''Problems and Cleavages"
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The English lyric no longer belongs to England, and its migrationsespecially to places near at handhave taken on new significance in the late twentieth century. In
Devolving English Literature
(1992), a study written from a Scottish viewpoint, Robert Crawford notices "a widespread wish in recent poetry to be seen as in some manner barbarian, as operating outside the boundaries of standard English and outside the identity that is seen as going with it. Such a wish unites . . . the post-colonial and the provincial." However, as the epigraphs suggest, Crawford simplifies the dynamics of poetic devolution if he presumes that nonmetropolitan literary identities are given, unproblematic, and united against the notional center. Solidarity in the United States among those whom Seamus Heaney calls "poets from the outskirts," like Derek Walcott and Heaney himself, may obscure the complexity of receding local ties.
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Nor does Crawford resolve the perennial ambiguity as to whether distinctive identities afford a support system for poetry (and vice versa), or whether they are constituted and reconstituted by poems themselves. Such a process might be most subtly at work in poetry with its mind on other matters and with other claims on our attention. Even in political terms Crawford's Australian and Caribbean instances hardly derive from identical "post-colonial" situations. Similarly, the Celtic bits of the British Isles differ among and within themselvespolitically, religiously, culturally, aestheticallybesides pursuing their several quarrels with London. And, as Crawford indeed points out, regional, class, and ethnic factors in England itself (including immigration from the Celtic countries) affect the literary issue. Poetry by first or second generation "Irish in Britain," as well as by the Caribbeans in Britain, can show distinctive qualities. Ian Duhig, whose first collection of poems
The Bradford Count
was published in 1991, is a talented example.
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Nonetheless, contemporary poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales often bears the marks of cultural, if not always political, revolt against the nineteenth-century construction of "Britain." We still await the "Break-up of Britain," anticipated by the Scottish socialist thinker Tom Nairn as coda to the breakup of empire. But if Scotland still wobbles on the brink, the slow civil war in Northern Ireland has caused enormous tremors since 1969. Signs of literary revolt in the British Isles include efforts to rescue discrete literary histories from
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