John Montague: Global Regionalist?

Abstract

BORN IN BROOKLYN IN 1929, shipped back at the age of 4 to County Tyrone, where he was raised by his paternal aunts while his elder brothers stayed with their natural mother seven miles away, John Montague from an early age knew all about feelings of rejection, dispossession and exile. From his childhood Garvaghey home, to boarding-school in Armagh, to University College Dublin, then Yale, various American universities as poet and teacher, three years in Paris as correspondent for the Irish Times, back to Dublin in 1967, then sixteen years teaching in University College Cork interspersed with frequent visits to America and France -he continues to lead a mobile life, with bases in France, Cork and New York. Experience and outlook have combined, Montague claims, to make him the quintessentially modern Irish poet:My amphibian position between North and South, my natural complicity in three cultures, American, Irish and French, with darts aside to Mexico, India, Italy or Canada, should seem natural enough in the later twentieth century as man strives to reconcile local allegiances with the absolute necessity of developing a world consciousness to save us from the abyss. Earthed in Ireland, at ease in the world, weave the strands you're given. 1 Reacting against both extremes of a closed regionalism (which he simplistically associates with Frost and Heaney) and a boundless globalism (as exemplified by Pound), Montague insists: the real position for a poet is to be global-regionalist. He is born into allegiances to particular areas or places and people, which he loves, sometimes against his will. But then he also happens to belong to an increasingly accessible world .. . So the position is actually local and international. 2