The house the poet built

Abstract

The house stands among the most potent images in Irish literature, its prominence reaching back to the subgenre of the Big House novel of the nineteenth century, which on the one hand represented 'a nostalgic or reactionary form, rooted in elegiac longings for a threatened hierarchical reciprocity' but, on the other, revealed 'a fiercely selflacerating' potential for the representation of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency (Kreilkamp, 2006, 61). Such novelists as Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton and later Elizabeth Bowen would explore the tension between nostalgia and critique, making the house a symbol of the social dynamic that unfolded in Irish society across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the 1900s, the figure of the house has risen to particular prominence in large measure due to the work of W. B. Yeats, for whom 'A storm-beaten old watch-tower' (Yeats, 1996, 239) and a house 'Where all's accustomed, ceremonious ' (p. 190) became two of his central symbols, embodying a transcendental ideal of an essentially feudalist culture. Such idealist attachments were largely jettisoned in the period following the Second World War. In Irish poetry of the last fifty years (both from Northern Ireland and the Republic), as Adam Hanna observes, the house has become 'a place where questions of belonging, rights over territory and cultural continuance all impress themselves upon the imagination' (Hanna, 2015, xvi). No longer symbolic of a