Literary history can be nothing if not trendy in its depiction of shaping forces and figures, which at times allows for univocal narratives to take hold and preside. Beckett’s bifurcation of Irish literature into two camps – Joyce’s Continental, modernist camp, and Yeats’s Celtic, “last Romantic” nativist camp – exemplifies such an instance. While the perspicacity of such claims is not without some efficacy, the absolutism attendant upon such claims can be limiting, even distorting. James Matthew Wilson’s exhaustive work of scholarship redresses how Beckett’s judgment has mischaracterized the individual and collective achievements of these three important poets whose careers took shape in the decades between the passing of Joyce and Yeats and the arrival, post-Kavanagh, of Kinsella, Montague, Longley, Mahon, and Heaney. Wilson’s thesis, that Coffey, Devlin, and MacGreevy, “represent the most sophisticated, extensive, and compelling fusion of Roman Catholic religious thought with modern literary practices that we may find in the modernist period,” (5) counters any tendency to situate the works of these poets wholly within the rubric of surrealism or, for that matter modernism’s presumptive secularism, T.S. Eliot notwithstanding.

In pursuing his thesis, Wilson’s method is to probe deeply into how these poets’ aesthetic practices represent each in their own characteristic way “the mystery and elusive complexity of Catholic theology, sacrament, and religious experience” (5). In the case of MacGreevy, Wilson advances his discussion though a thoroughgoing exploration of what he calls the poet’s “Augustinian imagination,” mainly by casting MacGreevy’s work in relief of the two cities, man’s and God’s, in The City of God. Relevant, too, is MacGreevy’s embrace of the Aquinian concept of “ontological form,” “the active principle of being” that animates beyond accidence the being of any created thing (35), which in turn informs his own conception of art’s potentially ideal affiliation with metaphysical reality. Wilson, importantly, links MacGreevy’s aesthetics to both Joyce and earlier analogical conceptions of the beautiful and good of which God is the eternal embodiment, and does so through the neo-Thomism of Maritain. As such, Wilson deems MacGreevy “both a Catholic modernist and a harbinger of Catholic thought in the postmodern age” (96). It follows then that Wilson’s study considers, by implication, not only these three poets and their place in modernism, but the impact of post-Cartesian thought for our own cultural climate.

In the case of Coffey, Wilson elaborates his analysis by showing how Coffey’s work contends with the post-Cartesian split between the thinking I and the world, leading to what Wilson calls a presumptuously angelic conception of human reason, which in his view is “an unnecessary error in the history of thought” (115). Coffey’s philosophical and aesthetic engagement with such questions, and the seeming breakdown of the analogical imagination, unfolds through his wrestling with the self-enclosed world of Beckett’s Murphy. Wilson explores the issue by analyzing Coffey’s Third Person, “Missouri Sequence,” Advent, and The Death of Hektor. Maritain features prominently in Wilson’s regard of Coffey’s probing achievement – as mentor, guide, and conceptual model. Wilson’s discussion of The Death of Hektor draws vitally on Simone Weil’s essential essay “The Iliad: A Poem of Force.” As with MacGreevy, Wilson makes sure to place the poet’s work in conversation with Catholic theology and practice, but also just as crucially with the literary figures and movements of the day – in Coffey’s case Becket, Eliot, and, later, Auden whose “Horae Canonicae” stands in obvious apposition to Coffey’s Advent.

Finally, Wilson’s discussion of Devlin’s body of work derives its interpretive frame through the poet’s application of Jansenism, in particular through the dual lenses of Montaigne and Pascal, though this equally substantive chapter also refers to the author’s previous treatment of Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes within the context of MacGreevy’s and Coffey’s literary trajectories. Wilson’s organizational strategy has the effect of composing a singular work out of what might have been a trinity of individual monographs. The result is a truly comprehensive engagement with each poet’s individual accomplishment, the theological, philosophical, and cultural influences and dynamics feeding their work, as well as the aesthetic, literary and wider cultural factors at play during the modernist period in which MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin were thinking and writing. In Devlin’s case, Wilson offers copious insights into the major works, including Intercessions (with special attention to “Est Prodest”), Lough Derg, and The Heavenly Foreigner. In doing so, Wilson makes a well-nigh incontestable case that Devlin’s brand of “Jansenist modernism” establishes him, as “the Irish Eliot.” Wilson’s appeal to the theological and mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysus – hardly a modernist – underscores once again the deep theological and philosophical roots, not only of Devlin’s poetry, but of MacGreevy’s and Coffey’s as well.

James Matthew Wilson’s Catholic Modernism and the Irish Avant-Garde aims to reposition its three modernist poets by emphasizing the irreducible influence of their Roman Catholic faith on their sensibilities and aesthetics. His incorporation of sources, historical, literary, and biographical, is at once deep with appeal to theological and philosophical matters and extensive with reference to the literary milieu of the modernist period and its figures. Letters, occasional articles, even Coffey’s scrapbook, find their place in Wilson’s account – and everything assumes credible inclusion. The same is true of Wilson’s assessment of the contributions of prominent critics in the field. Were Wilson to have considered any further interpretive pathways, he might have made more of MacGreevy’s exchanges with Wallace Stevens, or considered Devlin’s Lough Derg as a progenitor to Heaney’s “Station Island.” The absence of such further critical routes in a work already so substantial, however, could easily have detracted from the author’s central, crucial, intention. That intention is rendered, as is, with admirable fluency and critical acumen.