Poetry: When, in a review written in 1964, Padraic Fallon describes the verse technique of Rilke as "marvellously exciting", he reveals one of the sources of his own enduring brilliance as a literary critic - a capacity for exuberant enthusiasm.
It is a quality to be found everywhere in this lively collection of fugitive pieces by one of the sharpest literary imaginations of his generation, an imagination exercised in poems, radio plays, essays and reviews from the poet's precocious beginnings in the 1930s to the mature refinement of his work in the 1960s.
"Exuberant enthusiasm" is one source of this talent. Another is a razor-keen, skeptically alert intellectual understanding of, as well as a sympathetic feeling for, what poetry and poems are about: how they work; what they reveal of their maker; the task and function and vocation of the poet in the modern and contemporary world. When he speaks in the same Rilke review of the "rightness and exhilaration" of art, he implicitly lays bare the critic's task: to be true to both this "rightness" and this "exhilaration", to be the equitable judge of subject and style, to be awake to art's subtle, complex dance between morality (understood as fidelity to the true nature of things) and play.
In the weave of a poem Fallon never loses sight of how the moral warp and playful weft crisscross into patterns of satisfaction, how the body-grace of technique and the heart of the matter must achieve some sort of quickening alliance if the work of art is to realize its own breath-of-life potential. Always aware of the "affectionate truth" of art, his critical responses are waves of sensation and thought "in which things live actively". Consisting of brief reviews, mostly of poetry collections, as well as more expansive meditations on the poet's vocation and the craft of poetry itself, and a few pieces of a more directly autobiographical nature (early memories of Athenry), the well-titled A Poet's Journal is a valuable addition to our understanding of post-Yeats, post- Revival literary culture in Ireland, a late gift from one of its shrewdest and most articulate participant-commentators.
Less angrily embattled than Clarke, more intellectually secure and critically even-handed than Kavanagh, broader and deeper in his understanding of pre- and post-Independence Irish culture than MacNeice, Fallon provides us with graphic sketches of his cultural, literary, and socio-political milieu, as well as a vivid, non-egotistical self-portrait of the poet thinking about and responding articulately to the possibilities of his craft.
Whether I'm reading one of his journal pieces (written for the Bell in 1951 and 1952) or any one of the dozens of short reviews, I'm again and again stopped, startled, by the poet-critic's polished, witty, economic, thought-provoking, brilliant but never show-off phrasing. His sentences cut to the quick of any issue; his phrases, while light of rhetorical touch, have the weight of a long, deeply thoughtful involvement with the subject.
He can be clear-sighted ("Irish literary movements have never gotten under the skin of the Irish people"; Austin Clarke offers "the Catholic conscience simplified in landscape"; the poet's task in the new State "was to make poetry out of entirely new conditions"); prescient (recognizing its early promise, he says Thomas Kinsella's best note is something "knotty, problematic, and most often lucid and illuminating"; Ted Hughes is "a major poet in the making"); humorous (Shelley is "Eros with a pamphlet, Ariel with a blowpipe"; AE went around "in a state of spontaneous combustion"); or fastidiously technical (thinking of the verse of late Shakespeare plays, he observes that "a varied iambic can take most everyday speech into its orbit").
Whether his subject is in the major key of Yeats or Pound or Rilke or the minor key of Vernon Scannell or Edith Sitwell, he gives it the full benefit of his close, sympathetic, always scrupulous attention. Well equipped with strong opinions, but seemingly with neither special agendas nor idiosyncratic axes to grind, he is gifted with a generous ability to rejoice in talent wherever he finds it, to celebrate without anxiety or envy whatever he deems worthwhile, and to say directly why he thinks what he thinks.
As poet and as critic Fallon, while possessed - to an uncommon degree - of common sense, is an original, and I think that's what I especially love and admire about his poems and about these essays and reviews.
I only regret that he did not at times turn his expert, innately learned critical hand to longer pieces, giving himself the chance of working on a broader canvas, of carrying a problem or an insight into greater depths than are available in brief reviews. (The most likely reason for this is that he spent all his working life as a Customs and Excise civil servant.) Although his articulate energy and insights make a lot of other writing about poetry (of his own time and later) seem a bit lame, tame, lacking in spark, he is not without blind spots (meaning, I suppose, points at which I disagree with his judgements).
His various responses to Eliot, for example, seem one-dimensional and never truly resolved (whereas he has abiding respect for Pound, a decisive influence on his own verse); he doesn't ever quite come to sure terms with Synge; and he's off-target not only in his estimate of Milton, but also in his comments on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop.
In general, too, his feel for modern American poetry isn't comfortable, suggesting the variety, originality, and importance of the Berryman, Lowell, Bishop generation as well as their immediate successors held no compelling interest for him.
No matter. These pieces brim with good thoughts robustly and entertainingly expressed, while the repeated critical encounters with his great shadowing predecessor, Yeats (wrestling bouts conducted here and in a number of his strongest poems), represent some of the finest early (and later) responses to that difficult Master. Even Fallon's negative positions - because clearly spelt out and supported with the zest of the close reader - are always engaging, while whatever did catch his interested admiration he unfailingly illuminates, bringing us in piece after piece closer not only to individual poems and poets but to an understanding of the craft to which his life was dedicated,to the craft itself, to those who practised it, and to its place in the wider world, a place his scepticism knew was small and marginal, and his celebratory instinct kept affirming as large and central.
His judgments and canny observations remain alive both as revelations of his sensibility and of his subject matter. A deep reader (and sometime translator) of French and German poetry, he is always open to the new, and provides a small window into what constituted Irish literary culture in a period which tends not to be much regarded at the moment.
In his dedicated modernism, which he married to a traditionalism to which he would always remain faithful, he was, as the very tone of these reviews suggest, very much his own (often ironic) man. He has, as he says of a critic he admires, "all the bright currency of our time", while his observations carry convincingly home to us the feel (social, political and historical as well as literary) of his own time. What a treat it would be to have his sharp, imaginative, critical takes on poets who have come after him, poets the like of McGuckian, Durcan, Muldoon, Boland, Longley, Mahon, Heaney, and Ní Chuilleanáin.
That'd learn us.
Fallon was born in 1905, so this is his centenary year. Let's hope the present collection of his critical work (usefully introduced and edited with professional and filial care by Brian Fallon), along with the recently published selection of his remarkable radio plays, a 1990 Collected Poems, and the richly representative A Look in the Mirror & Other Poems (2003), will allow him at last to be seen clearly for what he is - a central, indispensable presence in the Irish poetry and, more broadly, in the Irish literary culture of the 20th Century.
The last sentence in this splendid collection is Fallon's characteristically generous response to a little Dolmen Press volume by Padraic Colum, and I can only repeat it here about his own posthumous book of resurrections: "I can recommend it to anyone".
Eamon Grennan is the author of Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century (Creighton University Press)