John Hewitt (poet)

Early life

After attending Agnes Street National School, Hewitt attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution from 1919 to 1920 before moving to Methodist College Belfast, where he was a keen cricketer. In 1924, he started an English degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, obtaining a BA in 1930, which he followed by obtaining a teaching qualification from Stranmillis College, Belfast. During these years, his calling to radical and socialist causes deepened; he heard James Larkin address a Labour rally, began to write for a range of Trades Union and Socialist publications, and co-founded a journal entitled Iskra. Hewitt also attended the Northern Ireland Labour Party Annual Conference as a Belfast City delegate in 1929 and 1930. He resisted the advocacy of a workers’ republic in the party's constitution.

In 1930 Hewitt was appointed Art Assistant at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, where amongst other duties, he gave public lectures on art, at one of which he met Roberta "Ruby" Black, whom he was to marry in 1934. Roberta was also a convinced Socialist, and the couple became members of the Independent Labour Party, the Belfast Peace League, the Left Book Club and the British Civil Liberties Union.

Early writing

Hewitt began experimenting with poetry while still a schoolboy at Methodist College in the 1920s. Typically thorough, his notebooks from these years are filled with hundreds of poems, in dozens of styles; Hewitt's main influences at this time included William Blake, William Morris and W. B. Yeats, and for the most part the verse is either highly romantic, or strongly socialist, a theme which increased in prominence as the 1930s began. Morris is the key figure, combining both these strains, and allowing Hewitt to articulate the radical, dissenting strain which he inherited from his Methodist forbearers, including his father.

As the 1920s moved into the 1930s, Hewitt's writing began to develop and mature. Firstly, his role models (including Vachel Lindsay) became more modern; secondly, he discovered in Chinese poetry a voice which was "quiet and undemonstrative but clear and direct", and which answered a part of Hewitt's temperament which had been suppressed. Finally, and most importantly, he began his lifelong work of excavation and discovery of the poetry of Ulster, starting with Richard Rowley, Joseph Campbell and George William Russell (AE). This research culminated, in part, with the publications of Fibres, Fabric and Cordage in 1948, Rhyming Weavers and other Country Poets of Antrim and Down (based on his MA thesis, Ulster Poets 1800–1870 of 1951) in 1974, and a book called The Rhyming Weavers in 1979. All of these publications and more, were based on his interest in the Ulster rhyming weaver poets of the 19th century, such as Henry MacDonald Flecher, David Herbison, Alexander MacKenzie, James MacKowen, and James Orr.

Hewitt himself felt that his juvenilia ended with the poem Ireland (1932), which he placed at the start of his Collected Poems (1968), and indeed it is more complex than most of his earlier work, and begins his lifelong preoccupation with bleak landscapes of bog and rock; with exile, and with the nature of belonging.

The 1930s

The 1930s was a period of transition in Hewitt's poetry, one in which he began seriously to address the tortured history of his native province, and the contradictions between his love for the people and the landscape, his inspiration in the radical dissenting tradition, and the bloody, fratricidal conflicts which scar Northern Ireland to this day. A key text is The Bloody Brae: A Dramatic Poem (finished in 1936, though not broadcast – on the Northern Ireland Home Service of the BBC – until 1954; the Belfast Lyric Players performed a stage version in 1957, which they revived in 1986), which tells of a legendary massacre of Roman Catholics by Cromwellian troops in Islandmagee, County Antrim, in 1642. John Hill, one of the soldiers who has been racked by guilt since he participated in the slaughter, returns many years later to beg forgiveness. This he receives from the ghost of one of his victims, a gesture which she wraps in a condemnation of his self-indulgence, luxuriating in his guilt rather than taking positive action to combat bigotry. Another theme which was to become a fixture in Hewitt's poetry also first appears in The Bloody Brae; that is, a bold assertion of the right of his people to live in Ulster, rooted in their hard work and commitment to it:

This is my country; my grandfather came here and raised his walls and fenced the tangled waste and gave his years and strength into the earth

Hewitt is not claiming a right of Imperial possession here; rather, the right to live alongside the native population.

Also in the 1930s, Hewitt was involved in with a group of young artists and sculptors known as the 'Ulster Unit', and acted as their secretary.

1940s and 1950s

During the 1940s and 1950s, Hewitt increasingly played the role of reviewer and art critic. He gained an MA from Queen's University Belfast, with a thesis on Ulster poets from 1800–1870, in 1951. In 1951 he had been appointed deputy director and keeper of art at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery but in 1957, Hewitt left to take up the position of Art Director at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, a position he held until 1972. While in Coventry, Hewitt started work on his unpublished autobiography, A North Light. He subsequently returned to Belfast on his retirement in 1972.

Legacy

The John Hewitt Society was established in 1987 to commemorate his life and work. Its mission is "to promote literature, arts, and culture inspired by the ideals and ideas of the poet John Hewitt". The Society runs an annual summer school.