Joseph Campbell (1879–1944) who also also wrote under his Gaelic name, Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil, was born in Belfast to a Catholic Nationalist family from County Down. From his father, a Catholic Parnellite, he imbibed fervent nationalist politics, and from his mother, of mixed Catholic–Presbyterian stock, a strong interest in Gaelic culture. He was educated in Belfast and, after working for his father, he entered the teaching profession. He helped to set up the Ulster Literary Theatre in the early 1900s and contributed some plays that he wrote. He also wrote the words for musical airs including two famous Irish airs: My Lagan Love and Gartan Mother’s Lullaby. Additionally, some of his poetry was picked up by musical composers such as Ivor Gurney and Arnold Bax who set them alongside a number of their own tunes. He visited Dublin in 1902 where he met a number of prominent members of the Nationalist movement while, at the same time, furthering his career in song writing and poetry. During this time he contributed poems regularly to Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman and Standish O’Grady’s All Ireland Review.
Soon after the publication of his first volume of verse, The Garden of the Bees in 1904, he moved to Dublin and, failing to find regular work there, moved to London where he was involved in Irish literary activities while working as a teacher. As secretary of the Irish Literary Society of London, he often wore a kilt. While in London he seems to have met with the London-based Modernist Imagist poets circle of T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound. He also met Nancy Maude, the daughter of Col. Aubrey Maude of the Cameronian Highlanders, at a poetry reading and married her in May 1910, against the objections of her family. Shortly after, they moved to Dublin and then to a a forty-three-acre farm at Lackendarragh, Co. Wicklow. He became a friend of Patrick Pearse and joined the staff of Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, teaching Irish history. In 1911 he published his first volume of prose, Mearing Stones: Leaves from My Note-book on Tramp in Donegal, illustrated with his own drawings. A play he wrote, Judgement, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in April 1912 and proved a critical and popular flop. Yeats justified the play’s failure by claiming that he had it performed solely for Campbell’s reputation’s sake. He makes an appearance as “Mountainy Mutton” in Gas from a Burner (1912) Jame Joyce’s verse diatribe, in the voice of his publisher, about the Irish literary scene at the time:
To show you for strictures I don’t care a button
I printed the poems of Mountainy Mutton
And a play he wrote (you’ve read it I’m sure)
Where they talk of “bastard”, “bugger” and “whore”
The name “Mountainy Mutton” is a mocking reference to The Mountainy Singer, a collection of poems by Campbell published in 1909 by Maunsel & Co, the publishing company that renaged on its promise to publish Dubliners. It irked Joyce that the language in Judgement, a Campbell play published by Maunsel, was worse than that objected to in his collection of short stories.
Joseph Campbell was a founding member of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin in 1913. The Irish Citizen Army drilled on the lawn of his Wicklow house in 1915. He took part, as a supporter, in the Easter Rising of 1916, doing rescue work. The following year he published a translation from Irish of the short stories of Patrick Pearse, one of the executed leaders of the Rising. He became a Sinn Féin Councillor in Wicklow in 1921. In the Irish Civil War he was on the Republican side and was interned in 1922/3. He was rumoured to have sought internment to escape his unhappy marriage. (Irish writer Francis Stuart said: That fella went to prison during the Civil War deliberately in order to get away from his own wife. That’s neither patriotism nor poetry.) During a hunger strike by the prisoners to secure their release, Campbell went ten days without food. Released in December 1923, he was hardened and embittered, his religious faith shattered by the Catholic Church’s condemnations of the anti-treaty side. His marriage broke up in 1924, after he and his wife had affairs, and he emigrated to New York in 1925 where he lectured at Fordham University and worked in academic Irish studies, founding the university’s School of Irish Studies in 1928, which lasted four years. He was the editor of The Irish Review, a magazine of Irish expression.
Campbell returned to Ireland in 1939, and lived as a semi-recluse at Lackandaragh in County Wicklow. He was embittered by what he saw as the betrayal of his ideals, railing against the national schools for producing appalling types – tittering, cigarette-smoking girls and uncouth boys. He wrote a long poem A Vision of Glendalough (1940), and made several programmes on literary, historical, and autobiographical topics for the Irish national broadcasting service, Radio Éireann. He proved to be an accomplished broadcaster with a rich, warm radio-friendly voice. He died alone at home from heart disease on the 5th June 1944, aged 64, and his body was discovered two days later by a neighbour. He is buried in Deansgrange cemetery.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND IMAGISM
I first came across the connection between Irish poet Joseph Campbell and the Imagist movement in London when I encountered a tweet from Frank Hudson who has written extensively on that connection. He is particularly enamoured by Night and I Traveling (see below) which he calls a poem which is remarkable not just for its tightly compressed and effecting scene, but for being published in 1909 so that it might be counted not just as the work of the first Irish poet to use free verse, but also as one of the earliest published examples of Imagism. It wasn’t until 1913 that F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound published their “A few Don’ts by an Imagiste” and laid out the three famous Imagist suggestions/rules, but before that in London Flint, Pound, and T. E. Hulme had been working out how to radically strip back poetry to a fresh, precise, and direct essence in the months before Campbell published “Night, and I Traveling.” He has set the poem to music and has praised it above more celebrated Imagist poems calling it to my judgement as fine an early Imagist poem as the more famous and anthologized ones, arguably a more worthy example because of its empathetic attention to the isolated rural woman in a still-colonialized Irish hut in place of Pound’s damp impressionistic leaf-faced Paris Metro riders published four years later.
Israeli poet Natan Zach, in an essay entitled, ‘Imagism and Vorticism (in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 , ed. Malcolm Bradbury & James MacFarlane) celebrates another brief poem by Campbell – The Dawn Whiteness (see below): ‘Despite some arguments to the contrary, the continuity of Imagist work from [T. E.] Hulme’s circle to Pound’s school can be readily traced. Joseph Campbell’s “The Dawn Whiteness” illustrates the kind of Imagist poem coming from the former … Slight without being trivial, the poem’s concentration on the image echoes the Symbolist stress on essential form to the exclusion of all allegedly extra-poetic matter. Though mildly suggestive of mood or state of mind, it minimizes the poet’s personal involvement, and is not manifestly symbolic in the sense of standing in for anything distinct from its own delimited surface meaning. The poem strives for verbal economy, its lightness of touch recalling the Japanese Haiku.
The Imagist poets can be categorised in two ways. There were those, such as Richard Aldington and T. E. Hulme, whose best work is their poems in that genre. And there are those, like Ezra Pound. Amy Lowell and Adelaide Crapsey, for whom the Imagist poems are but a small part of a wider oeuvre. Joseph Campbell belongs to the latter category. Most of his work reflects the tropes of the Georgian poetry popular at the time with a touch of Celtic Twilight modes to add to the mixture. Even in many of the shorter poems below, the rhythms and the rhymes reflect contemporaneous trends. However, there are a few poems, the better poems, written in the curt free verse style best suited to Imagist poetry. Alongside the two poems mentioned above, there is On the Top-Stone and, my favourite Campbell poem, simply entitled Darkness and as evocative as the best Imagist poems. You may nominate your own favourite Joseph Campbell poem in the comment box below.
Brief Poems by Joseph Campbell
I SPIN MY GOLDEN WEB
I spin my golden web in the sun:
The cherries tremble, the light is done.
A sudden wind sweeps over the bay,
And carries my golden web away!
***
DARKNESS
Darkness.
I stop to watch a star shine in the boghole——
A star no longer, but a silver ribbon of light.
I look at it, and pass on.
***
TO A TOWN GIRL
Violet mystery,
Ringleted gold,
Whiteness of whiteness,
Wherefore so cold?
Silent you sit there—
Spirit and mould—
Darkening the dream
That must never be told!
***
SNOW
Hills that were dark
At sparing-time last night
Now in the dawn-ring
Glimmer cold and white.
***
TO THE GOLDEN EAGLE
Wanderer of the mountain,
Winger of the blue,
From this stormy rock
I send my love to you.
Take me for your lover,
Dark and fierce and true—
Wanderer of the mountain,
Winger of the blue!
***
THE DAWN WHITENESS
The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.
***
NIGHT, AND I TRAVELLING
Night, and I travelling.
An open door by the wayside,
Throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light.
A whiff of peat-smoke;
A gleam of delf on the dresser within;
A woman’s voice crooning, as if to a child.
I pass on into the darkness.
***
ON THE TOP-STONE
On the top-stone.
A nipping wind blowing.
Winter dusk closing in from the south Ards.
The moon rising, white and fantastic, over the loch and the town below.
I take off my hat, salute her, and descend into the darkness.
***
THE CLOUDS GO BY AND BY
The clouds go by and by,
The heron sings in the blue—
And I lie dreaming, dreaming
Ever of you.
The stag on the hill is free,
And the wind is blowing sweet—
But I lie bound a prisoner
At your feet.
***
A SHEEPDOG BARKS ON THE MOUNTAIN
A sheepdog barks on the mountain,
The night is fallen cold;
The shepherd blinks at his fire,
The sheep are in the fold.
The moon comes white and quiet
Into the winter sky;
And nothing walks the valley
To-night but you and I.
***
DEAD OAKLEAVES EVERYWHERE
Dead oakleaves everywhere
Under my feet,
Filling the forest air
With odours sweet.
Acorns, three, four and five,
Falling apace.
Thank God I am alive
This day of grace!
***
LIKE A TUFT OF CEANABHAN
Like a tuft of ceanabhan
Blowing in the wind
Is my slender Aine Ban—
White and soft and kind.
Kind her heart is, but her clann’s
Cold as clay or stone.
Would that I had herds and lands
To take her for my own!
***
SIC TRANSIT
I lit my tallow
An hour ago,
And now it is burning
Dark and low.
The glimmer lengthens
And turns about,
Sinks in the sconce—
Then flickers out!
LINKS
Joseph Campbell biography on the Dictionary of Irish Biography site
Joseph Campbell biography on the My Poetic Side site
The Wikipedia page on Joseph Campbell
The Ricorso page on Joseph Campbell
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reviews a book on Joseph Campbell
Frank Hudson’s blog posts on Joseph Campbell
The Mountainy Singer (Complete Text)
Brief Poems 