“The satire of the poet is a pregnancy”: Pregnant Poets, Body Metaphors, and Cultural Production in Medieval Ireland

Abstract

“The satire of the poet is a pregnancy”: Pregnant Poets, Body Metaphors, and Cultural Production in Medieval Ireland Amy C. Mulligan In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes that “significance is indeed inherent in the human body.”1 In other words, the ability to signify, to create and perform verbal discourse, is a corporeal process. This is a tenet that medieval Irish poets and storytellers understood long before Kristeva and other modern theorists drew attention to the somatic nature of language and text. From the narrative accounts and theoretical tracts that focus on bodily aspects of language production, to the highly corporeal portraits of the famed poets themselves, medieval Irish textual culture demonstrates that the act of signifying, specifically of producing verse, is very much “inherent in the human body.” Medieval Irish scribes record, for instance, that by gnawing on the thumb he burned on a poet’s salmon of knowledge the hero Finn mac Cumaill accessed his divinatory powers and skills sacred to poets, and then delivered this wisdom in poetic form;2 the poet Néde raised deforming blisters on the body of the king by directing a satire, or anti-praise poem, at him.3 Imbas forosnai, a kind of poetic inspiration that reveals whatever the [End Page 481] fili, or learned visionary poet, needs to know, is an intricate act requiring both chewing on raw flesh (teinm laide) and reciting chants in a specific way.4 Furthermore, there is an extensive collection of texts attending to the bodies, births, and transforming rebirths of legendary poets who, as Patrick Ford has aptly put it, are “blind, dumb and ugly.”5 All of these examples stress the felt corporeality of poets and poetic composition. This article seeks to address one particularly rich manifestation of poetic corporeality, the association of poetic utterances with pregnancy and the attribution of a “womb of poetry” to male poets. In this essay, I examine reproductive bodily imagery and extended gestation metaphors used in accounts of intellectual and cultural production.6 I begin by considering legal references to a type of satire, the mac bronn (son of womb), and by analyzing a Classical Irish medieval court poem7 attributed to Donnchadh Óg Albanach which treats in great detail what I call the conceit of the “pregnant poet” or “poetic womb.” I argue that the conceit of a poet giving birth to highly wrought language is also meaningfully employed in the Middle Irish prose tale of the legendary Ulster poet Amairgen, son of Ecet Salach, and his development from a mute, deformed and swollen boy into an ollamh8 or chief poet.9 I then [End Page 482] shift from this narrative concerning a specific poet and locate a possible origin point for the “womb of poetry” or “pregnancy of the poet” in an Old Irish versified tract on poetry and poetic composition known as the Caldron of Poesy,10 a difficult schematic text describing a cauldron that moves about in the body, occupying different positions and enabling the production of knowledge and poetry of varying quality. Drawing on medieval medical discourse that describes the uterus in terms of a cooking vessel, also capable of movement within the body, I propose that the unusual poetic cauldron in the Caldron of Poesy suggests the womb (Irish brú)11 and the popular beliefs with which it was associated in early medical material. Finally, I address why concepts of the poetic womb and pregnant poet remained productive over several centuries, from the beginning to the end of the medieval period in Ireland. I. “I am Nine Months Pregnant . . . The Satire of the Poet is a Pregnancy”: The Mac Bron Satire A tract in the fourteenth-century Book of Ballymote on the ten types of versified satire enumerates the mac bronn (son of womb) satire, and asks: “What is the son of womb? Not difficult; it is made secretly.”12 A related passage in another manuscript, Trinity College Dublin MS 1337 (H.3.18) expands this description: “Son of womb, that is, a man who makes a satire and recites it secretly to someone,”13 and in further response to the same question, the steep penalties for both composing...

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