News from
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301Contact: Justin Harmon 609/258-5732
Date: April 10, 1998
Leonard L. Milberg Collection Showcases Irish Poetry
PRINCETON, N.J. -- A new collection of Irish poetry at Firestone Library will help scholars at Princeton and elsewhere address the extraordinary contribution to world literature made by Irish writers in this century.
To mark the acquisition of the Leonard L. Milberg '53 Collection of Irish Poetry, which comprises more than 1,100 printed works by 50 poets from the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, the Princeton Library has prepared an exhibition drawing on the materials in the collection, opening April 27. The exhibition, "Sing whatever is well made: The Leonard L. Milberg '53 Collection of Irish Poetry," will remain on view at Firestone Library through September 20. Present in the exhibition -- titled from a line in "After Ben Bulben" by William Butler Yeats -- are approximately 150 items: first and significant editions of the poets' books, broadsides, translations into English, children's books, fiction and nonfiction, and ephemeral items such as poem cards. Included are such items as a box of pen nibs belonging to James Joyce and a framed holograph poem written by Seamus Heaney on the occasion of Paul Muldoon's 40th birthday.
Four of the poets featured in the Milberg collection -- Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill -- will read from their works at events marking the opening of the exhibition. Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, will read on Sunday, April 26, at 4 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall. Longley, Muldoon, and Ní Dhomhnaill will read Monday, April 27, at 4:30 p.m. in Richardson. On Tuesday, April 28, at 4:30 p.m., in Room 101 of McCormick Hall, Edna Longley, a professor of English at Queens University, Belfast, and one of Ireland's leading poetry critics, will lecture on "'Atlantic's Premises': Relations Between Northern Irish Poetry and American Poetry in the 1960s."
In addition, the new, spring issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle includes previously unpublished poems by 41 of the poets whose works are featured in the Milberg collection.
The international appeal of Irish poetry -- and its pervasive influence on world literature -- reflect the extent to which Irish poets, writing of matters specific to Irish experience, also are writing fundamentally about the human condition, according to Samuel Hynes, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton, who prepared the introductory essay for the Library Chronicle. In "The Poem of Ireland," Hynes writes that Ireland's long poetic tradition has been uniquely "shaped and shaken by the deep national divisions that have made the island's troubled history and that still scar and define the present. Irish poetry is like a monument built along geographical fault lines, where one rock surface grates against another: Irish against English, Catholic against Protestant, royalist against republican, language against language."
"Divisions have made the Irish history and Irish memory; they explain Ireland's past and they will determine the future," Hynes writes. "They are the Irish tradition. The inheritance of a divided world may be a disabling one ... but it has also been enabling: it has made Irish poetry what it is."
One need only open a newspaper to realize the command held by Ireland's "Troubles" upon the larger public imagination. News of an impending peace agreement for Northern Ireland dominated the front pages of American newspapers this week. At the same time, inside the pages of The New York Times, we read a review of Martin McDonagh's "The Cripple of Irishmaan," newly opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, as well as an essay lambasting the use of the penny whistle -- with its Celtic overtones -- to add sentiment to popular music, such as the much-lauded theme "My Heart Will Go On" from the blockbuster movie Titanic.
The poets whose works are assembled in the Milberg collection represent an impressive range. As Princeton graduate student Wes Davis notes in the introduction to the catalog of the collection, more than 80 years separate the births of the oldest and youngest poets. The newest, Sara Berkeley, who contributed the poem "Approaching Thirty" to the Library Chronicle, has a home page on the World Wide Web. The earliest, Padraic Colum, whose "Expecting No One" is reprinted from his volume Images of Departure (1969), started as a writer for Yeats' Abbey Theatre, where his play The Land was produced in 1905. The poets represented in the collection include ones from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as Irish expatriates. Some, like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Liam Ó Muirthile, write in the Irish language, exploring its richness as a source of verse, despite -- or because of -- its legacy as a language of the disenfranchised. Many, such as Brendan Kennelly, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney, have turned at times to other cultures' mythologies and to other modern languages -- including Polish and Romanian -- rendering poetry that is broadly international.
The poems featured in the Chronicle are exceptional in their variety. "While no single volume can be exhaustive of everything that is happening in Irish poetry, this is a remarkably thorough anthology," said poet Paul Muldoon, director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton. "I am sure that, for the poets, the sense of being included in such a volume is both daunting and delightful."
Also featured in the Library Chronicle are essays on Irish poetry before and after Yeats (Bernard O'Donoghue, Ronald Schuchard, and Denis Donoghue), on the legacy of Louis MacNeice (Peter McDonald), on themes and tensions within current Irish poetry (Edna Longley, Neil Corcoran, and Clair Wills), on the writing of poetry (Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney), and on publishing Irish poetry (Peter Fallon and Dillon Johnston).
The collection was donated to Princeton by Leonard L. Milberg, a member of its Class of 1953, who is chairman of the board of Milberg Factors Inc. in New York City. In 1994, Milberg gave the University a collection of American poetry, comprising works by more than 70 contemporary poets. He began his Irish poetry collection shortly afterward, at Samuel Hynesí suggestion and with the encouragement of Paul Muldoon.
"I am a collector; it's part of my nature," says Milberg. "I learn as I collect. Week by week, as I gathered the materials for this collection, I studied Irish poetry, history, and legends. After a while, I recognized the universality of these poets. They are people of exceptional learning and interest, writing in a way that reflects the beauty of the language. I was amazed to find such a relatively small group of writers turning out such a large body of extraordinary work."
The Princeton University Library Chronicle is published three times a year under the sponsorship of the Friends of the Princeton University Library.
###
NOTE: Portraits of five poets featured in the Milberg collection and in the Princeton University Library Chronicle are available in jpeg format at the following URL: www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/98/poets.html. All five -- Peter Fallon, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon -- are copyright 1997 by Robin Hiteshew.