John Hewitt (poet)

John Harold Hewitt (28 October 1907 – 22 June 1987) was perhaps the most significant Belfast poet to emerge before the 1960s generation of Northern Irish poets that included Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. He was appointed the first writer-in-residence at Queen's University Belfast in 1976. His collections include ''The Day of the Corncrake'' (1969) and ''Out of My Time: Poems 1969 to 1974'' (1974). He was also made a Freeman of the City of Belfast in 1983, and was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast.John Hewitt (1907–1987)
John Hewitt Collection, University of Ulster, accessed 27 August 2007

From November 1930 to 1957, Hewitt held positions in the Belfast Museum & Art Gallery. His radical socialist ideals proved unacceptable to the Belfast Unionist establishment and he was passed over for promotion in 1953. Instead in 1957 he moved to Coventry, a city still rebuilding following its devastation during World War II . Hewitt was appointed Director of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum where he worked until retirement in 1972.

Hewitt had an active political life, describing himself as "a man of the left", and was involved in the British Labour Party, the Fabian Society and the Belfast Peace League.John Hewitt: Man of the Left
John Hewitt Collection, University of Ulster, accessed 27 August 2007 He was attracted to the Ulster dissenting tradition and was drawn to a concept of regional identity within the island of Ireland, describing his identity as Ulster, Irish, British and European.Biography: John Harold Hewitt (1907–1987)
, John Hewitt International Summer School, accessed 27 August 2007 John Hewitt officially opened the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre (BURC) Offices on Mayday 1985.

His life and work are celebrated in two prominent ways – the annual John Hewitt International Summer School – and, less conventionally, a Belfast pub is named after him – the John Hewitt Bar and Restaurant, which is situated on the city's Donegall Street and which opened in 1999. The bar was named after him as he officially opened the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, which owns the establishment. It is a popular meeting place for local writers, musicians, journalists, students and artists. Both the Belfast Festival at Queen's and the Belfast Film Festival use the venue to stage events.

Hewitt's life and writing

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,The John Hewitt Papers (D/3838)
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, accessed 27 August 2007 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
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