NB: This Joseph Campbell is not the prolific author of books on Mythology. In his youth this Campbell's poetry was published under the Irish form of his name, Seosamh MacCathmhaoil. He told Austin Clarke that he gave this up when he heard a young woman asking for the poems of Seo-Sam MacCatwail.
The
Biography.
Born in 1879 in Belfast he seems to have
spent his life on the margins. As a Catholic and Nationalist in Belfast, he was
an outsider; later, as an Ulster Man in Literary Dublin, then as an Irishman in
London and later New York, or as a
Nationalist who objected to partition; ‘an Irreconcilable’, he would face the
same problems.
His father owned a road mending
mending/building business. At 16 he became his father’s apprentice. There was
an extended period of illness. Then, when his father died in 1900, Joseph and
his brother John had to fulfill their father’s contract. He spent the next two years with his
laborers. He claimed; ’I gained, from intimate daily contact with them,
experience that proved of more value to me than if I had spent time in
libraries, or in aimless mooning about.’ Forty years later in a radio talk he
described some of these laborers and concluded: ‘These ‘untouchables’ of the
lowest caste, grubbers in clay and rock……I salute them as brave souls and as my
masters, for they taught me a great deal of my craft-and particularly, its iron
and integrity…’
He had written poems and prose pieces which
had appeared in the papers, but his first major publication was in Songs of Uliad. He had been asked to
write the words for a book of traditional airs his friend Herbert Hughes had
collected from the North of Ireland.
Austin Clarke claimed Campbell was the
first Irish poet to use free verse, a claim he repeated later with the qualification
“effectively’ tagged on. But most of Campbell’s poetry, including that written
in free verse, maintains the direct, compact lyric style of the ‘traditional’
folk song.
Having participated in various literary and
dramatic activities in Belfast he moved to Dublin, where he was as much an
outsider. He did have a play put on by the Abbey, but by ‘the second company’
and Yeats rejected his second play. Campbell went to London where he met
Pound and Flint and the other ‘verse revolutionaries’. Married, against the opposition of his wife’s
parents, they returned to Ireland. After
partition his nationalism landed him in Prison, which he describes in his
Prison Journal, edited by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and published in 2001.
Out of prison, disgusted with Ireland, his
faith in the church rattled, he went to New York where he set up a Centre for
Irish Studies. This wasn’t a financial success but was taken over by Fordham
University, where Campbell became an assistant lecturer. He had no formal
academic qualifications and the director ‘regretfully let him go’ in mid
1938. Although he tried to set up again
on his own he lost money on the lectures and night classes he gave.
Campbell’s friends collected enough money
for him to return home for a holiday. Although he seems to have had every intention
of returning to New York, he was once again unable to find a job and retreated to his
cottage. Although he continued to write
and broadcast, he died alone in 1944.
Some Poems.
Night, and I
Travelling
Night, and I travelling.
An open door by the
wayside,
Throwing out a shaft of
warm yellow light.
A whiff of peat smoke;
A gleam of delf on the
dresser within;
A woman's voice crooning,
as if to a child.
I pass on into darkness.
When
Rooks Fly Homeward
When rooks fly homeward
And shadows fall
When roses fold
On the Hay-yard wall,
When blind moths flutter
By door and tree
Then comes the quiet
Of Christ to me.
When stars look out
On the Children’s Path
And grey mists gather
On carn and rath
When night is one
With the brooding sea,
Then comes the quiet
Of Christ to me.
Priests
When he goes thin in leaky
shoes
For lack of meat and
marriage dues
Two moons will kindle in
the sky
And drink the deep
Atlantic dry
He built a chapel on the
hill
And let the peasants foot
the bill,
When Dagda cracks the
Steeple down
The rooted oaks will come
to town.
II
Walking the road between
grey, litchened walls
To where the sick man or
the sinner calls
You tread the path that
Paul and Jerome trod
Dispenser of the mysteries
of God.
The scholarship you know,
the Latin, Greek
The books you write, the
shining words you speak
Your silvered hair, your
shaven face, your dress
Are but as shadows of your
holiness.
I do not judge you, any
more than I
Have judged another; but
with Wisdom’s eye
I look, and count you
worthy of high song
Who lift the fallen, bid
the weak be strong.
III
Christ drank the wine of
love feasts
Christ broke the leper’s
bread
Christ let a fallen woman
Pour spikenard on his head
You put a mask on beauty
You bind the dancer’s feet
You bless the sad and
bitter
And curse the gay and
sweet.
The
Road Mender
Life goes by, slowly by
Clouds, like sheep flocks
in the sky
Tinkers, following for
gain
The ancient craft of Tubal
Cain
Red leaves whiled from
autumn woods
Summer shadows, winter
floods
Drovers, trampers, men in
carts
From the two-and-thirty
arts
Dawns that blossom, dusks
that die
All go by, slowly by.
Only you, that mend the
roads
Move not with the horses’
loads
Travel not with dusty feet
From mountain farm to city
street.
Life goes by you and you
feel
All the racket of the
wheel;
Time flies past you, and
you see
All its love and misery,
Stirring hardly from your
place-
A needle point in
boundless space.
Scattered
inconclusive notes for the work bench:
The ‘problems’ with Campbell’s verse are
not technical, certainly not by half way through the collected. So why is he a
footnote? I think the answer comes down to the fact that he was parochial; the
folk lyric is an attractive but dangerous model, and content and religion mitigate
against the poems being popular.
One of the most obvious features of
Campbell’s poems is that the frame of reference is Irish: not the acquired
vague ‘Irishness’ of Yeats, but the natural Irishness of a man who is writing
within a familiar framework of stories and ideas.
Patrick Kavanagh made the useful
distinction between ‘provincial’ and ‘parochial’. For Kavanagh, parochial is
not a term of denigration. The parochial poet knows his parish, and writes of
it and to it. The provincial poet has his eye on what’s popular in the
metropolis and cuts his cloth accordingly.
Campbell was parochial in the best sense.
He knew what was going on in the literary world, he’d been a participant in the
meetings of the ‘verse revolutionaries’ in London. According to his biographer
he had taken an interest in Russian, French and German literature and had
studied those languages. He’d become acquainted with the literary theories of
the twentieth century. But while this might have lead him to use, occasionally,
‘Free verse’, he never took on the Modernist’s (dubious?) claim to
internationalism.
The subject matter of his poems is local,
often localized. Clark claimed his collection 'Earth of Cualann’ was his
greatest achievement and ‘…has been neglected because it pays no concession to
popular taste or to that English Public whom some of poets always keep in
mind.’
A collection like Irishry ‘a portfolio of portraits’ as one critic called them, from
which the poems Road Menders and Priests are taken, presents verse
portraits of the people around him.
But reading the poems is like reading
journalism about a place or period of history one has nothing invested in. I
think Campbell suggests one answer to the question of ‘how important is
content’….and the answer is, pace the
arguments against… sometimes it’s crucial to the poem’s afterlife.
2
The folk lyric can be a seductive model;
and it can teach some beneficial lessons, In Saunders’ words their influence
was evident in ‘The note of restraint, of self-discipline in his later lyrics’.
But the danger is in missing how the words
rely on the tune and their delivery. In the great songs the words march hand in
hand with the tune and rhythm and the singer phrases them for effect.
Word is to the kitchen gone
And word is to the hall
And word is up to Madam the Queen
And that’s the worst of all.
Or:
I am a King’s daughter
And I come from Cappoquin
I’m searching for Lord Gregory
I pray that I find him.
Some great poems have been written using
the model, but you can hear the difference between the lyrics above and the
opening of Kavanagh’s Kerr’s Ass
We borrowed the loan of Kerr’s big ass
To go to Dundalk for butter
Brought him home the evening before the market
An exile that night in Mucker.
To go to Dundalk for butter
Brought him home the evening before the market
An exile that night in Mucker.
The difference lies in the way the poem
substitutes sound for the melody and the rhythm of the words push you towards a
way of reading. Stripped of their tunes and rhythm, a lot of folk lyrics die on
the page. In the hands of a good poet you can have the simplicity of diction
and syntax, mimicking a speaking voice, but it’s bound together by sound
patterning and rhythm (which may be parts of the same thing).
Yeats and MacNeice were notable
practitioners of this, as was Kavanagh on his good days and Heaney a lot of the
time. Graves was more hit and miss and
reading his complete poems is an exercise in listening to which poems sing and
which don’t.
Campbell’s poems rarely sing the way When
Rooks Fly Homeward does. They feel like lyrics to which the tunes have been lost.
3
3
His religion is present throughout, and
this is another feature of the poems which separate him from the modernists.
While poems like Priests are critical of the Church, it’s hard to imagine
either Eliot or Pound writing the collection 'The Gilly of Christ' or a poem like When Rooks Fly Homeward. Campbell had faith; Eliot had
religion. While both are profoundly held, Eliot’s was intellectualised. In ‘The
Gilly of Christ’ the poems explore religious folk lore, which is no less
important for being folk lore.
There’s a conclusion lurking in here, but
perhaps later.
Up Next as a Footnote, Richard Aldington,
who I think deserves to be a footnote. But it’s taken me six months to get this
far so it may be a while.
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