Thomas MacGreevy’s Combatant Modernism

Abstract

This article examines Thomas MacGreevy’s poetry in the context of combatant modernism. It argues that the preoccupations with themes of perception and violence in MacGreevy’s poems represent a prolonged engagement with the First World War and its legacy in Irish and British culture and politics. The article considers how this reframing of MacGreevy’s work helps elaborate on combatant modernism as an intersecting tradition with the more familiar forms of European modernism represented by the work of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and others, one in which recognizable techniques of fragmentation and disorientation are brought about not just by aesthetic experimentation but the need to find novel modes of poetic witnessing suitable to the new kind of conflict and suffering the First World War represented. This reorientation places MacGreevy alongside writers such as David Jones and Richard Aldington to reveal how combat service generated its own kind of modernist writing.