'Ancient Lights', Austin Clarke (Critical Essay‪)‬

The publication of Ancient lights: Poems and Satires, First Series (1955), marked the beginning of a remarkable new period in the poetic career of Austin Clarke. Some people may have seen it corning in the poems he published in The Irish Times: 'Mother and Child', June 1954; 'An Early Start', August 1954, followed by two Poems in Irish Writing, 'Fashion' and 'The envy of poor lovers', Autumn 1955. But it is unlikely that anyone could have anticipated the poetic surge that ensued: Too Great a Vine: Poems and Satires, Second Series (1957); The Horse-Eaters: Poems and Satires, Third Series (1960), all clearly connected as work in progress, with the same kind of material and the same subject matter dryly critical observations on Irish society, including defiant comments on the Catholic church--and all structured in the same way--a central, autobiographical poem surrounded by short poems, some satirical in manner. All three collections were characterized by a vigorous intelligence, exceptional linguistic energy, and a style packed with specific detail. That the poet was touching sixty in 1955 may not have been generally known, although many people would have associated him with the Irish Literary Revival and would have seen him as an enthusiastic imitator of its aims and methods: these included the use of Irish myth and legend, and writing in a style that was mystical and musical. Apart from verse drama there had been little sign of poetic energy at Bridge House, Templeogue, since the distinctive, individualistic poetry of Night and Morning (1938), a collection which was original in subject matter and resolutely dramatic in its depiction of a self torn between opposing attractions: the desperate need for intellectual independence of clerical controls and the equally strong emotional need to remain part of the communion of the faithful. It was as though Clarke wanted to be a heretic within the church. It was an impossible position to maintain for any length of time, but in that compact collection Clarke defined and gave expression to something whose origins, as the poems show, lay deep in the history of the Catholic Church, in intellectual dissent, the Council of Trent, and the rebellion of Martin Luther. In Clarke's generation the need for intellectual inquiry was still capable of causing anguish to the sensitive individual who had been brought up strictly within the Catholic ethos; it was particularly agonizing for one raised in the Jansenistic Catholicism that prevailed in Ireland in Clarke's childhood and growing years.