Making Integral: Critical essays on Richard Murphy

Abstract

Richard Murphy frequently treated himself as a literary footnote, a mode of literary self-reproach that presumed a minor status. Renowned in the 1960s and 1970s for poems set in the West of Ireland and the history of the island, Murphy remained, if not prolific, then persistent: reviewing, writing, travelling, and publishing his acclaimed autobiography, The Kick, in 2002. Benjamin Keatinge's collection Making Integral provides a timely account of a poet frequently sidelined in studies of Irish poetry. Yet Murphy's inclusion in the controversial Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets suggests that the renewal of interest in his work preceded his death in 2019. If Irish poetry and its critical coteries have, historically, seemed a notoriously male affair rivetted by the national question, Making Integral contributes to the rethinking of ‘Irish poetry’ beyond the confines of the nation-state. Keatinge's achievement is to bring together a representative set of criticism alongside a comprehensive bibliography which should introduce Murphy's work to wider audiences and catalyse further study. In our turbulent present, as the centenary of Ireland's partition coincides with Brexit's threat of a hard border, and as the flammable rhetoric of ethno-national and racial politics catches across these islands, Richard Murphy's preoccupation with the discredited ‘hypocrisies of the British imperial project’ is deeply relevant.