Protestant Culture, History, and Religion in the Early Poetry of Derek Mahon

Abstract

The late Derek Mahon (1941-2020) was among the most important and honored poets writing in Ireland at the time of his death. He was celebrated and remembered across English-speaking literary circles as an unreservedly ‘Irish’ poet, and he had been resident in the Republic of Ireland for almost three decades. However, this comfortable Irish designation to which the poet is now inarguably identified had not always been so easily given nor naturally embraced. Mahon hailed from the Protestant suburbs of Belfast in Northern Ireland, born into a politically unionist community that is known for emphasizing its Britishness and stressing loyalty to the crown. It is a sense of discomfort and dissonance with this heritage that many of the best poems of Mahon’s early career struggle with. The physical and spiritual break of the poet from his community and place of origin was preceded by years of poetic engagement with and interrogation of the implications of the Northern Protestant identity and legacy in Ireland. These deeply reflective inquiries into Protestant culture, history, and religion will be shown to have been a necessary and effective strategy for transcendence and stand as a testament to the dissociation of the poet from his background. This paper revisits Mahon’s early poetry in order to explicate the oftentimes complex explorations of the poet’s Protestant inheritance. In doing so, a greater understanding of Mahon’s early work as a necessary precedent for his later, unequivocally Irish sense of identity can be achieved.