TRADITION AS TENSION How Poets Inherit, Resist, and Remake

Tradition as Tension

How Poets Inherit, Resist, and Remake 

By Kieran Beville

 

“A poem is not only words arranged on the page; it is a conversation across time, place, and language.” — Eavan Boland 

To write poetry seriously is to step into an ancient practice: one that demands both humility and fierce independence. At its heart, poetry balances private urgency against formal invention, grounding individual voice in a lineage stretching from bardic syllabics to digital text. This article explores that balance: how craft choices, critical scholarship, and historical consciousness together shape a living poetic practice.

I. Reading as Apprenticeship

For poets, reading is not passive consumption but apprenticeship. We read not only for content but to question: Why this lineation? Why this metaphor, this break, this silence?

Consider Seamus Heaney, whose North excavates myth and history to reckon with contemporary violence, or how Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image reclaims the domestic sphere as a site of political and artistic power. Michael Longley’s classical allusions, Paul Muldoon’s playful forms, and Tracy K. Smith’s explorations of identity and history reveal that a poet’s influences are often contradictory — rooted both in native tradition and external experimentation.

Such reading must be wide and deep: the modernists’ radical line (T.S. Eliot), and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an American imagist poet whose work emphasised clarity, vivid imagery, and mythic themes; the deep image school (Robert Bly, James Wright); and transnational poetics that challenge the Anglo-American canon. Scholarship by critics like Clair Wills and Edna Longley helps contextualise these poets within broader cultural and historical frameworks.

II. Craft: Beyond Technique

Craft is not ornament; it is the poem’s architecture. Consider:

• Form: Traditional patterns (sonnet, villanelle, ghazal, blank verse) sharpen language by forcing unexpected moves. Boland, for instance, retools the sonnet to interrogate national myths.
• Music: Assonance, alliteration, and caesura are not decoration but ways of shaping thought. In Heaney’s “The Forge,” hard consonants echo hammer strikes, embodying craft itself.
• Lineation: The decision to break a line before or after a verb alters tone and momentum. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” uses long, meditative lines to pace historical reflection.

Poetry’s craft choices invite discovery, not control. As Paul Muldoon has shown, rhyme can surprise the poet as much as the reader.

III. Abstraction and the Concrete

Ezra Pound’s injunction to “go in fear of abstractions” remains urgent. Poets often begin with broad ideas — love, exile, grief — but these must be grounded in the particular.

Heaney does not write “memory of childhood” but the “cool hardness” of the milk can; Boland evokes political erasure through a single, unremarkable suburban street. Concrete details act as objective correlatives, embodying emotion rather than stating it outright.

Practice: keep a notebook of sensory fragments: overheard speech, the weight of keys in your pocket, a line from a news broadcast. Later, return to these as raw material.

IV. Revision as Re-Seeing

Paul Valéry observed, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Revision is not mere correction; it is exploration.

Techniques include:

• Removing opening lines (often “throat-clearing”).
• Changing form: rewriting free verse as couplets or blank verse.
• Testing different syntaxes: a single sentence; fragments; questions.
• Reading aloud to hear cadence and hidden awkwardness.

Revision becomes the process of discovering what the poem truly wants to say — its deepest urgency — as Flaubert reminds us, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

V. Lineages and Movements: Writing in Context

Poetry never emerges in a vacuum. Knowledge of poetic movements helps locate, challenge, or extend one’s work.

• Black Arts Movement (1960s–70s): Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni fused politics with vernacular and jazz rhythms, redefining audience and purpose.
• Confessional Poetry (1950s–70s): Plath, Sexton, and Lowell balanced personal trauma with strict formal choices, demonstrating that confession is as crafted as myth.
• New York School: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery embraced spontaneity, collage, and high/low cultural references.

Irish poets engage these currents selectively: Boland aligns with feminist revisionism; Muldoon borrows from the New York School…

VI. Advanced Prompts for Discovery

Beyond “write about love,” these prompts force craft decisions:

1. Interruptive Voice: Halfway through, insert an unexpected voice: a fragment of law, a radio jingle, a mythic line.
2. Historical Persona: Write from the voice of a minor historical figure, but use contemporary language.
3. Form and the Everyday: Compose a sestina about your morning commute; a ghazal about your inbox.
4. Ekphrasis with Conflict: Write not about art you admire, but that unsettles you.

These approaches unsettle habit, making craft visible again.

VII. Anthologies as Living Maps

Anthologies trace historical and aesthetic shifts. Essential reading includes:

• The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (ed. Crotty): from medieval praise poems to contemporary experiment.
• The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry: showcases living Irish poets.
• Against Forgetting (ed. Forché): poetry of witness and trauma.
• The BreakBeat Poets (ed. Coval, Lansana, Marshall): hip-hop-inflected poetics.
• American Women Poets in the 21st Century (ed. Rankine & Spahr): hybrid forms and poetics essays.

VIII. Beyond the Personal: Scholarship and Criticism

Critical reading refines artistic choices. Postcolonial theory questions language’s complicity in power; feminist criticism interrogates whose voices are centred; ecocriticism examines nature writing’s ethical stakes.

Works by Edna Longley and Clair Wills challenge poets to contextualise Irish poetry within colonial history and modernity. Far from stifling creativity, scholarship deepens it — asking not only what we write, but why and how.

IX. The Living Tradition

Writing poetry is not about repeating the past, but responding to it. Craft, critical context, and historical awareness together free poets to write with precision and resonance. As Seamus Heaney reminds us, poetry is “a credit balance in the bank of right and wrong.” An act at once personal and communal – shaped by those who came before and those yet to come.

NOTES

1. Eavan Boland, In Her Own Image (Dublin: Arlen House, 1980).
2. Clair Wills, Lovers and Strangers (London: Faber & Faber, 2001); Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986).
3. Boland, In Her Own Image.
4. Paul Muldoon, Selected Poems 1968–2014 (London: Faber & Faber, 2016).
5. Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry 1, no. 6 (1913): 200–206.
6. T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920).
7. Paul Valéry, Tel Quel (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).
8. Anne Carson, Plainwater (New York: Vintage, 1996).
9. Amiri Baraka et al., SOS: Poems 1961–2013 (New York: Grove Press, 2014).
10. Robert Lowell, Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1959).

11.  (Gustave Flaubert, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).

12. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
13. Longley, Poetry in the Wars; Wills, Lovers and Strangers.
14. Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996).