’s painting ‘Black Circle’. Malevich (1879-1935) became the leading figure of the radical suprematism art movement that focused on using basic geometric shapes such as circles and squares. His work, such as ‘Black Circle’ changed the perception of art and became hugely influential in Western culture. The visual artists that followed, such as Mark Rothko continued using basic geometric shapes and primary colours exploring philosophical ideas such as primitivism, adapting patterns from local folklore and mythology. Around this time, Ezra Pound one of the major exponents of modernism promoted imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. Borrowings from primitive art have been important to the development of Modern Art. Like an avant-garde artist, O’Grady has sought to find ever-deeper poetic expressions by excavating through Celtic history.
As well as the cultural significance, the poem also has personal resonance to O’Grady’s own life of leaving Ireland and making his own way in ‘foreign’ lands. At nineteen, due to the oppressive atmosphere of the Catholic church, O’Grady left Ireland in self-exile for Paris in search of la Vie de bohéme, where he quickly established himself within the avant-garde circles, socializing with many of the top 20th century artists, such as Beckett, Sartre and Picasso. Two years later he moved to Rome, where he had a life-changing affair with a countess and met Ezra Pound, becoming his amanuensis. While in Rome, he also met the iconic film-maker, Federico Fellini, and played himself, as the Irish poet, in Fellini’s classic, La Dolce Vita. In 1964, he was invited to Harvard Univerity by Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellman. While he was a Teaching Fellow there O’Grady took his M.A and Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures and comparative studies. His peripatetic life continued, teaching in Iran at the University of Tabriz, and Egypt where he was poet-in-residence at American University, Cairo, and University of Alexandria. In this sense, a rite of passage can be read into the poem, growing away from the ‘familiar’ family of an Irish‘childhood’ into the ‘foreign habits’ of life abroad.
The black ink of the poem forms its own ‘black circle of foreign habits’ that has grown away from the oral tradition of the ancient Celts. Just as ‘the old ways’ remain hidden and silent in the poem, the final deafening silence resounds after the last line’s question, ‘With what shall we now replace them?’ We fall off the ‘black circle’ of the poem into the silence of the white page and the shared silence of the nameless ‘them’: the ancient Celts. The climactic question also has a personal dimension, alluding to O’Grady’s own search and poetic vocation to replace the old ways with the ‘make it new’ innovation of the poet. Departures, new starts and journeys to far-off places is a hallmark of O’Grady’s poetic output.
While the poem is peppered with contrasts, the block-paragraph form suggests that there is a connection and unity. The lines are not splintered or divided into different stanzas, they are held together as a unified whole. Time and history are interwoven, blurred. The fricative ‘f’, alliteration scattered throughout appears with certain contrasting words that are both ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign’. While the meanings contrast each other, the alliteration creates a parallelism, suggesting the ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign’ are two sides of the same coin. Like Yin and Yang (literally meaning’ ‘shadow and ‘light’), the unseen (hidden, feminine) and seen (manifest, masculine), interact to form a greater whole.
This flipside of opposites, like ‘old’ and ‘new’, being two sides of the same coin, alludes to another Pound maxim on writing poetry, which still has major currency among poets today: ‘Make it new.’ The ‘it’ in ‘Make it new’ can be seen as the old – what is valuable in the culture of the past. Like Pound, a great deal of O’Grady’s poetry takes the form of translation, imitation, allusion and quotation from older text. He is trying to breathe life into a line of artistic and intellectual accomplishment that goes back through classical culture and the Celtic past. Because of these themes, some critics judge O’Grady’s style as grand and didactic, but this narrow view misses the wider context of ancient and classical text translation/version fragmentations, which forms the basis of his work.
In the 20th century, the art world became obsessed with innovation, many seeing modernism as a complete break away from the shackles of a conservative and confining past. This is in many ways misses the point of modernism’s true ideals. In Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and the individual Talent’, he suggests that an artist’s work should be judged not by its novelty or newness, but rather by how the artist handles the tradition he or she inherits. Throughout history, he wrote, the concept of originality referred to the transformation of tradition through an interaction with the past as opposed to the creation of something brand-new. While O’Grady may be out of step with current literary fashions, he is in many ways the true embodiment of modernism. His raison d’étre as a poet and scholar has been to bring the ancient past to light and transform it through his own life and sensibility, thus creating a body of work that is highly original. He is the true vocational poet, the ‘wandering Celt’ who, as Stephen Dedalus put it in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, set out to encounter ‘the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ While fashions pass, style remains, to coin a phrase. O’Grady is an Irish poet who has learnt and lived his trade. And here the true trade of art is a trade-off, where the original elements become transformed by the exchange.
Although there is an element of lament for the passing of old traditions, the poem breathes life into them. Literary critic, Harold Bloom says, ‘Strong poems are always omens of resurrection. The dead may or may not return, but their voice comes alive.’ In O’Grady’s quest and final questioning, he makes the old ways new, taking the baton of the seer/file who looks out of the dark and into the light of a new Celtic generation.
Paradoxically then, ‘The Old Ways’ is not about something lost but about something that can be regained. The hidden world of poetry begs us to refamiliarise ourselves with our ancient mythological past and the other world of the imagination, a world beyond the senses that like our knowledge of the ancient Celts is neither quite solid or well defined and yet it has an ever-enhancing effect on the imagination.
Poems are charms that stir creativity, invoke new powers of thinking and bring us back to elements in ourselves at a very deep and primitive level. The Irish Celts, now recognised for saving civilization after the fall of Rome – re-introducing writing, religion and spreading new ideas into Britain and continental Europe during the Dark Ages – continue today, despite centuries of conquest and oppression, to push the envelope of literature. Ireland’s literary impact on the world has been unrivalled not because it creates something out of nothing but because of its active engagement with ancient myth and tradition. By keeping alive its unique heritage of early Irish poetry – its myths and the esteemed position of the bard – Irish poets and writers continue to be at the spearhead.
We grew away from the old ways
familiar to us in childhood and fell
into a black circle of foreign habits.
We forgot the holy wells and places
where people gathered, without clearly
remembering the reason, on certain days; forgot
those old mysterious festivals for the different
seasons like fire-jumping on a summer hill;
ancient practices like blood-letting
on a new threshold and funeral games.
We said they were for superstitious old women
and we aped the ways of the foreigner.
Then we had nothing – neither a past
for precedent nor a future foreseeable.
With the old ways we had some idea
what the year held in store: with their help
we could face and endure it;
we knew a kind of visible security,
the security of a familiar ritual.
Without the old ways we became
loose straws in a black wind.
With what shall we now replace them?
Desmond O’Grady
Born in Limerick, in 1935, Desmond O’Grady is the most senior poet in this book. Known since the publication of, The Dark Edge of Europe (1967) as the ‘Poet O’Grady’, he has been a major force for decades in Irish poetry. He has published twenty collections of his own poems, including, Collected Poems, The Road Taken, 1956 – 1996. In 2001 he published The Wandering Celt, a poetic history of the Celts and Celtic influence. O’Grady is also one of the world’s most prolific and eclectic poetry translators since Ezra Pound – who became a close friend in later life – translating versions from Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Greek and numerous other languages. His eleven books of translations are collected in Trawling Tradition: Translations 1965-1994.
Just as there’s a thread of the ancient Celts running throughout the poem, O’Grady’s quest is to unravel the Cetlic thread that runs through European history. Concerned with journeys and origins, both cultural and personal, his poetry bridges the old world of the Celts and the new world of the modernists. ‘Born of a land natural with legend,/ in a backward place…’ he says in his poem ‘Start’. In another poem, ‘Exile from Exile’ he writes, ‘Each depart, returns a search for origin.’ This poem is also about origins. In many ways the poem summarises some of this book’s themes: The old ways of the Celts, its references to myth and folklore and how we now ‘replace them.’
As we move through the poem it appears to be a stream of polarity, shifting between contrasting words, ‘forgot’, ‘remembering’; ‘familiar’, ‘foreign’; ‘past’, ‘future’; ‘ancient’, ‘new’; ‘with’, ‘without’; and the first and last words in the poem, ‘We’ and ‘them’. The first person plural, ‘We’ flashes throughout the poem, the speaker is addressing himself and those ‘familiar’. It’s important to differentiate the plural from the singualar here. It could be, ‘I grew away…’ ‘I forgot…’ ‘I aped…’ which would make the poem sound more private. The plural ‘We’, includes the ‘foreigner’, encompassing us, the reader, making it both intimate and communal. The fact that it is ‘The Old Ways’ and not ‘The Old Irish Ways’, adds to the plurality and timelessness of the poem, hinting at Ezra Pound’s dictum, ‘Literature is news that stays news.’
The long vowel sounds in the first line, ‘We grew away’ ‘the old ways’, lulls us into a false sense of ‘security’, setting up a slow melancholic mood-music. This is a poem of serious reflection, an elegy of a kind, lamenting the dead, Irish folklore and their rituals. The elegiac mood is emphasized in the third line by the colour (or lack of) and imagery, ‘a black circle of foreign habits.’ While the forecast looks bleak, the abstract and striking turn of phrase evokes a mysterious magic of its own, stirring ‘superstition’ and suspicion of the ‘foreigner’. There’s a sense of foresight to the image too, which is picked up near the end of the poem, ‘loose straws in a black wind.’ The active verbs ‘grew’ and ‘fell’ give the sense of movement, the past tense showing that they are relevant to the notion of time long gone. ‘Childhood’ alludes to growing up, losing innocence, falling from grace perhaps? The placement of ‘fell’ at the end of the line gives the word extra stress and push as it falls off the edge of the line.
In contrast to the ‘black circle’ the old ways conjure purification, heat and evoke passion, ‘holy wells’, ‘mysterious festivals’, ‘fire-jumping’, ‘blood letting’, ‘funeral games’. The reds of ‘fire’ and ‘blood’ suggest the fiery nature of the Celts and a deep connection through ‘blood’ brotherhood. The Celts saw divinity everywhere in the natural world and worshipped in the open air. Rather than build temples their ceremonial sites were on hilltops – where great fires spelled the changing seasons – and at wells, which were honoured for their connection to a supreme goddess. The time of year and courtship ritual of ‘fire-jumping on a summer hill’ indicates that it is one of the four great annual Celtic festivals, beltaine, celebrated on May 1st, marking the beginning of ‘summer’. Beltain is believed to be named after the god of light, Belenus, ‘bel’ meaning ‘bright’, and was associated with bonfires lit before the festival, where many rituals and games including ‘fire-jumping’ would have taken place. The ‘funeral games’ is the last rite in the passage and perhaps is indicative of the death of the old ways.
Despite this deduction, the exact dates of those ‘mysterious festivals’ are kept hidden, ‘…without clearly/ remembering the reason’. Etymologically, ‘without’ comes from the Old English meaning ‘on the outside.’ Like their rituals, the ancient Celts have remained on the outside of recorded history. Although it seems the druids did have knowledge of writing, the ancient Celts honoured the spoken word, passing their history and mythology down word of mouth, so as the Celtic order died their history and knowledge went with them. Historians and archaeologists can only guess at what exactly these rites entailed. Here, the once sacred rituals and festivals of the ancient Celts are now undefined and confined to ‘superstitious old women’. This central line of disempowerment is also telling of how traditions change and may be a roundabout reference to the Celts possible matriarchal society.
The second half of the poem returns to the reality, ‘without the old ways…’ There is ‘nothing…’ We are outside in the dark again, without the past we can't make or imagine the future. The word ‘foreseeable’ echoes the word ‘foresight,’ the ability to see into the dark, referring to the Celtic poets’ gift of prophecy. In the final lines, we see the old ways become even more abstract, ‘a kind of visible security…’ we are blind to those rituals now. The imagery returns from the ‘black circle’ to ‘a black wind’. ‘Loose straw in a black wind…’ echoes the phrase, ‘a straw in the wind’ which is a sign of something that might happen in the future. Here the poet as file offers his own forecast on what happens if we are blind to our own kind. Without the knowledge of our past, the old ways are reduced to superstition, by forgetting ‘the old ways’ we diminish our knowledge and have no meaning.
On this level ‘the black circle’ connects to the Russian avant-garde artist, Kazimir Malevich’s painting ‘Black Circle’. Malevich (1879-1935) became the leading figure of the radical suprematism art movement that focused on using basic geometric shapes such as circles and squares. His work, such as ‘Black Circle’ changed the perception of art and became hugely influential in Western culture. The visual artists that followed, such as Mark Rothko continued using basic geometric shapes and primary colours exploring philosophical ideas such as primitivism, adapting patterns from local folklore and mythology. Around this time, Ezra Pound one of the major exponents of modernism promoted imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. Borrowings from primitive art have been important to the development of Modern Art. Like an avant-garde artist, O’Grady has sought to find ever-deeper poetic expressions by excavating through Celtic history.
As well as the cultural significance, the poem also has personal resonance to O’Grady’s own life of leaving Ireland and making his own way in ‘foreign’ lands. At nineteen, due to the oppressive atmosphere of the Catholic church, O’Grady left Ireland in self-exile for Paris in search of la Vie de bohéme, where he quickly established himself within the avant-garde circles, socializing with many of the top 20th century artists, such as Beckett, Sartre and Picasso. Two years later he moved to Rome, where he had a life-changing affair with a countess and met Ezra Pound, becoming his amanuensis. While in Rome, he also met the iconic film-maker, Federico Fellini, and played himself, as the Irish poet, in Fellini’s classic, La Dolce Vita. In 1964, he was invited to Harvard Univerity by Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellman. While he was a Teaching Fellow there O’Grady took his M.A and Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures and comparative studies. His peripatetic life continued, teaching in Iran at the University of Tabriz, and Egypt where he was poet-in-residence at American University, Cairo, and University of Alexandria. In this sense, a rite of passage can be read into the poem, growing away from the ‘familiar’ family of an Irish‘childhood’ into the ‘foreign habits’ of life abroad.
The black ink of the poem forms its own ‘black circle of foreign habits’ that has grown away from the oral tradition of the ancient Celts. Just as ‘the old ways’ remain hidden and silent in the poem, the final deafening silence resounds after the last line’s question, ‘With what shall we now replace them?’ We fall off the ‘black circle’ of the poem into the silence of the white page and the shared silence of the nameless ‘them’: the ancient Celts. The climactic question also has a personal dimension, alluding to O’Grady’s own search and poetic vocation to replace the old ways with the ‘make it new’ innovation of the poet. Departures, new starts and journeys to far-off places is a hallmark of O’Grady’s poetic output.
While the poem is peppered with contrasts, the block-paragraph form suggests that there is a connection and unity. The lines are not splintered or divided into different stanzas, they are held together as a unified whole. Time and history are interwoven, blurred. The fricative ‘f’, alliteration scattered throughout appears with certain contrasting words that are both ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign’. While the meanings contrast each other, the alliteration creates a parallelism, suggesting the ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign’ are two sides of the same coin. Like Yin and Yang (literally meaning’ ‘shadow and ‘light’), the unseen (hidden, feminine) and seen (manifest, masculine), interact to form a greater whole.
This flipside of opposites, like ‘old’ and ‘new’, being two sides of the same coin, alludes to another Pound maxim on writing poetry, which still has major currency among poets today: ‘Make it new.’ The ‘it’ in ‘Make it new’ can be seen as the old – what is valuable in the culture of the past. Like Pound, a great deal of O’Grady’s poetry takes the form of translation, imitation, allusion and quotation from older text. He is trying to breathe life into a line of artistic and intellectual accomplishment that goes back through classical culture and the Celtic past. Because of these themes, some critics judge O’Grady’s style as grand and didactic, but this narrow view misses the wider context of ancient and classical text translation/version fragmentations, which forms the basis of his work.
In the 20th century, the art world became obsessed with innovation, many seeing modernism as a complete break away from the shackles of a conservative and confining past. This is in many ways misses the point of modernism’s true ideals. In Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and the individual Talent’, he suggests that an artist’s work should be judged not by its novelty or newness, but rather by how the artist handles the tradition he or she inherits. Throughout history, he wrote, the concept of originality referred to the transformation of tradition through an interaction with the past as opposed to the creation of something brand-new. While O’Grady may be out of step with current literary fashions, he is in many ways the true embodiment of modernism. His raison d’étre as a poet and scholar has been to bring the ancient past to light and transform it through his own life and sensibility, thus creating a body of work that is highly original. He is the true vocational poet, the ‘wandering Celt’ who, as Stephen Dedalus put it in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, set out to encounter ‘the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ While fashions pass, style remains, to coin a phrase. O’Grady is an Irish poet who has learnt and lived his trade. And here the true trade of art is a trade-off, where the original elements become transformed by the exchange.
Although there is an element of lament for the passing of old traditions, the poem breathes life into them. Literary critic, Harold Bloom says, ‘Strong poems are always omens of resurrection. The dead may or may not return, but their voice comes alive.’ In O’Grady’s quest and final questioning, he makes the old ways new, taking the baton of the seer/file who looks out of the dark and into the light of a new Celtic generation.
Paradoxically then, ‘The Old Ways’ is not about something lost but about something that can be regained. The hidden world of poetry begs us to refamiliarise ourselves with our ancient mythological past and the other world of the imagination, a world beyond the senses that like our knowledge of the ancient Celts is neither quite solid or well defined and yet it has an ever-enhancing effect on the imagination.
Poems are charms that stir creativity, invoke new powers of thinking and bring us back to elements in ourselves at a very deep and primitive level. The Irish Celts, now recognised for saving civilization after the fall of Rome – re-introducing writing, religion and spreading new ideas into Britain and continental Europe during the Dark Ages – continue today, despite centuries of conquest and oppression, to push the envelope of literature. Ireland’s literary impact on the world has been unrivalled not because it creates something out of nothing but because of its active engagement with ancient myth and tradition. By keeping alive its unique heritage of early Irish poetry – its myths and the esteemed position of the bard – Irish poets and writers continue to be at the spearhead.
