MURPHY, Richard

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Nationality: Irish. Born: County Mayo, 6 August 1927. Education: Canterbury Cathedral Choir School (Cathedral Chorister, 1940); King's School, Canterbury (Milner scholar), 1941–42; Wellington College, Berkshire, 1943–44; Magdalen College, Oxford, 1945–48,B.A. 1948, M.A. 1955; Sorbonne, Paris, 1954–55. Family: Married Patricia Avis in 1955 (divorced 1959); one daughter. Career: Director, English School, Canea, Crete, 1953–54; writer-in-residence, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1965; visiting fellow, Reading University, Berkshire, 1968; Compton Lecturer in poetry, University of Hull, Yorkshire, 1969; O'Connor Professor of Literature, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, 1971; visiting professor of poetry, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1972, 1974, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1974–75, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1976–77, and Syracuse University, New York, 1977–78; distinguished visiting poet, Catholic University, Washington, D.C., 1984, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, 1985, Wichita State University, Kansas, 1987, and University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1992, 1994. Awards: AE memorial award, 1951; Guinness award, 1962; Arts Council of Great Britain bursary, 1967, award, 1976; Marten Toonder award, 1980; American-Irish Foundation award, 1983. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature (UK), 1968; member, Aosdàna. Address: The New Forge, Cleggan, County Galway, Ireland.

Publications

Poetry

The Archaeology of Love. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1955.

Sailing to an Island. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1955.

The Woman of the House: An Elegy. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1959.

Three Irish Poets, with John Montague and Thomas Kinsella. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1961.

The Last Galway Hooker. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1961.

Six Irish Poets, with others, edited by Robin Skelton. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Sailing to an Island (collection). London, Faber, 1963; New York, Chilmark Press, 1964.

Penguin Modern Poets 7, with Jon Silkin and Nathaniel Tarn. London, Penguin, 1965.

The Battle of Aughrim and The God Who Eats Corn. London, Faber, and New York, Knopf, 1968.

High Island: New and Selected Poems. London, Faber, and New York, Harper, 1974.

Selected Poems. London, Faber, 1979.

Care. Amsterdam, Cornamona Press, 1983.

The Price of Stone. London, Faber, 1985.

The Price of Stone and Earlier Poems. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1985.

New Selected Poems. London, Faber, 1989.

The Mirror Wall. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1989.

Recording: The Battle of Aughrim, Claddagh, 1969.

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Manuscript Collection: McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Critical Studies: Richard Murphy, Poet of Two Traditions: Interdisciplinary Studies (includes bibliography by May Fitzgerald), edited by Maurice Harmon, Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1978; "The Poetry of Richard Murphy" by Dennis O'Driscoll, in Poetry Australia (New South Wales), 71, 1979; "Perception of Roots: The Historical Dichotomy of Ireland As Reflected in Richard Murphy's 'The Battle of Aughrim' and John Montague's 'The Rough Field'" by James J. Lafferty, in Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature, edited by Heinz Kosok, Bonn, Bouvier, 1982; "Richard Murphy: Poet of Nostalgia or Pietas?" by James D. Brophy, in Contemporary Irish Writing, edited by Brophy and Raymond J. Porter, Boston, Iona College Press, 1983; "The Poet As Builder: Richard Murphy's 'The Price of Stone' by Joseph Sendry, in Irish University Review (Dublin), 15(1), spring 1985; "Three Irish Voices" by Charles O'Neill, in Spirit (South Orange, New Jersey), fall-winter 1989; "The Historian, the Critic and the Poet: A Reading of Richard Murphy's Poetry and Some Questions of Theory" by Joseph Swann, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Saskatoon, Canada), 16(1), July 1990; The Historiography of Three Irish Poets: W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Murphy (dissertation) by Robert James Clougherty, University of Tulsa, 1991.

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In his earlier poems, collected in Sailing to an Island, Richard Murphy succeeds as a lyrical biographer. He has created a poetry of epitaph and biography. "Woman of the House," for example, is an elegy for his grandmother, Lucy Mary Ormsby:

Time can never relax like this again,
She in her phaeton looking for folk-lore,
 
He writing sermons in the library
Till lunch, then fishing all the afternoon.

But Murphy's thematic range is not limited to the Anglo-Irish world. There are early poems about Wittgenstein in Galway, fishermen, Crete, and the drowning of a novice: "Now his feet were washed / in the sluicing bilges." Murphy writes in a distinctly clear style, following traditional verse structures with great ease and breaking away from these structures only when the theme requires it. His is a mandarin style washed clean by the activity of the sea. He shares with Louis MacNeice and Elizabeth Bowen a deep architectural sense and a wonderful capacity to re-create silent interiors. He began with the interior world of the family and the home but moved outward to embrace a broader architecture of Galway folk memory and Irish history. His career has been built around three broad concerns: the seaboard folklore of the west of Ireland, the Roman Catholic-Orange conflict of the Battle of Aughrim (1691), and the activity of home building in The Price of Stone. He has a novelist's sense of structure and ability to make connections, as in "Gate Lodge" from The Price of Stone:

I face my forebear's relic, a neat sty
That hovelled with his brogue some grateful clod
Unearthed by famine; and I hear go by
Your souper choir school voice defrauding God.

Murphy's sea poems and his seal poems—"Sailing to an Island," "The Cleggan Disaster," "Seals at High Island," and "Stormpetrel"—have become classics of the Irish poetic canon. Their rhythm and vocabulary are unique. The following lines are from "Sailing to an Island":

Now she dips, and the sail hits the water.
She luffs to a squall; is stuck; and shudders.
Someone is shouting. The boom, weak as a scissors,
Has Snapped...

So completely has Murphy mastered the folklore and rhythms of western Ireland that one never doubts the integrity of his world. Although educated out of Ireland and brought up in the Anglican tradition, he has always spoken for the native as well as the Anglo-Irish tradition. Like Yeats, Murphy alternates between revulsion and return, but his ear never betrays him, so that he constantly repeats Catholic voices. He picks up a rosary being said in a shop or uses the technique of Catholic blessing, of benediction, in a poem like "Stormpetrel": "Gipsy of the sea … / Waif of the afterglow … / Pulse of the rock …"

In his book-length poem The Battle of Aughrim he has created a narrative in several voices, like a radio play, around the central theme of the Irish defeat near Athlone in 1691. The poem moves through a series of tight lyrics to Saint Ruth's speech: "I my self will Command you; the Church will pray for you, your Posterity will bless you …" The narrative juxtaposes quotes from the Reverend George Story's Impartial History with descriptions of Sarsfield and Luttrell, with Luttrell's murder and Sarsfield's fatal exile:

Berwick the bastard sired by James the Shit
Immortalized you with no head but grit.
He took your widow Honor for his wife,
When saving the Sun King you lost your life.

In his collection The Price of Stone Murphy moves from the "cool creek of traitors" that was Aughrim to a more personally haunted world of houses. In poem after poem houses speak—Letterfrack Industrial School, a rectory, Kylemore Castle, a gate lodge, a barn. All speak of human habitation, of abandonment, and of possession. "Little Barn" says,

I've been converted to increase the rent
Between us, cornered in a stable yard.

It is a curious achievement for homes to speak of human migration. Murphy sets up an anthropology based on stone. But the technical brilliance of each verse and the cool detachment that created it are in keeping with the distinctive classical tradition of the Irish Anglican community. Perhaps houses and their stonework are the only documents without prejudice in Irish history. And this has been the crucial impetus in Murphy's work—a willed bridging of two traditions, an effort to connect sensuously and emotionally with two versions of Irish history.

—Thomas McCarthy