Celebrating St. Patrick's Day, Irish writers and their peerless facility for the written language via nparts
Kennedy’s Pub behind Trinity College in Dublin has an intriguing claim to history. Formerly Conway’s, it’s stood at the corner of Fenian and Westland Row since 1850, right across the street from Sweny’s Pharmacy.
In most parts of the world, writers write of home with affection, and those places live on for us, inflected by the voice of the author, in the popular imagination, even while the places themselves remain largely undisturbed. Saul Bellow’s Chicago may be eternal on the page, but as far as I can tell there’s no Augie March sightseeing tour, no bronze likeness of Herzog in Hyde Park — the homage runs one way. In Ireland, it runs in both directions.
It emerges that among Irish writers the English language is of the utmost concern. Many of the country’s masterpieces are expressly about language — about how it is used or abused, about its traditions and informing history, about its limitations and its unexplored frontiers. You can see this as far back as 1729, when Swift published his satirical Modest Proposal, demonstrating such supreme command of rhetoric that he weaponized it.
He is particularly fond of muffins. How to explain why this is one of the funniest sentences ever written for the stage? It has something to do with the soundness of Algernon’s reasoning — that eating muffins does seem a sensible course of relief during times of crisis, and that it won’t do to eat muffins, or anything else, in an agitated manner. More to the point, the word “muffin” is very funny.
Many of the country’s masterpieces are expressly about language — about its traditions and informing history, about its limitations and its unexplored frontiers. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament… He would never be popular: he saw that. … The English critics, perhaps, would recognize him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices his book would get.
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