A Scholar’s Books and Boxes

I ENVY PEOPLE who can keep everything they ever wrote on a flash drive. When I happen to gaze at the 51 boxes of unsorted papers at one end of my study, I look away quickly. And I make excuses: No two of my books were on the same subject; I need hard copy for proofreading; sometimes the Wi-Fi goes out in this ZIP code; little things get lost.

I have no excuse. I could have shredded the notes for each book, because my last four monographs were on totally different subjects. Each one generated the next by a kind of opposition. My book on five Irish cultural controversies (The Irish Art of Controversy), begun in 1991, was published in 2005; I did so much research that each controversy could have been a book. OK, I told myself, now I’m going to write about one brief event; I began work on the four-hour dinner that W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound organized for the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. It hadn’t occurred to me that a book on such a small event would require an awful lot of research. In 2014, when Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal was published, I’d completed a book about an all-male dinner from which women were explicitly excluded, although the seven men had only met because of their romantic and professional associations with women. Now, I said to myself, I’m going to write a book with women in the center and men on the periphery.

Gathering material for a book about women’s eyewitness accounts of the Easter Rising inublin involved exciting research. People all over Ireland ransacked their family papers and sent me holograph manuscripts of their grandmothers’ stories of 1916. Because my focus was on women involved in the revolution, the men were in the background this time. At the Dublin launch of At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916 (2015), all the descendants of the women gathered for a group photograph in the Royal Irish Academy.

But in April 2016, when the centenary of the Rising was over, I said to myself, I want to get back to poetry, my real love. This will be a quick book, because most of the poems are short. Nine years later, the “quick” book on poetry was published: Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s (2025). Writing it proved as sociable and pleasant as writing about 1916, because most of the more than 60 poets I studied have become good friends. Before I confront the boxes, I’d like to emphasize that my years of scholarship have not been lonely. Lots of teas and coffees and lunches in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, and New York, as well as Zoom and email, have kept me connected with the grandchildren of the women rebels and with the many contemporary poets.

The ideas I developed about “slightly magical” Irish poetry involved the use of words like “ontological” and “metaphysics,” terms I learned in one of my best undergraduate courses with Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Hans Oberdiek. I owe him thanks for the concepts that formed the argument of my most recent book.