John Montague: Global Regionalist?
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews is Professor of English Literature and Head of the Research Graduate School at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. His books include The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (Macmillan), The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Icon Books), The Art of Brian Friel (Macmillan) and (De-)Constructing the North: Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969 (Four Courts).
The contention of this essay is, first, that Montague’s globalism is of an arguably superficial kind, in that while he may be an international modernist in poetic technique, he is more of a traditionalist in his socio-political attitudes; and, second, that Montague’s regionalism is of a notably skewed and partial kind, in that he tends to see his famously divided province in terms of one community only. While demonstrating an openness to cosmopolitan influences, what Montague sought was not a continual process of ‘making it new’ but a modernisation of Irish tradition within a nationalist framework.