Although Derek Mahon has been rising toward major status during the last decade both as a poet and as a translator, his relatively small poetic output still deserves a wider international audience. Critical attention has not exactly been scant, but the problem is that some of the best criticism has appeared in small Irish periodicals or in Irish newspapers which are not readily accessible abroad¹, while some of the worst criticism is easily available on the stacks of our libraries. Robert Hogan's splenetic and schoolmasterly entry on Mahon in his Macmillan Dictionary of Irish Literature (1980) is a prime example of the latter, presenting Mahon as a poet of uncertain formal control in comparison with Auden. Mahon's “faulty examples of meter and rhyme” are cavilled about, and to cap it all Hogan does not hesitate to upbraid him for “still conducting his prosodic education in public” and for seeming “as untutored” as many of his generation (if more talented than most).

What is one to make of such a critical stance? The “obvious alternatives” are that Hogan himself does not adequately understand, or indeed does not “care for” what he is doing (to turn one of his other negative observations on Mahon against himself).

More perceptive critics such as Edna Longley noticed the “subtle brilliance” of Mahon's rhetoric as early as 1968², and in the last few years this has been corroborated by substantial essays exploring the cunning intricacies of Mahon's prosody. These remarkable contributions have included analyses of his disguising of rhyme patterns in apocopated and slant rhymes, as well as of the link between such prosodic technicalities as a recurrent anticlimactic rhyme scheme and a comparable movement in culture and history.³ As an implicit rebuttal of Hogan's ill-informed criticism these recent essays are so perfect that further polemic is superfluous.

However, there is also another type of criticism, as misdirected and preposterous as Hogan's but even more complacently silly, that has been doing a great disservice to a wider recognition of Mahon's achievement: namely, the crass Marxist approach as represented by Stan Smith. Although at least two critics have already in passing taken exception to his “unwise” and “inaccurate” criticism⁴, this issue still seems less preempted than the formal one. Hence the focus of this contribution will be on Mahon's concept of history in some paradigmatic poems and its misrepresentation in both a review essay and a book by Stan Smith; special reference will be made to Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history throughout my argument.

The most superciliously negative criticism of Mahon from an ideological point of view was perpetrated by Smith in 1980 in a review essay significantly entitled “At One Remove”; this dealt with Mahon's Poems 1962-1978 as well as Michael Longley's The Echo Gate and Maurice Harmon's anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats. Subsuming Mahon's multifarious output under the Procrustean category of “The Ulster Poem”, Smith facetiously proceeds to define this sub-genre as “Tragical-comical-elegiacal-pastoral …”:

“It makes a show of being terse, but is often wordy, even sententious. It performs its civic duties equitably, by reflecting, in an abstracted kind of way, on violence (…); but its hands are indubitably clean. For this it is always winning prizes, for it is competent poetry (…). It speaks, at times, with the tone of a shell-shocked Georgianism that could easily be mistaken for indifference, before the ugly realities of life, and death, in Ulster; at times, with the true voice of pastoral: it bleats. (…) Sheepishly, it looks back to Louis MacNeice as its literary progenitor, like Derek Mahon in “Carrowdore Churchyard” (…); and it seeks to reproduce “Each fragile, solving ambiguity” of that older and more troubled poet.”⁵

Further questionable labels inflicted on Mahon include “bone-bred parochiality” (without the positive meaning “parochial” had in Kavanagh's poetics), and moreover his “drained-off, privatized, self-indulgent” poetry is unfavorably compared with Montague's and Heaney's because “there is anger and ferocity in their response to the historic dilemma of the North, but no washing of hands in sanctimonious disdain”.

There is something utterly wrong with this kind of arid criticism, and the same holds true of Smith's discussion of Mahon in his book Inviolable Voice. History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1982, p. 188-193). Again Mahon's “uncomprehending stance” towards the Ulster dilemma is chidden, particularly his polarising of reality into the quotidian and the apocalyptic, resulting in the latter's reduction to mere fantasy—and thereby ratifying a larger refusal of “the concept of history”. It is very ironical that Smith tries to use ammunition from Walter Benjamin for a finishing shot at Mahon; such superficial appropriation of a thinker noted for his complexity and profundity is of course bound to backfire. Let us try to straighten out Smith's messy argument and see what we can gain from what is, one hopes, a less inadequate use of Benjamin's ideas.

Smith wants to play off Benjamin against Mahon by stressing the former's superior insight into what he perceives to be a similar historical process at work in Germany in the 1930s, as expressed in one of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (nr. VIII). Smith's quotation of this key text is, however, regretfully truncated and will in due time have to be restored to yield its full significance:

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. (…) The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”⁶

Benjamin here implicitly refers to the Aristotelean concept of “thaumazein” as the potential beginning of all knowledge and differentiates it from the perplexity or panic of the late thirties which was not productive with a view to gaining insight into what was actually happening.

The latter attitude is also Mahon's today, Smith feels: remaining locked in a consumer's view of history, Mahon “steadfastly refuses Benjamin's perception”.⁷ This way of putting it implies a curious innuendo of obstinate ignorance or even bad faith, whereas there is no palpable evidence that Mahon actually read Benjamin either in the original or in the English translation of Illuminationen first published in 1968.⁸ To be sure, there is little doubt that the latter volume circulated as a “Geheimtip” among leading members of the Irish avantgarde connected with the periodical Atlantis such as Seamus Deane, William J. McCormack, and Mahon himself. Also Mahon's translations of Brecht poems may have familiarized him with the concept of history shared to a certain extent by Benjamin and Brecht.

However, what some Marxist critics tend to overlook and even to suppress is that Benjamin's last works, including the “Theses”, were written under the shadow of the infamous pact between Hitler and Stalin that betrayed him and so many other exiles. The “Theses” are a desperate attempt to reconcile materialism and Jewish mysticism by discovering in the latter enough messianic drive to sustain the flawed spirit of the former in a period of danger and impending doom.⁹ Overstressing one pole of Benjamin's thought, i.e. his radical materialism and his advocacy of class struggle, Smith obliterates certain fundamental affinities between Benjamin and Mahon in terms of utopian and messianic impulses and potentialities. Whether these affinities are cases of creative coincidence or whether Mahon is indebted to Benjamin directly or indirectly doesn't really matter; the point is that they may lead to mutual illumination. To put the problem into perspective, the part of the VIIIth thesis elided by Smith needs first to be restored:

“Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.”¹⁰

In other words: Benjamin reacts against the ideology of linear progress which is not equipped to deal with throwbacks: he implies that it would be preferable to take catastrophe as a historical norm instead. This gloomy perspective is very close to Mahon's in many of his poems. On the other hand, however, Benjamin and Mahon share a basic desire to rescue and redeem whatever is worth saving in the world and in history, albeit often unrecognized by the “compact majority” as vitally important for the survival of mankind or even entirely abandoned as a lost cause.

The most successful expression of this belief is to be found in an elegy from The Snow Party (1975)—“arguably the finest poem to come out of Ireland in the past twenty years”, as Declan Kiberd put it in 1982.¹¹ To realize the validity of this statement, it is indispensible to read the poem aloud in its entirety; only the most relevant parts can be quoted here.¹²

“A DISUSED SHED IN CO. WEXFORD”

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the
asphodels.

—Seferis, Mythistorema

for J. G. Farrell
Even now there are places where a thought might grow—
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

“Even now” may ring a bell for readers who remember the repeated topicalization of these words in the curious poem at the end of Steinbeck's Cannery Row, a novel celebrating the thriving Monterey of the Thirties of which only shadowy vestiges remain today—thus implicitly reinforcing the pervasive atmosphere of global decay. But more importantly, at least for this reader, “Even now” can be linked to the Benjaminian concept of “Jetztzeit” (presence of the now), a cornerstone of his philosophy of history not unrelated to the mystical “nunc stans” but containing wider societal ramifications. Actually this concept was already implicitly present in the above quoted VIIIth thesis; the real state of emergency is in its revolutionary potential practically a synonym of the “Jetztzeit” as defined in the XIVth thesis:

“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the Now (Jetztzeit). Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history.”¹³

Now Mahon, not being a Jacobin or a radical Marxist, does not blast open the continuum of history, but nevertheless in his own subdued way the does prize it open to look for something preserved, as it were, under a shell from the days of the Civil War—something that might help to solve the problem of the Irish deadlock and the resurgent troubles of the late sixties.

Several critics have already emphasized the importance of the dedication to J. G. Farrell (1935-1979), whose novel Troubles (1970) is set in a fictitious village of County Wexford in the period 1919-21 when many Big Houses and hotels were burnt down. Although not generally recognized as a masterpiece, this novel is a remarkable example of the authentic historical novel as defined by Lukacs: “one which would rouse the present, which contemporaries would experience as their own pre-history”.¹⁴ It was only during the writing process that Farrell realized how relevant his topic had suddenly become again, and this relevance struck not only reviewers such as Elizabeth Bowen but had a catalytic impact on Mahon as well.

Beyond the emphatic homage to a favorite writer, however, the poem's location in Wexford may also be associated with a number of historical facts—which makes it all the more imperative not to dislocate the setting to Co. Wicklow as Seamus Deane repeatedly does in his otherwise brilliant essay on Mahon.¹⁵ First of all, many readers know that Wexford was the first Irish county to be colonized from England. Fewer readers will realize that the county is also rich in memories of the 1798 rising, but nevertheless this connotation is not irrelevant. In 1798 insurgent pikemen fought against overwhelming odds, and only in Ulster and Wexford was the rising widespread. We should also keep in mind that 1798 generally came to represent “a myth of the last chance”, symbolizing the last real attempt by Irish Presbyterian and Catholic to make common cause.¹⁶

Such a cluster of topographical and historical associations constitutes what Mahon has defined as “a community of imagined readership” in an interview with Willie Kelly, where his sense of place is differentiated from Heaney's by its being less sure:

Seamus is very sure of his place; I've never been sure of mine. My home landscape, and here I mean North Antrim where I spent most of my childhood holidays, and not Belfast where I was born, figures largely in my poems. Aside from these poems the place that the poetry occupies is not a geographical location; it's a community of imagined readership.

Some of my poems don't take place anywhere in particular, others take place quite specifically, in Co. Wexford, or North Antrim.¹⁷

Even though perhaps not all of the above associations may belong to the “meaning” consciously intended by the author, still they can enrich the reading process and contribute to the poem's “significance” for us (to borrow a useful distinction from E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation).

Mahon's affirmation of a potentially redeeming growth of insight even in the most unlikely Irish places also implies a rebuttal of Smith's deprecatory characterization of him as merely a watered-down MacNeice. Not only does Mahon go beyond MacNeice in terms of formal achievement as well as exceeding him in his capacity to transmit “a sense of dread”¹⁸, there is also a greater sense of positive, realisable values in him (or at least in this particular poem). This can be made clear by a juxtaposition with MacNeice's famous “Valediction” (1934), where he denies the Irish all capability of genuine growth and consequently decides to resolve all emotional ties with his doomed fatherland:

But no abiding content can grow out of these minds
Fuddled with blood, always caught by blinds. (…)
I will exorcise my blood
And not to have my baby-clothes my shroud
I will acquire an attitude not yours
And become as one of your holiday visitors,
And however often I may come
Farewell, my country, and in perpetuum …

The visitor motif also emerges in Mahon's penultimate stanza, but loaded with a much richer emotional resonance:

A half century, without visitors, in the dark—
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

Mahon at least tries to rise up to his obligations when confronted with the collective yearning of the imprisoned mushrooms struggling for light, i.e. he gives them a voice to lament the solitude of history:

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
“Save us, save us,” they seem to say,
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!”

In one of the most wonderful essays ever written by a poet about a fellow-poet, Seamus Heaney has managed to grasp this poem's complexity and plangency as follows:

… what gives the poem its sorrow and insight is the long perspective, an intimacy with the clay-floored foetor of the shed kept in mind and in focus from a point of detached compassion, in another world of freedom, light and efficiency. To reduce the mushrooms' lives and appetites to counters for the frustrations and desolations of lives in Northern Ireland is, of course, one of those political readings which is perfectly applicable, but we recognize that this allegorical approach ties the poem too neatly into its place. The amplitude of its effects, its vault-filling resonance depend upon its displaced perspective. Those rooted helplessly in place plead with the capable uprooted visitor, be he poet or photographer, and it is in this pleading that we find the psychological as opposed to the political nub of the poem.¹⁹

On the basis of such an extraordinary felicitous poem we can show that Mahon is not only MacNeice's heir but also his disinheritor (albeit not deliberately, as he modestly remarked when asked about his perception of this filiation). Actually it seems to me that Mahon is closer to Auden here, a poet he did not as often mention among his formative influences as some others (Graves, Beckett, W. S. Merwin, even MacNeice …) but who is perhaps as inevitably present in Mahon's work and in twentieth century poetry generally as Milton was omnipresent in eighteenth century poetry. More specifically the above quoted passage reminds one of Auden's elegy on Freud (1940):

but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
          not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also
because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
                    us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future
that lies in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him …

More than the slippery rhetoric of a politicized poem such as “Spain”, the subdued diction of this elegy manages to convey the collective yearning of oppressed humanity, and Mahon equals Auden at his best in this respect—except for the superfluous and melodramatic exclamation “Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!” which is more reminiscent of Audenesque diction of the mid-thirties.²⁰ Even without this emphatic explanation, most readers would have realized that the subject of the poem is the tragic plight of defenseless people struggling for the luminosity of redemption and that the mushrooms are merely a paradoxical symbol (after all fungi don't need light, as they lack chlorophyll). But this is just a minor flaw in an otherwise brilliant poem, whose merits are recognized even by Stan Smith.

However, in the final count Mahon's stance is sneeringly dismissed by Smith. In contrast to Heaney and Montague, who, according to Smith, may need to renounce the troubled ground of bomb-torn Belfast in order to complete their art, “… poets such as Longley and Mahon need to have their noses rubbed in it, if they are to survive as poets, and, possibly, as men (my italics, J. D.). The middle ground and the middle distance are not the place where thought may grow, or wisdom flourish.”²¹ Hindered by such dogmatic blinkers, Smith is unable to see the possibility of (re)reading the poem from a Benjaminian perspective, although Mahon's strategy of using an almost Benjaminian epigraph could already have served as an eye-opener. The quotation from Seferis—“Let them not forget us the weak souls among the asphodels” implies that the danger of oppression persists even among the flowers covering the Elysian fields. This is consonant with Benjamin's view of history as expressed, for instance, in Thesis VI: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”²²

Instead, Smith keeps harping on Mahon's “refusal of history,” e.g. in “Autobiographies”, a sequence of two poems in which childhood impressions are recaptured. Mahon's wonder at his own sheltered existence in a period when Jews were exterminated leads to the final verdict: “The distance of the fortunate beneficiary of victory is here faithfully inscribed”²³, a verdict which is at once harsh and smug. It is also self-defeating, as it exposes once more the critic's inability to relate to a writer's private dimension—something Benjamin was eminently capable of, witness e.g. his shrewd observations on Marcel Proust (whom he also translated). This attentiveness, a core value of Benjamin's approach to literature as well as to history and to life generally, is perhaps what is most conspicuously and most sadly lacking in the criticism of his epigones fifteen years ago in Germany and now also in Britain.

How then can the Proust-Benjamin connection be made productive for our purposes? Some felicitous formulations from Irving Wohlfarth's essay on Benjamin can clarify the issues involved. Taking his cue from Benjamin's observation that the idea of happiness is bound up with that of redemption, and that the same holds for the image of the past to which history gives its allegiance, Wohlfarth points out that such happiness would appear to be neither “hymnic” nor “elegiac”, neither wholly unprecedented nor merely repetitive:

Therein Benjaminian redemption differs from its Proustian model, which it quotes—and thereby completes—against its context. Unlike mémoire involontaire, which finds its fulfillment in the pure repetition of the past (…), the recuperation of the past that Benjamin intends is its restructuring completion, the fulfillment of its wishes. (…) In each case, individual and collective, the messianic light of redemption has the effect of retroactively articulating the past. Only with its fulfillment does the past fall into place; its completion coincides with its final reinterpretation. (…) And the rhythm of fulfillment is that of messianic actuality, the split second of the “fulfilled now” …²⁴

Even though Mahonian redemption may differ from the Benjaminian model in some respects, basically they are consonant: in both cases the private and the public self merge to an extent which is not found in Proust.

In this context, the hitherto unnoticed autobiographical component of “A Disused Shed …” should be taken into account. The poem is indeed disguised autobiography in the most interesting sense, as we can gather from an interview with Paul Durcan:

“In the back-garden there was a coal-shed in which Mahon kept his bicycle. (…) The little boy felt pity for the coal in the coal-shed and each time he closed the coal-shed door he felt regret, if not guilt. Why should all that glittering coal be shut away and live an imprisoned anti-social life of its own?”²⁵

Although the link with “A Disused Shed …” is not explicitly made, the identity theme is of course fundamentally the same; it recurs in significant variations throughout Mahon's oeuvre, testifying to the pervasiveness of its autobiographical impulse.²⁶

In a less disguised way, the same childhood epiphany occurs in the title poem of the volume Courtyards in Delft (1981), contributing again to a highly interesting merger of the private and the public dimension. In fairness to Smith, it should be mentioned that this poem was not yet accessible to him at the time of his attacks; one hopes it will make him refrain from further ill-informed attempts at maligning Mahon as a petty bourgeois poet lacking in historical insight, for it is a perfect illustration of Benjamin's VIIth thesis:

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”²⁷

By “brushing history against the grain”, as Benjamin defines the task of a historical materialist, Mahon tries in this poem to open the reader's eyes to the connections between a 17th century Dutch painting by Pieter de Hooch steeped in chaste precision, and the horrific expansion of the Dutch colonial empire.

The poem goes beyond a mere restatement of such uncomfortable knowledge as can already be found in didactic poems by Brecht in that Mahon adds a private dimension, exploring the analogy with his childhood environment and its comparable enmeshment of protestant cleanliness and delusions of imperialist vocation:

“COURTYARDS IN DELFT”

—Pieter de Hooch, 1659

(for Gordon Woods)
Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile—
Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that
Water tap, that broom and wooden pail
To keep it so. House-proud, the wives
Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives
Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.
Foliage is sparse, and clings. No breeze
Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.
No spinet-playing emblematic of
The harmonies and disharmonies of love;
No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird
About to fly its cage while a virgin
Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste
Precision of the thing and the thing made.
Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste:
We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.
That girl with her back to us who waits
For her man to come home for his tea
Will wait till the paint disintegrates
And ruined dykes admit the esurient sea;
Yet this is life too, and the cracked
Out-house door a verifiable fact
As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit
Railings that front the houses opposite.
I lived there as a boy and know the coal
Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon
Lambency informing the deal table,
The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.
I must be lying low in a room there,
A strange child with a taste for verse,
While my hard-nosed companions dream of war
On parched veldt and fields of rain swept gorse;
For the pale light of that provincial town
Will spread itself, like ink or oil,
Over the not yet accurate linen
Map of the world which occupies one wall
And punish nature in the name of God.
If only, now, the Maenads, as of right,
Came smashing crockery, with fire and sword,
We could sleep easier in our beds at night.(28)

For all his revolutionary fervour at the end of this poem, in which Mahon for a change blasts open the continuum of history in a genuinely Benjaminian spirit, the fact that the poet is deeply implicated is not denied with the superior detachment of the Brechtian stance. Rather like Benjamin, who also had an incurably ambivalent admiration for certain privileged works of art (such as Klee's “Angelus Novus”) while concurrently trying to demystify their aura, Mahon realizes that he is addicted to art no matter how immoral its origins. It is doubtful whether his recent resolution to kick “the very bad habit” of writing poems about paintings will prove to be a lasting one.²⁹

An almost insurmountable obstacle to negotiate for the average reader is of course that such a “connoisseur poem” is accessible only to the happy few who can visualize the Courtyard painting and the several paintings by Vermeer which are so lovingly described without being precisely identified.³⁰ There is indeed a contradiction between this elitist attitude and Mahon's reiterated affirmation that “the plain people of Ireland” will remain, in his view, the audience deciding what good poetry is all about.³¹

It is precisely this kind of unresolved tension and contradiction that makes following Mahon's career all the more fascinating.³²

Notes

1. E.g. Brendan Kennelly, “Lyric Wit”, Irish Times Dec. 22, 1979 (dubbing Mahon “a Belfast Keats with a Popean sting”); Aidan C. Mathews, “Winter Quarters for a Poet-exile”, Irish Times Feb. 19, 1983.

2. In her review of Night-Crossing (The Honest Ulsterman No. 8, Dec. 1968, p. 27-29).

3. Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce (Notre Dame/USA: University of Notre Dame Press & Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1985), p. 224-246; Edna Longley, “The Singing Line: Form in Derek Mahon's Poetry” in her Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986), p. 170-184.

4. Gerald Dawe: “Icon and Lares: Derek Mahon and Michael Longley”, in: Across a Roaring Hill. The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland, eds. G. Dawe and E. Longley (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985), p. 232; E. Longley (as in note 3), p. 173.

5. Literary Review, No. 22, Aug. 8, 1980, p. 11.

6. Inviolable Voice, p. 192.

7. Inviolable Voice, p. 193.

8. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt; translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace). Smith quotes from the 1973 Fontana/Collins edition, my references are to the 1970 Jon. Cape edition. With all due respect for Zohn's pioneering achievement, it remains nonetheless imperative to read Benjamin in German if one wants to appreciate the glimmering quality of his discourse.

9. The best commentary is Irving Wohlfarth's “On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections”, Glyph 3 (1978), p. 148-212.

10. Illuminations, p. 263.

11. Review of Poems 1962-1978, Irish University Review, 12 (1982), No. 1, p. 109.

12. From the definitive version in Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; Second edition: 1986), p. 79-80. This poem has also been widely anthologized, e.g. in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, eds. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, p. 79-80.

13. Illuminations, p. 263.

14. As pointed out by Ronald Binns in his excellent monograph J. G. Farrell (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 27. Binns quotes from Mahon's obituary for Farrell in The New Statesman (Aug. 31, 1979, p. 313) but is apparently not aware of the influence exerted on Mahon's poetry: only novels by William Boyd and Mary Jones are mentioned in this respect (p. 9).

15. “Derek Mahon: Freedom from History”, in his Celtic Revivals. Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (London: Faber, 1985), p. 162, 163.

16. See Terence Brown, The Whole Protestant Community: The Making of a Historical Myth, Field Day Pamphlet No. 7, 1985.

17. “Each Poem for me is a New Beginning”, The Cork Review, 2, 1981, No. 3, p. 11.

18. S. Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 242.

19. Place and Displacement. Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (s.l.: Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1985), p. 9.

20. It would be precarious to go beyond this general suggestion of an intertextual relationship and to define its exact nature more precisely. Even such a sensible critic as Dillon Johnston, in his remarkable analysis of the later poem “The Hunt by Night”, jumps to conclusions in this respect: “A revision in the first of these stanzas indicates how far Mahon has detoured to pay tribute to W. H. Auden” (o.c. as in n. 3, p. 244). Mahon's denying of this assumption in a conversation with me does of course not preclude the possibility of an unconscious interaction, but at any rate this is not an example of intended homage. Another interesting case in point is Smith's detecting “a deliberate nod of acknowledgement” to Edward Thomas's poem “Digging” in Seamus Heaney's poem with the same title (Inviolable Voice, p. 4). However, on Aug. 23, 1986, Heaney told me that no such echo had been intended.

21. Literary Review, p. 12.

22. Illuminations, p. 257.

23. Inviolable Voice, p. 193.

24. Wohlfarth (as in n. 9), p. 185.

25. Paul Durcan, “The World of Derek Mahon”, Magill, Christmas, 1984, p. 43.

26. Thus lending support to Paul de Man's controversial thesis that autobiography is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts (“Autobiography As De-Facement”, in his The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 70).

27. Illuminations, p. 258.

28. This definitive version is now the opening poem of The Hunt by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) (Second edition 1986-), p. 9-10.

29. Terence Brown, “An Interview with Derek Mahon”, Poetry Ireland Review, No. 14, Autumn 1985, p. 16-17.

30. The extraordinary inspiring power of these Vermeer paintings not only for poetry but also for critical theory is demonstrated in Claude Richard's article “Oedipa Regina”, Dires. Revue du centre freudien de Montpellier, No. 2, Janvier 1984, p. 67-84 (with reproductions).

31. Interview as in n. 29, p. 11.

32. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jennifer A. Otlet for her comments upon an earlier version of this article.