Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The Lie of the Land
- 2 Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)
- 3 John Montague: Global Regionalist?
- 4 Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora
- 5 Padraic Fiacc and James Simmons
- 6 Michael Longley's Ecopoetics
- 7 Derek Mahon: ‘An Exile and a Stranger’
- 8 Tom Paulin: Dwelling without Roots
- 9 Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics
- 10 Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
- 11 New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - John Montague: Global Regionalist?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The Lie of the Land
- 2 Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)
- 3 John Montague: Global Regionalist?
- 4 Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora
- 5 Padraic Fiacc and James Simmons
- 6 Michael Longley's Ecopoetics
- 7 Derek Mahon: ‘An Exile and a Stranger’
- 8 Tom Paulin: Dwelling without Roots
- 9 Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics
- 10 Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
- 11 New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Born in Brooklyn in 1929, shipped back at the age of four to Co. Tyrone where he was raised by his paternal aunts while his elder brothers stayed with their natural mother seven miles away, John Montague from an early age knew all about feelings of dispossession and exile. From his childhood Garvaghey home to boarding-school in Armagh, then to University College Dublin, then Yale, then to various American universities as poet and teacher, then three years in Paris as correspondent for the Irish Times, then back to Dublin in 1967, then sixteen years teaching in University College Cork interspersed with frequent visits to America and France, he continues to lead a mobile life, with bases in France, Cork and New York. Experience and outlook have combined, Montague claims, to make him the quintessentially modern Irish poet:
My amphibian position between North and South, my natural complicity in three cultures, American, Irish and French, with darts aside to Mexico, India, Italy or Canada, should seem natural enough in the later-twentieth century as man strives to reconcile local allegiances with the absolute necessity of developing a world consciousness to save us from the abyss. Earthed in Ireland, at ease in the world, weave the strands you're given.
Reacting against both extremes of a closed regionalism (which he simplistically associates with Frost and Heaney) and a boundless globalism (as exemplified by Pound), Montague insists:
the real position for a poet is to be global-regionalist. He is born into allegiances to particular areas or places and people, which he loves, sometimes against his will. But then he also happens to belong to an increasingly accessible world … So the position is actually local and international.
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- Information
- Writing HomePoetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008, pp. 53 - 82Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008