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What are the themes, use of language, imagery, and forms in John Montague's works?
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John Montague's works explore themes like the complex relationship with Roman Catholicism and the experience of Irish exile. His poetry often reflects personal connections to family and Irish history. Montague employs vivid imagery, such as the symbolic use of a potato to represent Ireland, and his language is rich with assonance and alliteration. While he often writes in free verse, his poems maintain a musical quality through these sonic devices.
John Montague was born on February 28th, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York, to an Irish family. In 1933, he was sent back to live with his aunts on a farm in Ulster in Northern Ireland. He was educated in Ireland, where he learned about traditional Irish poetry and folklore. As well as studying at University College, Dublin, he attended Yale, and in his later career he lived in France and the United States as well as Ireland, giving him a deeply cosmopolitan background, despite the often strongly Irish focus of many of his best-known poems. He died in Nice, France, on December 10th, 2016.
One major theme in Montague's work is his relationship with Roman Catholicism and how it both functions as an essential part of Irish identity and yet is often oppressive and fails to live up to its promise. Another common theme is that of the Irish exile or expatriate, often being reminded of home by a fleeting encounter, as in his poem "Murphy in Manchester," in which an Irish man in England is described as:
Passing a vegetable stall
With exposed fruits, he halts
To contemplate a knobbly potato
With something akin to love.
In this, the potato is a symbol of Ireland, and the moment stands in for the fraught relationship of the Irish diaspora with their homeland.
Many of Montague's poems are deeply personal, reflecting on his relationship with his mother and other members of his family intertwined with his sense of Irish history. In terms of form, although Montague uses free verse in many poems, he has a strongly musical ear, with frequent use of assonance, alliteration, and other sonic devices.
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