In The Great War with Germany 1890- 1914 (1997), I. F. Clarke documented the literary background against which Yeats fondly predicted a titanic clash of civilisations, not to be dissolved in mustard gas. We appreciate Yeats's apocalypse in a passage Dr Brearton missed. "Today while the great battle in Northern France is still undecided, should I climb to . . . where a medium is sitting among servant girls, some one would, it may be, ask for news of Gordon Highlander or Munster Fusilier, and the fat old woman would tell in Cockney language how the dead do not yet know that they are dead, but stumble on amid visionary smoke and noise . . . "
This catches both Yeats's hesitancy and his contempt for actual human lives. Nevertheless, Brearton treats him as a model figure, then limits her achievement by excluding too much. Her subject is poetry. She writes to good effect about tragedy which should implicate drama. Yeats's plays are eschewed, amongst which The Dreaming of the Bones (written in 1917) is crucial. She needs to omit Shaw's Heartbreak House, the most important response to the war by an Irish hand. Nor does she examine The Silver Tassie, except to allege O'Casey's debt to Wilfred Owen (detested by her avatar). According to Yeats, "we should not attribute a very high degree of reality to the Great War." This, too, Brearton wisely omits, though the greatness of Yeats would be better served by less discretion.
The War was a prosaic affair, and what it prompted in Ireland was mainly a prose literature. Joyce's Ulysses (1922) was radically modified as the slaughter persisted. Liam O'Flaherty fought in France, as did many subsequent Sinn Feiners - and 'Tans. Brearton provides some effective historical contrasts between Ireland and Britain, but she fails to convey how thoroughly the generation of O'Flaherty and O'Faolain reflected the War's universal presence. Bowen's fiction is haunted by the Great War; Beckett's also, if less palpably. Poetry is not enhanced by being held at arm's length from prose and drama which help to create it. Six chapters treat individual (male) poets - Yeats, Graves, MacNeice, Heaney, Longley, and Mahon. This selectivity reveals much. Heaney is the only non-Protestant in origin, and he (like Graves) provides a transcendentalist defence of poetry as such.
Yet there is much acute criticism here, written from a decidedly Northern perspective. Despite the embargo on drama, Frank McGuinness is applauded. The War is equated with the Western Front, in line with Ulster's claim on the Somme. A generous account of Michael Longley concludes the book, though Mahon is younger (and a defector to the South.) Few whom Edna Longley dislikes survive in this report from the battle zone. Seamus Deane is ticked off for downgrading the War in his discussion of The Silver Tassie (ignored by Brearton.) Hand-to-hand fighting persists in Irish criticism, amid visionary smoke and noise.
W.J. McCormack's Ferocious Humanism: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from before Swift to Yeats and After was published earlier this year by J.M. Dent