Eavan Boland As National Treasure

(Picture, Dublin, Stephens Green Pond, by Susan Abraham)

Written in Response to International Women's Day, 2018, Thursday March 8th.

Speculative Discourse / Imbhas Forosnai / Manifestation of knowledge which enlightens / Cauldron of Poesy / Amergin's Ars Poetica 

As Dublin poet Eavan Boland's globally successful academic and literary career is testament to, Irish poets who are women have been historically wholly outside, and generally are thoroughly put culturally off by the long and established bardic and courtly conservative patriarchal literary filí poet tradition and its arduous and voluminous set-textual curriculum.

That taught trained and turned out over twelve Samhain to Beltane semesters, for a thousand years of the Gaelic poetry-schools' existence, forty consecutive generations of bard and literary filidh men poets from the 7-17C. 

For all but a cererbally touched and spiritually committed handful of both men and women that end up drawn to and enjoying the long and intellectually challenging studies involved in learning in Irish and in English translation the full of this ancient literary filidh poets' tradition; it is a male model which offers absolutely nothing in the way of inspiration, role-models, or relevance for the overwhelming majority of modern Irish women (and men) writers and poets.

Understandably inclined to be inspired and follow in the literary footsteps of contemporary female Irish trailblazers whose poetries of bereavement, career, childbirth, divorce, family, marriage, motherhood, illness, relationships, sex, and the everyday lived female bodily, cultural, and quotidian psychological experience of being a woman; connects directly and viscerally with women in a way ancient male bardic voices from a thousand and more years ago mostly do not.

As Boland states in Object Lessons: "... early on as a poet, certainly in my twenties, I realised that the Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry was not available to me."

The words woman and poet in the Ireland Boland grew up in were, she tells us, 'almost magnetically opposed', 'oil and water'.

Although, over a short period of time, this has all changed utterly; and there is now more than poetic parity across the board. For example, women, from the director to the editorial assistant, make up six-sevenths, or nearly 90% of the state-appointed and employed staff at Poetry Ireland. The Official Verse Culture body, People's Poetry Palace on Parnell Square, and premier literary performance vehicle in the Republic of Ireland "committed to achieving excellence in the reading, writing and performance of poetry throughout the island of Ireland."

And this figure does not include Boland herself, who began with the "Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry (that) was not available to" her when she began writing. But who is now sitting atop of the Irish Nation's poetry tree as its Official Verse Culture chooser in chief and Editor of Poetry Ireland's Poetry Ireland Review, directly deciding the state-sanctioned poems for inclusion into Official Ireland's flagship domestic and international poetry journal of global record and note.

A culturally inspiring and positive state of being when we consider that it is only in the last three decades that Irish society has from the often dark and barbarous past of recent tragic histories of oppression, cover up, scandal, and silencing by Church, State and the Ulster Troubles - emerged into a long overdue light of social and economic mass growth, change, and full poetic and gender parity in the literary arts.

There is now a fully established equality of literary esteem in which Irish female writers rule the global roost when it comes to romantic fiction, mystery, crime thrillers, childrens and young adult, and a new wave of transgressive female fiction and short story writers led by deliciously dark comedic voices such as June Caldwell and Lisa McInerney. 

Unthinkable that the in ye face content and brilliantly subversive genre-busting comedic and literary style unique to both of these critically acclaimed Irish women's voices would have been published in Ireland during Boland's time as a young poet. 

They would have been sectioned into the Central Mental Hospital on the word of a powerful and jealous male rival and had their hands tied behind their backs with orders they not be allowed to write.

And so it is a long way in a short time, and the milestone has been the Good Friday Agreement and subsequent Peace Process. Which took the daily male created barbarity out of the cultural equation, and since then women's voices in Ireland have been firmly claiming their rightful cultural place.

This after having broken almost completely free from what formerly was all too often a horrific and horrendously repressive, and insidiously abusive misogynistic culture dominated in business and politics by a small caste of thoroughly unethical misogynistic men. For example, until the 1970s in Ireland, Irish women could not sit on juries, had to leave their government job on getting married, were unable to get a restraining order against a violent husband, could not refuse to have sex with their husbands, and generally were there to be seen and not heard.

During this long time of de Valera's cripplingly insular Ireland Boland was born into and raised in, women could sit next to the poets in the pub, but they could not be the poet, artist, critic, or intellectual. And these various what Boland calls 'signal injustices' meant being a woman in de Valera's Irish society was a singularly unjust experience.

And of course there was the other society-wide injustice of the Catholic church in which there was a class of perversely corrupted priests who enacted all manner of evil, and subjected individuals and communities within Irish society to the most calumniatory, censorious, cynical, demeaning, depraved, derogatory, destructive, malign, obloquious, opprobrious, sickening, vilifying compulsively one-sided coercive 'relationships' in which ordinary Irish children and women were culturally manipulated, legally subjugated and controlled by a fear and abject distrust of Ireland's ingrained patriarchal system; and with no real public presence, platforms or freedom to write, speak or publish their own voices.

A silent majority most definitely silent no more.

As Boland eloquently writes:

"The majority of Irish male poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry. They moved easily, deftly, as if by right among images of women in which I did not believe and of which I could not approve. The women in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status. This was especially true where the woman and the idea of the nation were mixed: where the nation became a woman and the woman took on a national posture.

The trouble was [that] these images did good service as ornaments. In fact, they had a wide acceptance as ornaments by readers of Irish poetry. Women in such poems were frequently referred to approvingly as mythic, emblematic. But to me these passive and simplified women seemed a corruption. For they were not decorations, they were not ornaments. However distorted these images, they had their roots in a suffered truth."

Boland says of this deafening silence that "It seemed to me a species of human insult that at the end of all, in certain Irish poems, they should become elements of style rather than aspects of truth."

This 'suffered truth' was founded entirely on instilling silence by fear into the people that dared not speak against Ireland's entirely male legal, political and religious institutions which in de Valera's Ireland operated as a monolithic Official Male State that kept its people and culture socially and economically oppressed, repressed and visionless for so long after Independence and the civil war.

And so Boland found her own way of discovering and setting first free her voice into letters in de Valera's culturally stunted Ireland by seeking inspiration not in a dry impenetrable archaic ancient oppressive and spiritually inhibiting patriarchal bardic tradition, but finding it most notably in the language of the American poet, public intellectual, and radical feminist, Adrienne Rich, as well as in the voice of the British poet, Denise Levertov.

Discovering her path into poetry lay in practicing a wholly modern experimental American form, that grew out from the university workshop model, and what is often pejoratively labeled 'confessional' writing. One founded on a completely different contemporary, and ultra-modern 20C poetics, gloriously loose, free and unencumbered by the weight of an unmanageable and burdensome wholly male writing tradition.

A modern form of literary liberation in which the only rule is that there aren't any rules; and no fixed starting point other than to spontaneously write whatever comes into the imagination. 

In which the Dublin writer sought to speak the private entirely authentic female Irish experience, that successfully redressed the cultural and historical gender imbalance by exploring in poetry the hitherto unshared and lived experiences of being a woman. 

One wholly new to Irish poetry when she began leading the way and creating a template and inspirational model for the generations of Irish women following her. Creating a contemporary literary movement founded on documenting the authentically lived female themes and subjects of marriage, suburban home, motherhood, illness; and bringing to life a poetry of the private everyday moment of real women's lives.

In an original and entirely logical rejection of the 1960s and 1970s Irish poetry model, in which the acceptable themes of poetry were very public, officious, and seriously sombre, dealing with airy lofty public events, in which, as Boland states in her RTE Profile, it was permissible to have a political murder but not a washing machine. 

There were very fixed subjects for poetry during de Valera's long political reign, and an entire assumption about who could, and who could not, be a poet. With Boland being firmly situated in the second category as a married woman writing poems on subjects that the snobs in the first category, as Boland states in the RTE Profile, dismissed as the scribblings of someone that shouldn't be writing at all.

And so when she began as the earliest pioneer of this wholly experimental course and form of celebratory female writing in which domestic themes were brought into the public sphere, it was a brand new, refreshing, and revelatory writing giving voice to the lived familial, marital and domestic incidents of normal human reality. What was previously considered the inappropriate and mundane unpoetic material of everyday suburbia was translated, transmuted, and turned by the visionary will of Boland into a legitimate, popular subject matter; and creative business of a radically more intimate and homely form of contemporary Irish writing. 

One that appealed to and spoke to entirely new audiences and redefined the relationship between poetry and the ordinary everyday literary people of Ireland. 

One in which the private body and the cerebral female Self became major central conceits, sources, subjects and themes of this (then) startlingly different, emotionally substantive, entirely authentic, and wholly original newly emerging form of free verse poetry in late 2OC Irish writing.

And when she left for America, leaving behind the cultural and creative conservatism and stifling petty poetic condescension and misogyny of male Dublin life, she continued the process of personal and public evolution by carving out and creating her own unique role and model of writing. 

Further walking in letters on a path that led her to writing and publishing to great critical and commercial acclaim poems and exploratory experimental biographical and critical prose, that laid out her poetics and set down a guide and map that became an inspirational model for English speaking and writing women across the Irish and Anglophone world.

Who had been shown a way of successfully rejecting the patriarchal bardic mode of lofty public utterance about serious newsworthy events, with such vigour, fervour brio and elan.

An early important encounter for Boland was meeting the person who became transfigured into her poem, The Achill Woman, as an object of profound cultural mystery, as she tells us in A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic, 1989)

"When I met the Achill woman I was already a poet, I thought of myself as a poet. Yet nothing that I understood about poetry enabled me to understand her better. Quite the reverse. I turned my back on her in that cold twilight and went to commit to memory the songs and artifices of the very power systems which had made her own memory such an archive of loss."

Whilst for oneself the Achill Woman is a familiar paternal grandmother, Winifred Desmond, nee Masterson; born in a Sraheens Bothy overlooking Achill Sound facing the Currane peninsula (pictured below).

With an Achill poem of one's own lyrical soul source that is fully Connected  by blood, flesh and spirit to and from the island and its mythic Tuatha De Danann people of the goddess Art.

That brings to mind a half stanza that appears in Ériu (1921-3) (vol. 9, part 2, p. 118) "Irish Grammatical Tracts", edited by Osborn Bergin:

Sinn ag loighe ar in lucht romhainn,
lucht oile orainn san úaigh.

(we * at * lying * on * the * people * before us /
people * other * on us * in the * grave)

We rest on those who came before us,
and others will rest on us in the grave.

~

And so for the Irish diplomat's daughter who lived as a child in London and New York where her father had been appointed, there was a significant sense of detachment from the cultural heart of rural Ireland.

As an emotional outsider, two very different women from two radically oppositional Irish worlds, Boland made no poetic connection with this wild remote and mythic Achill island woman recounting to the young Trinity educated diligent and studious poet local Famine folklore; and thus the Mayo woman remained in Boland's mind a remote and culturally distant, strange and opaque figure. 

Due, in part, to Boland's peripatetic upbringing and its concomitant sense of home being not a single geographical location of physical permanence in the way it is for those that are rooted in the reality of one fixed unchanging place; but more home being the carrying around within the imagination a wider world, in a transcontinental process of departure and return between multiple homes in different cultures, countries, and continents.

An urbane academy poet for whom the personal equivalent of bothy, bog, and bardic complexity, exist in the parallel poetics of domestic experience. The life-long loving marital bonds of one half of a happy marriage, and the self-schooled contemporary complexity of a thoroughly modern global female Irish mind and physical body in the singularly unchanging spiritual home of a legitimate, successfully hard won, self-created dán/gift/poetry, and 'fate'.

One that this suburban woman of the people of the goddess Art, wrought to become the first real 20C faery from the Tuatha De Danann tradition to speak a visionary home of 'Ireland' that made tame the savageness of Her bardic male mind.   

Whilst the mind of the Achill woman was still dwelling in a pre-historic time, with a living connection to the superstitious remote antiquity and ancient topography of a bardic poetic model, and cerebral construction of physical Ireland perceived as an invisible female deity and cthonic earth Goddess that the suburban Dublin poet had conspicuously rejected when starting out after associating it with de Valera's omnipresent culturally misogynistic influence and suffocating belittling anti-Woman society in the gritty political centre and extreme periphery on the opposite side from the living heart of the Achill faery island Her.

A timeless Achill populated by the sidhe, Fir Bolg, and most ancient otherworldly race of Fomorians. Where the wind itself is considered to be invisible spirits traveling in their troops to sport, compete and do poetic battle with the hosts of other places away from the heartland and country of the Tuatha De Danann, literally, people of the goddess Art.

That are as real and homely in the minds of Achill men and women dwelling for generations in that land of mountain sky sand sea stone, wild Atlantic weather, and the implacable majesty of Croaghaun's two thousand foot sea cliffs -; as neatly mown lawns, ice cream vans, the orderly sound of door bells, the light thrum of automatically opening garage doors, and the trusty hum of a washing machine cycle are to the Irish housewife and women poets giving voice to the everyday domestic and familial moments in Darndale and Dundrum.

~

And so, all this is an object lesson in how what works for poet number one, and what tradition and tales they are born into and will naturally connect with, take to, learn from and love; will be to poet number two a wholly alien baffling strange tradition, and not at all the same set of familial experiences it is for poet number one. 

Ultimately each poet has their own unique literary template, spiritual path and poetic model, that s/he alone will create, discover, write; and by drawing the sounds in their silent spiritual voice from the cerebral cauldron of experience within their imagination, set them slowly down syllable by syllable into print, by the continual spontaneous experimental act of spinning letters into lines, sentences and stanzas.

And one by one the silent aural sounds within transliterated into words are written in form/s, that, over time, the more s/he writes, come to accurately reflect, sing and speak in song the one true voice in their head heart and soul.

Or not. 

And what all can recognize, wholeheartedly commend, and celebrate, is Boland's unique self-created path and position in Irish poetry, as an inspirational role model for the generations of Irish and Anglophone women and men writers that are following Boland. 

Although one's own sixteen year path of scholastic study on which I found nothing but joy, very possibly, and perhaps precisely, because I am a man, and so can connect with it-; is a course that will be, and is, totally off-putting to a majority of Irish women writers; precisely because there are no women's voices in there with which to identify and connect. 

And so in the exact same way many men do not read or connect in any real depth with the contemporary women's writing Boland is a world leader in, so too many (if not most) women (and men) are not in any way attracted to, nor do many connect with, the bardic tradition and its one thousand years of poems written by forty continuous generations of literary bards and highly educated courtly filidh poets undertaking the role of genealogist, legal counsel, propagandist and praiser in chief of their aristocratic patron, and satirist combating the slurs and slights of their patron's political rivals.

With most today passing over what in the orginal Gaelic was an arduous twelve-year set-textual curriculum, that taught trained and turned out a thousand years of courtly male poets in Ireland from the 7-17C; in favour of becoming a poet on their own terms.

Learning on a more modern, less challenging plethora of folk poetry curricula written and taught by any number of contemporary self-taught spoken and written word practitioners from similar confessional writing schools of British and American learning.

In which the starting point is not the introduction to students of ancient unchanging knowledge in the form of ogham scales and the rote acquiring of a system of prosody; but spontaneously writing whatever comes into the imagination.

And though one has been lucky enough to witness Boland in person reading only once, two years after arriving in Dublin, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, 2006; one can say, that, though at the time I was not led to explore her work further, the act of writing this blog has turned on a light of sincere curiosity and genuine interest in tackling Boland's writing in greater depth than the coast for quotes and skim across the landing pages of online sites containing basic biographical and critical data points with which one made this experimentally written piece spurred into spontaneous literary being from a Poetry Ireland Facebook Page video of Boland that was posted as part of International Women's Day.
 
Being a product of the happy and productive writing workshop model oneself, I do look forward to becoming acquainted with the published work of the Director of Stanford University's Creative Writing Program and Ireland's most critically significant living poet who is a woman. 

With a heart of Dublin one's own Dublin born and reared mother possessed, even though she left her Cabra home in 1955 aged thirteen with her elder sister, and three brothers. Along with Mother, Mary Swords nee English, and retired Bohola garda father, John Swords, who'd spent thirty years since the founding of the state serving as a guardian of the peace in An Garda Síochána. Dead before I was born, and who my mother idolized.

"At the very least it seemed to me that I was likely to remain an outsider in my own national literature, cut off from its archive, at a distance from its energy.  Unless, that is, I could repossess it.  This proposal is about that conflict and that repossession and about the fact that repossession itself is not a static or single act.  Indeed, the argument which describes it may itself be no more than a part of it."

Eavan Boland, Object Lessons.

Kevin Desmond Swords

 

 Masterson's bothy, Sraheens, overlooking Achill Sound to the Currane peninsula.

Cheers Ears

I attended last evening for the very first time a unique, cererbally empowering, spiritually uplifting, and poetically prestigious live event, at the recently obtained premier bardic home for the people of the goddess Art. The Poetry Ireland Literary Palace on Parnell Square, whose talking participants were introduced to an all but full public room by its Director Maureen Kennelly.

Who, in the name of Banbha, Fodla and Eiru's people, has been appointed the administrative guardian tasked with leading a collaborative creative turning of this elegant property into a stately home fit for the 21C cultural purpose and possession of the ancient Irish artistically aristocratic 'noble brew in which is boiled / the true root of all knowledge / which bestows after duty / which is climbed after diligence / which poetic ecstasy sets in motion / which joy turns / which is revealed through sorrow'; and that the unimprovable original druidic voice speaking 7C Milesian poet Amergin's Literary Ars poetica --that was only first translated into English in 1978--, informs us, 'is lasting power / undiminishing protection'.

The ninety minute evening of readings and discussion, Arguing with Edmund Spenser in Contemporary Irish Poetry, was a collaborative event organised by The School of English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing, University College Dublin, and Poetry Ireland.

Five poets who'd been "thinking and arguing with Spenser in their recent work" gave a collectively virtuoso performance that made this event a homely yet seriously scholarly and culturally warm occasion that cost those attending precisely nothing but our time, travel, ears, eyes, and which suitably edified and entertained our minds with the imaginations of five of Ireland's premier poetry practitioners performing in letters and live spoken language at the very highest level.

John McAuliffe, Trevor Joyce, Leanne O'Sullivan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and the current Ireland Professor of Poetry, Ard Ollamh Eireann, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

~

St. Helens, Lancastrian born, Kerry raised Irish language poet, Ard Ollamh Eireann (2001-4), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, gave the first reading of her mythic poetry written in response to Spenser at an event curated by the UCG educated poet-critic, Manchester University Creative Centre for New Writing co-director, John McAuliffe.

Ní Dhomhnaill poignantly explained how it was very challenging, and all but impossible to intellectually reconcile the finely crafted airy lines of praise in the Faerie Queene-- that she first read by the sea near Smerwick on the Dingle peninsula in Kerry --with what Spenser witnessed and was complicit in, in his official capacity as Secretary to Lord Grey. The genocidal act of the Smerwick Massacre, that signaled the beginning of the end of the disastrously inept Second Desmond Rebellion, conducted by the hands of Walter Raleigh leading the decapitation of eight hundred possibly press-ganged Italian and Spanish papal soldiers; which Spenser described as the 'rough work' of his fellow courtier poet.

McAuliffe's ten minute Introduction to the event set the scene and provided context to Spenser's role as a literary propagandist and Crown administrator divvying up and parceling out the former final fifteenth Earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald Desmond's escheated half a million acres to loyal Elizabethan English and Anglo-Irish tenants, and those literary and martial Elizabethan courtiers who had successfully hunted down, crushed, defeated, and brought to an end three and a half centuries of Hiberno-Norman Geraldine governance in Munster by decapitating the head from the House of Desmond and its lineage of four barons and fifteen earls.

Next up was Trevor Joyce whose texts were a variation of the write-thru form. Where the literary experimentalist takes one text, chops, cuts, and reconfigures it into another text.

A form of turbo-charged and very complex creatively conducted Found Poetry oneself began practicing in 2004 in my final year at university, using Sylvia Plath's father poem Colossus. And since that time one's regular experimental literary acts of write-thru have evolved into the fairly fluidly oiled process and practice it is today.

Write-thru is a form not many practise in because it is a fairly challenging form that takes a lot of intellectual and creative effort. Most published poetry is personal lyric of the minor and major epiphany, and Joyce, one of Ireland's premier modernist poets, is in one sense working in resistance to this tradition by drawing his literary inspiration from and following in the experimental footsteps of the 1930s Irish modernist poets such as fellow Dubliner, Samuel Beckett, career diplomat, Denis Devlin, and European intellectual and Advent Publisher, Brian Coffey. The latter two practices for the bulk of the time they were living were in the main airily waved away in silent dismissal as culturally irrelevant by the less fully realised supposedly leading poetic lights of immediate post-Yeatsean bubbaling tewn.

In which his many admirers stepped into the absence of a living cynosure and arrogated its afterglow to themselves as his enemies, flunkies, friends and many competing literary custodians. The retrospective elevation into the first order of the Irish literary canon and retroactive acknowledgement of their contribution to Irish letters by later generations of golden circle ollúna under the wise and humane spiritual guidance of the Bellaghy bard, is, perhaps, a source of grim satisfaction for some of the Poundian inspired literary crazees.

Devlin and Coffey's treatment by the state-sanctioned and subsidized Official Verse Culture mob in Dublin, as it was with Kavanagh, it is now generally agreed, constituted the many petty and mean-spirited acts of negligence by omission at the time by a ruthlessly lesser talented and less visionary 'Yeatsean' careerist crowd who traded on Silly's name to boost their own published efforts as Friends of Famous Mister Coole Dublin Sligo London dreamer.

Dubliner Joyce recited what for oneself personally was the most interesting piece of the evening. Made up entirely of one syllable words cut from what is generally considered to be Spenser's crowning achievement, Mutability Cantos, and recast by the arch modernist as a write-thru.

And one from his book of most recently published experimental poems that Joyce describes in the subtitle of this latest collection, Fastness, as being: "A Translation from the English of Edmund Spenser"; which is at once both modern and ancient. The hypnotic effect of the one syllable pitched perfect oral flow was startling in its originality. Joyce spoke of his process of casting these literary and linguistically innovative experiments and write-thru poems, in a very illuminating manner.

He talked of 'stripping out' all the four and five syllable words of Latin and Greek gods and goddesses, and getting down to the linguistic hardcore and foundation of Spenser's poetry and intellect. Very much a make-over expert taking the words of one text, changing it into another, and in the process making the finished product the experimentalist's own voice.

The protean nature of language is what, as I heard it, interests Joyce. The fleetingness of thought, ideas, and very much an intellectual approach, balanced by a long and established practical understanding of the basics of spiritual reality due to his life-long love of language which is the vehicle for spiritual expression we all share.

Joyce said that prior to his dive into Spenser he was not at all a fan of his poetry (I think the word 'loathed' may have been uttered); not least because Spenser is a very divisive figure due to his role as the founding voice of Elizabethan lyric propaganda, at Ireland's tragically sorrowful cultural expense. But after working on the write-thrus Joyce began to appreciate Spenser's gift with language, and came to understand the poet and separate him from 'the bad man'.

'He was a good poet but a bad man', was the succinct and perfect summation spoken by the always interesting and prodigiously gifted, humble, modest and wise current Ard Ollamh Eireann, Ireland Professor of Poetry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Whose ability to cast a cold eye across his poetry and separate it from the barbarous acts Spenser was active and complicit in as one of the most ruthless Elizabethan toadies of his time, dissolved one's own dilemma of this poet with culturally oppressive proximity to one's own paternal name and (the family yarn spins) lineage of Desmond.

And for this I am eternally grateful I attended this ninety minute event of readings and panel discussion on this reviled and polarizing figure in Irish culture and its poetry.

The Trinity high priestess of Desmond Munster English said she had heard this from another academic. And this simple calmly rendered statement of reality allows the Irish writer a permission to begin investigating the poetry of Spenser with a sense of emotional detachment and intellectual balance by examining and appreciating the craft of poetry without being cluttered up and put critically off kilter by the hate-filled genocidal composition of his most humanly evil publication too incendiary to publish during his own lifetime, A View of the present State of Ireland.

A truly evil text composed by an inferiority-ridden then modern contemporary Elizabethan poet who had been born to a low station and with the barest of authentic poetry tradition to draw and learn literate nobility from. And with no real spiritually noble aristocratic class or humanly positive qualities.

A mind filled only with the desires, whims, and jealousies of a ruthlessly heartless and wicked supremely selfish uncaring Tudor courtier and astonishingly flawed human being. The word-work of a homicidal psychopathic cowardly bully and what is called by working-class London English people, a no good wrong 'un. A truly bad example passionately advocating in his vile doggerel for the violent extermination of the Irish people and culture. Rendered by this arch cruel and conspicuously envious man who exercised his gift in language to a very fluent degree, as 'the pacifying of Ireland'.

But only, of course, the delusional monarchical mind of this mentally ill madman argues, should its people not cease speaking Gaelic, wearing Irish dress, stop conducting themselves in their millennia old ancient and noble Irish cultural habits; and become English themselves.

I may have the order wrong but next up, I think, was Leanne O'Sullivan, who came to Spenser via her husband, Spenserian scholar and Medieval and Renaissance specialist in the UCC English Department, Dr. Andrew King.

Her response to Spenser was a smoothly eloquent and innately poetically gracious flowing lyric poem in which a third person narrator muses on the art of scholarly endeavor via the form of a character composed by the narrator as a literary errand boy and scribal assistant moving among and around to and from books and manuscripts as O'Sullivan's arch bandraoi voice sculpted by the mythic reality of sand sea sky and stone transports the listening Reader to faeryland with her otherworldly O'Sullivan Beara spirituality rooted and sourced in the ancient Cashel Eóganachta nobility of magical memorial Milesian mouth-music originating in what became the Gaelic Irish and Kerry Cork Kingdom of Desmond.

The culturally poetic force of mystic language Nollaig Ó Muraíle suggests has an etymological connection to the Kerry dialect word béarach, béar[r]a that refers to "rocks on the seashore against which the sea breaks with great force."

The first of the three O'Sullivan readings I have attended was the 2004 launch of her debut Waiting For My Clothes, and four Bloodaxe collections later she has fulfilled the early promise of a fully rounded innately perfected wild mythic imagination that made such a global splash when she turned up a shy and artistic teenager to a local poetry workshop in Cork composed of vacationing American MFA students, hosted by visiting poetry professor and high priest of witty sardonic and dry poetic American modernism, Billy Collins.

Who spotted her natural and prodigious gift for literary speech that eventful day and from this chance encounter attained her potential early on after a rocky teenage start to become Ireland's premier Munster poet of her generation.

John McAuliffe, one of Ireland's most contemporaneously significant and publicly visible poet-critics, had as the subject for his poem his first visit to the ruins of Kilcolman castle, where Spenser had written The Faerie Queene, and that was a Geraldine castle of Desmond's Spenser ended up with the possession of, along with three thousand surrounding acres, after the final fifteenth earl Gerald Desmond's half a million Munster acres, castles and estates were escheated and divvied up by Spenser as a Crown servant and secretarial agent tasked with the orderly transition to the highest bidders of the Geraldine properties, spoils and wealth acquired by violence and mass murder.

McAuliffe's lyrical investigation and literary wrestle with the ghost, contrasted the ruined castle with the grandeur of the Spenserian stanzas that served as the Merchant Taylor scholarship pupil's then contemporary formally experimental cutting edge Elizabethan amateur's rough-work and loose less evolved English language parallel to an expansively more metrically sophisticated anamain praise poetry composed in the strict-straight Dán Díreach verse-form. That was the the first class superlative poetic state and reserve signature form of the apical grade of the seven degrees of wisdom in the Gaelic literary tradition, the ollúna/poetry professors.

As we learn from the great 19C Kilkenny Irish language scholar, John O'Donovan, the formal complexity of the Dán Díreach verse form makes the metrical sophistication of the experimentalist Spenser's poetry by comparison appear as challenging to compose as a limerick, nursery rhyme, or doggerel.

Such was its acoustic and literary complexity that the student poet was trained up in two looser forms. A beginner's imitative potty-training Oglachas form that a student poet began playing with letters and practising in; in which most of the formally exacting and mindbogglingly precise metrical rules of the Dán Díreach verse forms were left out; before getting handier and graduating to the water-wing and stabilizer Bruilingeacht form.

In which more of the metrical rules of the Dán Díreach verse forms were introduced and gradually applied, until by the transition from the eleventh to twelfth year the nearly qualified poetry professor was applying the seven and eight requisites of strict straight Dán Díreach verse we learn of in Part IV Chapter Two of O'Donovan's A Grammar of the Irish Language (1845), Of Versification: "viz., 

1st, a certain number of syllables in each line.

2nd, four lines in each quatrain.

3rd, Concord/Alliteration/Uaim is of two kinds, proper and improper. The former, called Fior-uaim, is where the last two words of a line begin with a vowel or the same consonant... The Improper Concord is when the words so beginning are not the last two in the line. 

But here note, that what the ancient Irish called an Iarmbearla, i.e. the article, possessive pronoun, adverb, preposition, or conjunction, coming between any two words, neither forms nor hinders a concord. The proper concord can be used for the improper, and vice versa, in every line except the third and fourth, in which the proper concord is indispensably necessary.

4th, Correspondence/Comharda. This has some resemblance to rhyme, but it does not require the corresponding syllables to have the same termination as in English rhyme. Correspondence is of two kinds, perfect and broken. Perfect correspondence, which is sometimes equal to perfect rhyme in English, consists in the agreement of two words, the last in two lines of poetry, in vowels and consonants of the same class. 

Broken, or imperfect, correspondence is the agreement of two words, the last in two lines of poetry, in vowels only, without any regard to consonants.

5th, Termination/Rinn, requires that the last word in the second and fourth lines of a quatrain should exceed that of the first and third by one syllable.

6th, Union or Uaithne, is nearly the same with Correspondence, except that the same vowels are not required in each place; and, in polysyllables, it is only necessary that they agree in class, as abba, biobba; imne, doimne, opmaille, reanpoige; but the nearer they agree the better. A syllable, however, with a broad vowel cannot form a union with one having a small vowel.

7th, Head or ceann, is the monosyllabic word which concludes the second and fourth lines of a quatrain in that kind of verse called Seadna.". "To these may be added an eighth, not because it is always necessary, but because it is often used, namely, Urlann, of which we shall speak in its proper place.

8th, Another requisite of in Dan Direach is that called Amus. It is nearly the same as an imperfect correspondence, except that it requires an equal number of syllables in the words which correspond.

The principal species of Dan Direach verse chiefly in use among the Irish poets are the five following, namely, Deibhidhe, Seadna, Rannaigheacht mhor, Rannaigheacht bheag, and Casbhairn. 

Deibhidhe. The principal requisites which distinguish this kind of verse from others is, that the first and third line of each quatrain end with a minor termination, and the second and fourth with a major termination. It requires also seven syllables in each line, with correspondence concord, and union, which must all be perfect in the last couplet."

And O'Donovan carries on as you can read at the link, listing the full complexity and intellectual beauty of these metres that Spenser not having Gaelic viewed in his barbarous unsophisticated mind as the work of uncouth, unlearned uncivilised rhymers with no class and speaking a language he only wanted to exterminate and render into silence. 

There can be no rehabilitation into the Irish canon of this doggerelist's evil infantile and wholly anti-human view that the literary utterances of the finest most sophisticated language experts to have ever written, with a thousand year history and ancient authentic local native tradition, sourced in the pool of living druidic speech - were a doggerelistic product of the monstrous minds of barely thinking rude crude illiterate Irish simpletons. 

This mind may have a few stray lines of beauty but they are between masses of plodding uninventive utterly unimpressive tin-eared propaganda written solely to boast, prance, wheedle, flatter, and obsequiously toady in the service of himself alone and no other. He cared not for any earthly queene, he dreamt only of powerful riches and vast material wealth and would lie, cheat, steal and have others kill on his order, to secure what he wanted for himself alone.  

And as we know from the table listing the requirements for each grade, that is at the front of George Calder's translation of the four books that form the Medieval grammatical texts which make up the Auraicept na n-Éces, literally, Precepts of Poetry, aka Scholars Primer, and Handbook of the Learned, and the technical training manual of the twelve year Gaelic poet-training programme - the writing of twenty anamain praise poems in the highly creatively complex and immensely intellectually challenging strict straight Dán Díreach verse forms was a requirement of learning in the penultimate eleventh year of study.

It could be the major or minor variety, anamain mór or anamain becc; with four divisions of anamain mór, Nath, the Anair, Laidh, and Eman.

And at which point the nearly poetry professor had one more year, and after performing a learning requirement of the Four Feats of Ladchend mic Bairchida, Chota, Bicni, and Béci; became qualified on the twelve year curriculum and had finally after a long creative and intellectually joyous literary route attained the apical grade and appellation of ollamh/poetry professor described in the annals as: 'A great sage then, s/he does not apologize for their ignorance of anything in the four divisions of learnedness (Gaelic, History, Latin and Poetry)'.

The Irish language poet and Ard Ollamh Eireann (2001-4), Ní Dhomhnaill, seemed most of the five poets reading the one for whom the living Gaelic language folk memory of 'the bad man' was of such cultural potency and phantasmagorical strength that she came across as the one least willing of the five talking participants to completely abandon all cultural reserve and join in the fun of acknowledging the well-wrought craft and praising the poetry of this contentious figure surpassed in the centuries long and ancient historical Irish memory only by figures such as Cromwell.

She said that in her opinion Spenser's low opinion of Irish literary Filidh poets was the result of his 'jealousy' of them. Which I would tend to agree with. He had no Gaelic and the genocidal way in which he wrote about Irish culture would tend to more than suggest the mind of this uncommonly unaristocratic low birthed talented scholarship boy and later man was one driven by an inferiority complex, greed, jealousy, hatred, and an ability to ignore any act of barbarism in the pursuit of personal material profit and his own social elevation by any means to the aristocratic status he was cravenly obsessed with and his entire life was a testament to and his writings the living literary proof of. 

One of the most qualified repositories of the entire unadulterated cultural arc and sweep of history contained in the living Gaelic language; Ní Dhomhnaill, punctuated the air of good-natured frivolity on the professorially detached four-fifths academic panel of poetry professionals by delivering a timely bardic reminder in her recounting of the local Kerry and Desmond South Munster folk memory that was proven true when during an archeological dig, she said, I think, in the 1980s, a corner of some domestic field known locally for generations as 'field of the heads', was found to contain a mass of sixteenth century people's severed heads.

The pieced together facts from the few that were ever recorded, and certainly not publicised ('rough work' being all Spenser committed to print), with Grey himself boasting to his queen he had: "Then put .. in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There were six hundred slain"; tell far less the true gruesomeness of what occurred than the physical proof which turned up in the corner of this Kerry field close to the site of the Smerwick Massacre.

The final poet to read her work was the current High Poet and her scholarly anecdotes imbued the occasion with a wit and wisdom of the very highest intellectual order which crowned and completed an extraordinary evening in the Poetry Palace on Parnell Square.

Blessed by the bardic history one thousand years in living existential print, and the Irish titans of global literature. The officially noble laureates Beckett, Bernard Shaw, Heaney and Yeats. Not to mention the unofficial modernist noble laureate Joyce. And a very long list of the world's premier literary poetic practitioners and people of the goddess Art in the home of scholarly European letters with a living connection to the birth of Gaelic writing in the Ogham aka Celtic Tree Alphabet.


Ní Chuilleanáin's prayerful praising of our collective faery woman of this island O Ireland of memory and mouth-music;- was a tour de force in how to do it and one felt truly blessed to have been privileged to hear, witness and be a silent cerebrally joyful participant in such a memorable event as I left for the first of what one hopes will be many more at Ireland's premier home place and Poetry Palace fit for the world's best spoken bardic matter and literary filiocht we the public witnesses there have been presented for free by the cultural magic of this island's ancient druidic goddess of the kind maternal timeless ever present warm witty wise, in triplicate, living literary feminine love spiritually all Her.

McAuliffe was not so much attempting to rehabilitate Spenser as have a mature dispassionate look at the language of this 'good poet' in a playfully mature Argument five centuries after the butchery and mass murder this arch 'bad man' was witness to, complicit in, and glossed over in virtual silence. Challenging instead the phantasmagoria of what he had taken part in and witnessed, thru the mutable lens and redemptive process of Poetry.

Thanks very much to Director Kennelly, Publications Manager Paul Lenehan, Education Officer Jane O'Hanlon, Communications Manager Muireann Sheahan, and someone whose name I don't know, who opened the door, a very smiley lovely person. It has been amazing fun and I cannot wait for the honor and privilege of serving once again as witness to another event at the Peoples' Poetry Ireland Literary home there in the heart of this thing of deep cultural joy and profound poetic love.

Here's to all the hard-working staff and literary lovers at Poetry Ireland and UCD for making a major psychological event of minor personal epiphany such a rewarding spiritually beautiful and lofty thing.

And hopefully much more of the experimental English language anamain prose-poetry. Slainte.

Grá agus síocháin

Kevin Desmond

Arguing with Edmund Spenser

Originally published in the Discussion section on a Poetry Ireland Facebook Event: Arguing with Edmund Spenser in Contemporary Irish Poetry, on 15th February 2018, at which The School of English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing, University College Dublin and Poetry Ireland host readings and a discussion panel of "five poets who have been thinking and arguing with Spenser in their recent work": John McAuliffe; current Ireland Professor of Poetry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Ireland Professor of Poetry 2001-2004; Trevor Joyce, and  Leanne O'Sullivan.

~

One's own paternal Hiberno-Norman family name of Desmond (Swords being my mother's nee name) as well as being on the receiving end of injustice was responsible for great oppression, mass murder, vast social sorrow, a one in a millennial cultural upheaval, violent wickedness, abject wrongs; and the occasional just and wise royal personage whose reigns of hereditary governance in Desmond/South Munster were culturally positive ruling influences in Medieval Ireland prior to the family's destruction and physical eradication at the hands of courtiers and poets from Liz 1's mercenary band of mass murderers killing for cash castles booty and the escheated estates of Irish earls.

Among whose number were Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, who ended up with Desmond's castle in Kilcolman, where he wrote The Fairie Queene and his call for genocide on the Irish people, A View of the Present State of Ireland.

Spenser was the literary propagandist of the courtier-poet mercenaries that had been sent to Ireland specifically to hunt down and bring to heel the last of our family's Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond, who spent three years an outlaw in the Kingdom of Desmond after being declared on Samhain, 1 November 1579, a traitor to her maj's cause of world domination, by Sir William Pelham, at the start of the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579-83).

Desmond's hereditary enemy, his step-son, "Black Tom", Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond, a much favoured and staunch ally from childhood of Elizabeth I, was refusing to settle local disputes with his deceased mother's third husband and Desmond foe using Brehon law, as the two families had traditionally done since the literary Filí poet and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland (1367), Gerald FitzGerald, 3rd Earl of Desmond's time. He had offered during the first Desmond Rebellion (1569–1573), a £1000 alive £500 dead head-price on Gerald. An offer he re-advertised in June 1583 close to the end of the Second Desmond Rebellion.

~

Five months later, Gerald with his few remaining kern raided and made off with forty cows and nine horses from Maurice MacOwen, who sent word to his brothers in law, Owen and Donnell, chiefs of the clan Moriarty, who tracked him to a cabin in the wooded fastness of Glenagenty, five miles east of Tralee, and organized an ambush.

At dawn they bust in the door and all escaped but the old man, a woman, and boy; and Daniel O'Kelly, a Kerry kern killing in the name of the clan Moriarty; struck a blow with his sword and half severed an arm on the old man, who cried out: "I am the Earl of Desmond: spare my life".

A second blow took off an ear, and carrying Desmond some short distance from the cabin, at the urging of Moriarty, apprehensive of any surprise engagement with what few of Desmond supporters remained, O'Kelly ended the earl's life, hacked off his head, and, according to his first biographer, a son of the final loyal Ó Dálaigh Fili from a heriditary literary lineage that served for three centuries as the Geraldines' praise poets, Dominican priest, Rosario O'Daly, confessor to the Queen of Portugal, and founder and Vicar-general of the Irish convent of the Dominican order in Lisbon; Gerald's "corpse was thrown on the highway as food for birds and beasts."

Traditional folk lore marks the spot of an oak tree near where his body was dumped and shortly after retrieved by some supporters, Bóthar an Iarla. And this skull of our forebear's Fitzgerald blood got pickled, placed in a pipkin, and gifted to Liz in London by Butler, with a note addressed to Secretary of State Walshingham, stating: "I do send her Highness (for proof of the good success of the-service and the happy end thereof) by this bearer, the principal traitor Desmond's head, as the best token of the same, and proof of my faithful service and travail; whereas her charges may be diminished, as to her princely pleasure shall be though meet."

There were public events to celebrate Desmond's death organized in Cork in January 1584, and municipal celebrations in Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford for the rebel earl's demise and Her Majesty the Queen and England's great victory.

The decapitated head was spiked on London Bridge as an imperial statement and very effective deterrent to other would be rebels. If the mighty Royal European Ingens Rebellibus Exemplar Earl of Desmond family's head can end up an acorn on Liz 1's nut necklace, ending a line of four barons and fifteen earls that were the most powerful branch (the other being the surviving Earls of Kildare FitzGeralds) of the Hiberno-Norman FitzGerald family in Ireland for 350 years; then whose cudnt?

The 500,000 escheated Desmond acres were divied up into the Plantation of Munster by Liz 1's mercenary mass-murdering male servants, and, rewarded for his role as chief imperial propagandist, one of the Desmond castles and a 3000 acre estate at Kilcolman fell into the possession of The Faerie Queene author, and ultimate nouveau poet toady, Edmund Spenser.

Where the classic imitative rhyme scheme and form that bore his name was invented, birthing on one of Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond's family estates the epic allusive Fairie Queene idyll in Spenserian stanza. The distinctively mongrel metrical-hybrid English cross-breed form of rhyme royal and ottava rima, ababbcbcc; eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a single 'alexandrine' line of iambic hexameter.

Spenser came to Ireland in July 1580 as secretary to newly appointed Lord Deputy, Arthur, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton's mission of taking out Desmond.

He was present at the Seige of Smerwick mass-murder of 600-800 papal soldiers in Dún an Óir ('Fort of the Gold'), an Iron age Promontory fort located near Smerwick harbour; that Walter Raleigh was the cheery organiser of under the direction of Grey, who wrote in his despatch to the culturally warm and lovely Liz in London: "Then put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There were six hundred slain", and adding magnanimously: "Those that I gave life unto, I have bestowed upon the captains and gentlemen that hath well deserved..."

~

Three other contemporaneous accounts contradict Grey's version of how kindly the survivors were treated. According to O'Daly, O'Sullivan Beare and Russell, the less than benevolent Baron Grey promised the papal garrison in the ancient thousands of years old stone fort he would spare their lives if they surrendered and then double-crossed them. Remembered in the term "Grey's faith."

The 'papal soldiers' contemptuously described by Bingham as ‘poor simple bisognos, very ragged, and a great part of them boys’, were in all probability only rudimentary unwanted waifs and strays and economic undesirables rounded up by a local papal press-gang in Galicia, promised all kinds of swag and booty that awaited them in an easy fight, and shipped to Ireland as a perfect way of getting rid of poor and property-less single male migrants.

After several days from 7th-9th November 1580, the woefully untrained 'very ragged' 'boys' realised what they were up against in a two-pronged pounding from both musket shot and cannon on the crumbling fort by Grey from land and three ships at sea under the command of Bingham.

And after their most effective canon was eliminated from the action, and with Desmond's mythical 4000 troops failing to materialize after the besieged force replaced the Pope's banner with the unfurling of a black and white flag as a signal to him of their distress and call for assistance; the second in command of the by now crushed forces, Captain Alessandro Bertone of Faenza, "at last .. hoisted a sheet, with cries of Misericordia [mercy], and craved a parley" with Grey.

Sebastian de San Joseph, the commander of the continental adventurers, negotiated with Grey, claiming that the Spaniards and Italians had not been sent to wage war on behalf of any King, but been lured to Ireland by false representations by Recalde, the governor of Bilbao, informing Grey through the interpreter, Dr. Oliver Plunkett, that they had been sent solely to defend the Catholic faith on behalf of the Pope, that they had no quarrel with Queen Elizabeth, and, as honorable soldiers where willing to abide by the rules of war, leave the battlefied and depart as they had come.

Depending on what and whose version (if any) of this crucial episode in Irish history one chooses to accept, Grey responded either by resolutely refusing all conditions of surrender to the besieged force and only agreed "that they should render the fort to me and yield their selves to my will for life or death", voicing in true Puritan style that his Holiness was "a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of the diabolical faith"; or he double-crossed them after promising to spare their lives and treat them honourably according to the rules of war. As historian Alfred O'Rahilly contends in a 1938 thesis; possibly with the connivance of San Joseph who agreed to sell out those beneath him for his own and fourteen others freedom.

The Siege and Massacre at Smerwick was part of a wider European Geo-political Religious fight between Spain and England. And a cut-price disastrously uncoordinated toss into the sea of six hundred desperate young migrants, thrown from the streets of the continent into a revolting Ireland at the start of the Second Desmond Rebellion. On a gamble that their arrival created a plosive military momentum that would tip the martial scales, draw forces away from the main theater of war between Spain and England, and fatally weaken, wound and then defeat England's most historically prestigious monarch to give the Catholic Church the prize of that blessed plot, precious realm, little defensive moat of men that Nature set against a scepter'd stone.

Fifteen professional soldiers who could afford it were offered life in exchange for being ransomed and renouncing their Catholic faith, and thus spared the fate of the six to eight hundred penniless frightened economic migrants who were methodically decapitated by the poet Walter Raleigh and their bodies tossed into the sea by his merry helpers. Those who refused suffered the same fate as the interpreter Dr. Plunkett, Laurence Moore, and William Walsh, for refusing to acknowledge the religious supremacy of Liz 1, and: "On refusal, their arms and legs were broken in three places by an iron-smith. They were left in agony for a day and night and then hanged."

His prominent role in this massacre became a criminal charge for which he was convicted in one of Raleigh's trials, at which he argued he was "obliged to obey the commands of his superior officer".

As Seamus Heaney pointed out in his 1993 Pratt Lecture and essay published in the critical collection The Redress of Poetry: Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander; the author of The Faire Queene obliquely referred to the mass-murder of six to eight hundred mostly poor and press-ganged economic migrants in the old Spenser Handbook, writing that Raleigh 'had done rough work for Lord Grey'.

Spenser lived a decade and a half in the old family's former property, and left without packing when it was razed by arson several years before the end of the Nine Years War by the forces of the final O'Neil Mór and second Earl of Tyrone, Hugh O'Neill. With Ben Jonson, asserting that one of Spenser's infant children perished in the blaze. In 1599 aged 46 he returned to London, and died that year, according to one of Johnson's more unprovable claims, "for want of bread".

Buried by other rhymers in Poets' Corner; poems and pens were ritualistically dropped into the grave. His sister, Sarah, who had gone to Ireland with her brother the poet, married into a family of wealthy Cork landowners, the Travers, and the poet's sister's Travers descendants were for centuries prominent local Cork figures.

A forced exit from what had become for him at the end a land cursed by the indescribably tragic spirits of the FitzGerald Desmonds he played a minor secretarial role in extinguishing, burying into silence with powerful propaganda for the past half-millennia the true nobility of spirit speaking back now in the lawful learned laughing warm authentic voice of the only loving earthly son of our FitzGerald Desmond Swords' familial faerie Queen up above in heaven. And, perhaps signalling the onset of some music of magic and memory making start a song at the beginning of the end of an entire royal courtier-poet role-model, at risk of being consigned, unwittingly perhaps, to contemporary irrelevance, I'm afraid.

Perhaps the most egregious intellectually evil literary creation Spenser composed in one's male ancestral family home, is his vile genocidal call for the extermination of the Irish race and culture, that appears in his most humanly evil text, A View of the Present State of Ireland.

In which he argues for what he chillingly refers to as the 'pacifying' of Ireland. Orwellian double speak for the physical extermination of Her people. But only of course, the mentally ill monarchical madman argued, if they refused to stop speaking Gaelic, wearing Irish dress, and engaging in Irish habits. An arch courtier toady propagandist's most dangerous, dark and disturbing thoughts, far too inflammatory to publish until long after his death, in the 17C. When his suggestions about how to enact official policy for exterminating Irish people and Her culture were more acceptable to voice and were enacted in the Penal Laws that outlawed Gaelic culture in Ireland.

In a similar vein intellectually, I always thought, as Ezra Pound argued his mad dog-shite three and a half centuries later. And a trace chic retro-cool soupcon of it in the aristocratic star at the start of last month's episode of Britain's Baddest Bardic Bidjaz; yo! Oxbreligious Trinity slammer and literary mawjastactic vulgarian Well Hard Rebecca Watts, showing the earliest mental signs of it in her intellectual assassination attempt on the reputation of the genuinely modest and very talented lovely human being and poet Hollie McNish, in an article titled The Cult of the Noble Amateur, published in the most recent issue of Carcanet's Poetry Nation Review (Volume 44 Number 3, January - February 2018).

Wholly opposite in sentiment to The Fairie Queene with its extolling over VI Books virtues that are a "feature" solely of "the nobly born"; such as Holiness Temperance Chastity Justice and Courtesy.

In which the Redcross Knight and chaste fair Lady Una have jolly adventures with dragons, wizards, giants, ogres, and saintly goodly noble brave Sirs rescue virgins from the clutches of evil sorcerers, battle on the side of goodness whilst facing constant bombardment of sexual propositions from fetishized one dimensional phony wicked fantasy females crazed with lust for noble English aristocrats. Nymphomaniacs rescued and driven to suicide when rebuffed by brave Sirs with the sacred jizz of nobility. And with only an elite special, chaste, holy, just, aristocratic people born to spurt that spirit, they wisely fall in love and marry lucky beautiful virgins.

As Spencer told in the letter to his old captain and expert in mass-murderer's 'rough work', Raleigh, published with the first three books: "the general end of the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline."

Kevin FitzGerald Desmond.