Then . . . now . . . what difficulties here, for the mind.

Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

The Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.

Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland

In 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called 'Poets with History and Poets without History'. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with history - her examples are Goethe and Pushkin - is there for contrast, that her aim is to talk about, even justify, the existence of the poet without history. The poet with history is either defunct or everywhere, and therefore scarcely a poet at all; the poet without history is an enigma or a dissident. The poet without history resists history, as Roland Barthes once said it was the business of literature in general to do. The literary work, he argued, is 'at once the sign of a history and resistance to that history'.

LRB 14 August 2008 | PDF Download