By Sam Burnside

Public libraries as mentors of private and public imagination. In Libraries – information and imagination. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Joint Conference of the Library Association of Ireland and the Library Association (NI Branch), 42-52. Dublin: LAI/LA(NIB), 1996.ISBN 0946037 32 9(LAI); 0 906066 15 8 (LA(NIB))

This is a time when we should look energetically and optimistically to the future. It is a time that calls for both optimism and for realism. Optimism, in the sense of all of us on this island turning our faces hopefully to an emerging, changing and challenging present – and to the potential of a future in which peace and reconciliation will be key terms. Realism, in the sense that we know the difficulty that underpins this.

That difficulty is comprised of many elements – numerous threads woven into the very fabric of our society – we can easily enough put words to these treads – pain, suffering, loss, violence, unemployment, poverty. The end result of such a cacophony is social exclusion for many; marginalisation for many more.

There is another element, one that is less often talked about. That is the cultural fragmentation that involves the loss of voice, the cutting off of expression, the demise for many of a real sense of identity: and, critically, of means of celebration of self-hood. This is the foundation for emotional marginalisation from a community and imaginative alienation from others and the disintegration of a sense of self. These are the commonly defined elements that lead to social exclusion.

It is appropriate that we, as a joint north-south library conference should address ourselves to the issue of cultural development and to the role the public library service can play in forging a new and dynamic role for itself in cultural, social and educational policy. In our desire to contribute to reconciliation we have a number of valuable assets. In the context in which we are today discussing these issues(1) we can identify a rich and vibrant verbal arts culture that comprises traditional myth, legend and story; we have oral narrative of a more formal nature; we have folk song, poetry, drama, the novel. The Irish short story, for example, is the envy of the world.

All of this is strengthened by being in both Irish and in English; the English itself is enriched by many influences, among them Scots English.

This is an immensely strong language base. It is a natural foundation upon which to build bridges between cultures, communities, individuals, geographical areas, among other bodies and organisations.

In facing the challenges that lie ahead we must look to practical and people-based solutions. These will entail people coming together, engaging in direct, face-to-face conversations that move from sharing to revealing; that move towards social and then creative and imaginative co-operation; engaging, perhaps, in the forms of compromise that are necessary to at least see (genuinely recognise) the other’s point. These practical solutions must involve core skills of speaking and writing – they must also involve the mirror key skills of reading and listening.

Introduction

In this talk I want to explore the relationship between imagination and libraries. In doing so I shall attempt to distinguish between what I view as private and public arenas of imagination. By adopting this approach I hope to be able to identify what I see as a real and growing contemporary challenge for the public library service. Then, finally, I want to suggest one way of meeting that challenge.

The term ‘imagination’ is a notoriously difficult one to define, as philosophers, imaginative writers, and psychologists have found. But then, so too does the term ‘library’ offer difficulties for those who would throw a net over meaning.

So before looking at imagination lets begin with the term ‘library’. It is such a familiar one that all of us tend to take both it and the ostensible and physical entity it represents for granted. So the question is begged: is a library a ‘thing’ or a place; is it a fixed resource or an active service? Is it a centre of quietness, calmness, the place for the focused and very exclusive interaction between one individual reader and one book, between a supplicant and what has by some(2) been regarded as the lodestone of knowledge, enlightenment or enthralment, that is the printed page. If that is what it is, what does it signify – a place of escape for the reader who wishes to flee the world or a place of intellectual challenge where mind meets mind.

In 1777 Richard Brinsley Sheridan a saw libraries as taking on a rather dangerous colouring:

You will respond to this by saying, perhaps, that these notions are too rarefied, too romantic. Perhaps they are: to counter such a tendency there must be a science somewhere that has more objectively defined what is a library – a thing comprised of information systems, and an activity relating the storage and retrieval of bits and bytes, of facts and figures.

I have put forward two extremes here and perhaps a more balanced, generic or holistic definition is needed. Certainly, a library is a physical entity, a thing, a building filled with books, it is also the books, the collections within the building.

It is also what is inside the books, and inside other forms of information storage.

But, at the heart of the definition, lies the product of human creative endeavour, the thing recorded and kept there for consideration. Everything else, when you take away the ‘significant content’, it seems to me, is just the vehicle, the container. This morning I want to explore this notion of a library – of library as idea, as vision – a much less tangible thing, and for that reason, liable to be forgotten amid the pragmatic necessities of late 20th century life.

I shall attempt to explore this aspect or ‘idea’ of a library, and all of the consequences, implications and possibilities that flow from that, but shall do so by rooting or ‘earthing’ that idea to the reality within which we all work; that is, to the economic, social and cultural – those parts of civilisation that we are all acutely and increasingly aware of in our daily lives.

Now, I want to conclude this introduction to what I am about to say by asserting that I am not a librarian – I am a reader, a book buyer, a registered (I was going to say licensed or certified) library user; I have written and published some poems and other bits and pieces; I am a member of a library committee – but I am not a librarian, and am well aware that there’s nothing so designed to stir up negative feelings within the breast of a professional as someone from outside his or her field coming along with ‘bright’, innovative’, ‘new’ ideas. As Mark Twain put it, “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example”.⁴ I appreciate that there is nothing new under the sun, so I am exploring this theme with the knowledge that to some of you it may not be new at all.

Exchange – Commerce between two minds

On the face of it that ‘commerce between two human minds’ that I put at the centre of my idea of what a library is, is by its nature an image of exclusiveness. It represents an act that excludes everything else. (Like Rodan’s The Thinker, the body language of an intent reader is inward turning). Yet, paradoxically, the ‘idea’ of a library, to be helpful to me, (given my interest as listed above) has to be holistic, it has to be inclusive, not partial or exclusive. So, how do I reconcile this paradox. I can best attempt to do so by appealing to the twin concepts of private and public imaginations

(Another way of expressing this might be to talk of individual and community imagination.)

Historically, the developed imagination of the individual has been regared as being synonymous with literary imagination. And literary imagination itself has been viewed as being at its best when exercised through the heightened sensibility of the visionary poet. At worst this has been regarded as a retreat or escape from the world by one who cannot face the mundane challenges of routine, daily life.

It is important to set against that, as a crucial corrective, a more open and social concept of imagination – of imagination as an essential agent within the processes of growth, change, development – of imagination as the stimulating agency of mental and emotional curiosity. In short, of imagination as something too important to be confined to an ivory tower.

We rightly value the quality of commitment and the quality of consistency of purpose – but, we also value the individual imagination for its characteristics of detachment; for its ability to play objectively with the fixed and the accepted; for its ability to speculate, to unsettle, to test and sometimes to topple, the established and sacred. We value it for the ways in which it surprises and delights and instructs us in new ways of seeing old things.

Now, if we value these aspects of individual imagination should we not also value the same qualities in public, or social imagination. It too can be a radical influence in the community – and by radical I mean seeking, prying, getting to the root… The exercise and sharing of speculative and creative imagination of a community is a vital to the collective health as that of an individual is vital to his or her health.

I would argue that libraries have played a major role in playing host to this kind of activity.

Exchange – Commerce between many minds

I want to go back for a moment to my earlier definition of what is a library. I said that everything except the ‘significant content’ could be regarded as just the vehicle. But of what significance is the vehicle itself? Of what is it made?

It has to include the books (and by books I mean books, pamphlets, newspapers, journals) of course as well as the building, the car park, the room set aside for community use, the store spaces and stacks hidden from public view, the locked cupboard or room where signed first editions are kept. It has to include the staff recreation room, and the tapes and books in braille and the ramps and lifts provided for those who cannot mount steps and the dedicated car parking spaces for handicapped users as well as infrared signing. It has to include a storytelling corner where children can be introduced to the chemistry produced when real authors of real books can come into productive contact with real young readers or potential readers and borrowers. (This very list indicates the (growing) pressure that exists and ins such a multitude of forms!)

And it includes the staff – librarians of of course, because they go with the books (new and constantly up-dated stock!) as well as the support staff.

And then, to be really inclusive, it needs clients, customers, readers, listeners (and writers and talkers) – our partners in this enterprise (I know of one library (not in Ireland) where they are referred to as ‘the borrowers’ – language betrays a lot) – a varied and ever changing tide: in the morning, retired men and women and unemployed men and women; in the afternoon school children doing their homework or engaged in topic work. All day long, business people in to explore some matter or fact; or local historians working on the newspaper collection.

These people may be using real newspaper files, or they may be working at machines – more and more at computers, using terminals, modems, CD roms. Some may be using the public photocopiers, other waiting to use the fax facilities. A few will be there because it is a free, warm public place, open to all citizens, with no questions being asked, no demands made, and the morning paper available.

There will be men and women, young and old, able bodied and disabled, employed and unemployed, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, Christian and non-Christian. Readers and non readers, people who want one question answered, others with a lifetime of research or interest to carry forward. As they said of something else, all human life is there…and indeed it is. Looked at in this light a library is a remarkable place: an admirable educational, cultural and social institution and a powerhouse of human recreation, social, emotional and intellectual commerce.

To understand the import of where we might go it is necessary to look to where we were.

If what we have had so far is a snapshot of what a late 20th century library is like, let us look at a number of other pictures.

The Roots

The Bardic Schools can be seen as highly sophisticated institutions which existed up till the end of the sixteenth century. They were followed by the Courts of Poetry which continued up till the end of the nineteenth century. Somewhere in the middle, related to these, came the hedge schools, so well described by William Carleton.⁵ At a later date, and associated rather more with urban experience we have Mechanic Institutes. Each of these performed an important social function in terms of supporting the public imagination.

William Orr was born near Ballyclare in Co Antrim in 1770. He was a weaver poet and records in his poem “The Reading Society’ an description of an early library.

Fifteen years after Orr’s birth in Antrim Thomás Ruadh O’Sullivan was born in Kerry. He bacame a hedge schoolmaster but he was also a poet schoolmaster, in the same category as Brian Merriman. At the heart of O’Sullivan’s life was a library, in this case a private library that he carried on his back from place to place and one that he lost through misadventure. He too recorded his experience in a poem:

He goes on to provide an account of the books in his library. The seven stanzas both record and lament the loss of those individual volumes that, as he put it,

[gave] power and knowledge
To those who can read.

William Orr, at the other end of Ireland, and writing out of a very different culture, put it like this:

Ye sons of pow’r! how can ye say we err By such pursuits, though us no gains they’ve brought; Though toil supports us, why will ye infer, That knowledge, therefore, can avail us nought?⁸

I have no desire to create or add to the myth of a pastoral idyll – but it is a fact that the lives of these two men – Orr from Co. Antrim, O’Sullivan from Kerry – remind us of things we should not forget:

– both were poets, both linked into ancient and different, but none the less complimentary, literary and educational traditions;
– they represent the strengths of our diverse cultural heritage on this island.

Seen in this light, a library becomes a centre for education, but importantly, for self-education, or at least for mutual education and that through collective and shared experience. The other notion that I began with – a view of the book as cultural icon, as artifact (and of the author as somehow different, higher more attuned to life and its experiences) has to be extended – it depended too much upon an analysis predicated on a relationship whose nature was almost mysterical, that between author and text and between reader and text. The book, undoubtedly, still is the corner stone of the library service – yet we must build on that corner stone in a variety of vital and imaginative ways, if we are to secure a place for public libraries in a cost-conscious, changing, competitive, demanding and critical world.

In a sense a library, in its core being, merely meets a human need: what that need is is indicated I think by the nature of libraries in, for example, the mechanics institutes so prevalent in the 19th century. In these a ‘library’ was not a totallydiscrete function; it was part of a planned educational and social complex – and it is no accident that in these new buildings the library room, reading room, lecture room, discussion room, museum and meeting place were combined together under the one roof. This need to exchange and interchange, to communicate, learn and share experience and knowledge, burst forth everywhere, even on board ships taking emigrants to the other side of the earth:

The voyage to New Zealand by sailing ship and lasting three months or more was itself regarded as an educational opportunity. The Nelson (settlement in NZ) settlers were particularly eager to make their resources go as far as possible. On board ship they gave lectures to each other. They also pooled their books to form a library when they arrived and founded the Whitby Institute.

At the core of this was not just a desire to get or acquire information – it was that partly, but it was much more the desire to exchange knowledge and ideas, in other words the exercise that I have called public imagination.

Moving from Sense to Sensibility

The question arises, ‘what is the nature of this knowledge, this communing through the written and spoken word?’ The South African novelist Laurens Van der Post tells how a bushman defined story: “Story is like the wind,” the bushman said, “it comes from a far off place, and we feel it”.⁹

Shakespeare, as usual, unpicked the threads of sense and sensibility:

And often did beguiled here of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful strokeThat my youth suffered. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange;
‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful.
She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished
That heaven had made her such a man; she thanked me
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake,
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used. 

When we begin to look at what is exchanged in these transactions, we can see that the information is more than of a factual nature: there is a move from sense to sensibility, something that springs from deep within the individual but extends far beyond the personal.

To come closer to my own home ground, we have an account, of about 1814 or 1815 from rural Co.Derry, that describes this need to congregate in groups, to exchange and interchange. It gives an interesting insight into cultural community and democracy and into the ways in which the literary and oral tradition was safeguarded and transmitted. The Rev. Ross, Protestant Rector of Dungiven, Writers:

This demonstrates the crucial role of public or community creative and critical activity and tells us something about the importance of access to and participation in cultural heritage. In short, it tells us something about ownership and identity.

I have been deliberately eclectic here. I have referred to poetry courts, hedge schools, and Bardic schools (peculiar to rural Ireland) to reading rooms from Co.Antrim but with strong Scottish roots, to a 19th century rural group storytelling from Co.Derry, to a ship-board-community-built library and to mechanics institutes. What unites these examples of human endeavour is the enduring need we have for social intercourse that leads to learning – about ourselves and about others.

Cultrual Policy and the Public Library Service

This leads me to view libraries as a social institutions, as well as cultural institutions; it leads me to view the erosion of this aspect of library function as something to be avoided, or halted.

Libraries are public spaces: Libraries are where interchange, interaction and exchange can freely occur.

Libraries are one of the (few) places where communities can commune! (commune in one of its original meanings simply means to share). A potential strength here is the traditional political and social neutrality professed by librarians and other commentators. (As an aside, it should be noted, from my point of view at least, that neutrality does not mean not taking sides in ongoing efforts to provide access to the resources of civilisation, it does not take away the duty to be pro-active.)

I believe that there is a danger that libraries increasingly may become resource centres where numerous instrumental transactions occur, not places where communities are enabled to exercise their imaginations. This is not to be a prophet of gloom, but to simply be aware of the consequences of the tremendous pressures on time, energy and attention that is part of the experience of all of us.

It has become a commonplace to say that we are no longer a verbal culture – that we are moving increasingly towards the visual. Certainly, many indications point up that this is the case: BBC official figures for the last quarter of 1994 ¹² show that Britain’s total radio audience in 1994 was 600,000 less than it was a year before; that it was 1,184,000 less than two years before; that the proportion of people over 25 who listen to any radio has fallen from 89% to 86% over the past two years ¹³. We know that 99% of all households in the UK have a TV set and that 73% have a video recorder ¹⁴. Almost half of all homes with children (47%) now have a personal computer.

Yet, other indications exist to show that there is a great hunger for spaces and outlets for creative and imaginative activity. The sixth edition of the Directory of Writers’ Circles lists 420 writers’ groups in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The 1991 edition of the Small Press Yearbook lists 400 small presses which operate on the fringe of mainstream publishing. In one year (in the 1980’s) there were 32,000 entries for the Poetry Society’s competition for a new short, unpublished poem. The Arvon Foundation has experienced a similar response with 30,000 competition entries in one year. The quarterly journal Poetry Review receives more than 30,000 poems each year for consideration. The BBC, which broadcast 217 original plays in 1990, receives between 10,000 and 13,000 play-scripts each year. The Royal Court theatre in London receives about 2,000 unsolicited scripts each year. ¹⁵

I give these figures simply to indicate the scale of interest in self-realisation through creative expression and in self expression.

Adapting to change

It seems to me that the library service itself is having to adapt to tremendous changes in areas like information flow, information handling, information technology, super highways, and the like not to mention financial challenges and customer expectation.

One of the more obvious requirements for immediate change (or adapting to change) is a certain flexibility of approach – an open and integrated mental and emotional stance.

Two things strike me about this:

Firstly, to simply adapt to therse largely imposed technical and external demands is to be no more than routinely if professinally responsive to external stimuli (fumbling in the shadow of the cloak).

The library service has a greater stake than that in the cultural health of our society; even the limited survey I have undertaken this morning indicates that. But, the public library service has to articulate that claim and it has to go on to explain the function of its role as it sees it.

And so, and this is to move to the second point, I believe that the public library service has an active and progressive role to play in an ongoing dialogue about social philosopy and in the shapng and delivery of cultural policy (as that arises out of the verbal arts).

If I were asked to briefly indicate what this is, it would be that:

a. the Public Library Service has an interventionist role in:

b. the Public Library Service has a positive enabling role in:

There are those who have seen danger in this aspect of a library. Sheridan may or may not have been serious in his linking of books to forbidden fruit, but this writer certainly is serious:

Teach the hungry poor to read, and they will read the long roll of their wrongs … till they have them at their tongue-end; teach them to write and they will write their sufferings in words never to be blotted out … from these expensive play things (Mechanics’ Institutes) I would draw an admonitory lesson … I am for bread before books. 16

To extend the food analogy, to this I would add, “I am for books before information bytes…”

A Role for the Public Library Service

How to do this

Our common aims are:

The Arts Plan 1995-1997 ¹⁷ recognises the importance of creating a new relationship between libraries and literature, and in particular the need to provide financial support for writers (‘only 30-40 Irish writers are ableto make a living from their work p 66) and the need to counter ‘unhelpful divisions’ between writers and their public. The plan suggests a partnership between An Chomhairle Leabharianne/The Library Council the crux of which will be the appointment of a specialist executive who will develop a scheme leading to up to ten residencies based in libraries by the year 1997.

The Education Service for Northern Ireland A Strategic Analysis ¹⁸ sets out to provide a framework for discussion and the setting of priorities. Among these is the need to secure better understanding among all sections of the community. In its section on Libraries it points to the strength of the well developed network of branch libraries; it then identifies a number of key issues, including the need to stimulate wider public participation in the use of these resources.

It is against this background that the Annual General Meeting of the Association of Education and Library Boards passed a resolution recognising with admiration the cross-community cultural work carried out by, and within, libraries. With a view to exploiting and continuing creativity in the verbal arts, it is recommended that the Boards consider the benefits of supporting joint ventures in this field.

Implementation – A Practical Model for Action

It might be prudent to consider setting up a scheme designed to: counter the perceived drift away from the library service traditional role, even for a trial period of, say, three to five years:

In the literature discussion document produced by the national arts and media strategy the authors say:

I think we have to accept that. It would appear to be a matter of common sense to assume that not everyone who works in the library service will have a love of literature – we have already noted the wide range of activities that take place in the modern library. Yet, in everything I have been saying is the explicit belief, or assertion, that this activity is absolutely central to a sound definition of what a library is. There may be a need for a policy, or a mission statement, or some explicit acknowledgement of literature’s centrality but the overriding important thing is to produce some meaningful action:

Three models:

1. Leave things as they are:

2. Appoint literature development workers attached to libraries: This approach increasingly has been adopted by some authorities in the U.K. I have done a little research and have found that those involved see that attaching literature development officers to libraries has proved a mixed blessing: some of their comments

3. The Verbal Arts Centre model

This hinges on the notion that a small dedicated body which has a pro-active and developmental stance can provide both leadership, forward planning and organisational resources in an extremely cost-effective manner and can spread its benefit across other bodies and across the community. By co-ordinating activities it spreads costs, makes best use of visiting writers etc., involves local people, builds partnerships between agencies and across communities.

In our experience it is not enough just to identify and appoint a writer to a library, whether it is a public library or a school library and to leave it at that. A successful residency needs careful preplanning, (matching writer and host body; creating links with schools, community groups and individual local writers and preparing the ground well before the writer arrives), providing sustained support during its lifetime, and engaging in evaluation and ‘debriefing’ afterwards. The latter may well entail the nurturing of a local writers’ group stimulated during the residency. In other words, our experience shows that you cannot ‘parachute’ a creative writer into and then out of a community.

What is needed is:

The way forward, I would suggest, is to have a dedicated verbal arts resource that can work in partnership with library boards, VECs, and individual libraries; in that way, the verbal arts resource can do its work in partnership with libraries and within agreed policy parameters. This would avoid some of the difficulties that have accrued from other models of operation: for example,

Some school are now calling their libraries ‘resource centres’ – with CD Roms, computers, etc. taking pride of place (Education Guardian) Jan 10 1995)

The Verbal Arts Centre Experience and the WELB

The Verbal Arts Centre was established April 1992. It was set up in recognition of Ireland’s heritage in the spoken and written word but while we wanted to celebrate that and wanted to find new ways of nurturing wide appreciation of its riches we had no desire to simply promote ‘dead’ culture when there was and is so much living, rich and vigorous contemporary literary activity, in both English and in Irish, with which we could engage.

During the three year period ended 31 March 1995 the Centre has taken a pro-active approach to increasing access and participation. The figures will give you some idea of the profile of work undertaken: just under 40,000 individuals were involved in a thirty-six month period.

During this period we have established a very productive relationship with the library service, as well as with the education board and schools. Not only have our combined efforts enabled each of us to deliver an enhanced and increased service and to a wider audience, but we have also gained considerable experience as to what is good practice.

We have done the obvious things – we have organised readings and tellings’ by visiting writers and storytellers for both children and adults. But we have gone well beyond that to organise residencies, for example in Co.Fermanagh where the poet Pat Boran held a residency that led to the setting up of a county-wide writers’ circle. We have had storytellers on mobile library vans during the past two summers, again on a county-wide basis in Counties Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry.

We have jointly supported and organised library – based exhibitions, for example in Central library in Derry where the work of a resident poet in a residential home was combined with work of primary school children. We have organised talks and exhibitions relating to illustrations for children’s books We have also co-operated on publications and we have organised a number of training sessions for library staff, in particular on storytelling and on approaches to developing children’s reading.

All of this has centred on writing and reading, speaking and listening; we have been conscious of the need to build up and sustain an audience and to achieve a balance between supporting professional writers with national or international status and nurturing local writers. At the core of our work has been a belief in the inclusive nature of ‘literary’ experience – reading and writing go hand in hand, speaking and listening go hand in hand, the individual and the community are inter-related, professional and amateur are mutually dependent, and so on.

Conclusion

As I said at the outset, I am reluctant to provide you with what Mark Twain called “the annoyance of good example” so I shall stop describing the VAC at this point. Yet, the recorded and evaluated experience of the past three years indicates that it does form one model that has some virtues. As my conclusion, I shall try to list these, in particular those that relate to libraries, and leave you with them.

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination: what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not: 20

That, linked to the free exchange of experience, is a potent brew. Its exercise (both the process and the outcomes) is, I believe, a basic human need.

It is customary at the end of discursive talks like this to suggest that the topic is of such importance as to call for wide debate. I don’t really think we need much debate on this. There is a clear need for positive action, not discussion or head scratching or pondering. Without being over indulgent in praising something I myself have been involved in, I do think that the Verbal Arts Centre’s work has been innovative and pioneering. It shows what can be achieved through a combination of commitment, a modest budget, co-operation between agencies and a sensible organisational approach. It just needs someone to take the next step.

And then it is forward, one step at a time.

But, and this is crucial, the Verbal Arts Centre could not operate on its own. It is crucial to its operation that it works with willing partners. At the end of the day, I believe all of us would willingly subscribe to these views: let us together find ways of giving expression to the wish:

A society’s cultural life is rich if people in that society can communicate with each other, describe their reality and their experience, voice their feelings, understand one another, and thus – in the end – be in a position to respect one another.²¹

I want…to promote the telling of stories – stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and social justice…22

I think it is Patrick Kavanagh who said,

By poetry he means both imagination and the renewal that is possible though expression arising out of imagination. The library service cannot be content to be custodian of any dark place – it has a powerful role to play in supporting renewal.

I shall finish with the words of a poet, young (he was twenty two when he wrote this) and perhaps ‘elemental’; perceptive, certainly: this is John Keats in a letter written in November, 1817:

Bibliography

1. 31st Annual Joint Conference of the Library Association of Ireland and Library Association (Northern Ireland Branch), Tralee, April 1995

2. Among others, Arnold; Leavis;

3. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal, 1777

4. in, Pudenhead Wilson

5. William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry

6. James Orr, Ballycarry, Collected Poems, 1817

7. from Songs of Thomás Ruadh O’Sullivan

8. ibid, p 275

9. Laurens Van der Post, A Story Like the Wind

10. Mason, Parochial Survey, vol. 1 p 213 (given in The Hedge Schools of Ireland, p 10)

11. Raymond Williams “The Tenses of Imagination” – a lecture given at University College of Wales in 1978 and included in Writing in Society, pp 267-268

12. Sunday Times, 5 February, 1995

13. BBC official figures for the last quarter of 1994 quoted Sunday Times, 5 February 1995

14. Central Statistical Office

15. from, R. Hutchinson and A. Feist, Amateur Arts in the UK, Policy Studies Institute, 1991

16. J.R. Stephens, in Ashton Chronicle, July 1849. Quoted in M. Tylecote, …

17. The Arts Plan 1995-1997, The Arts Council, 1995

18. The Education Service for Northern Ireland, A Strategic Analysis, DENI 1994

19. Alastair Niven, Ed., Literature, Arts And Media Unit, Arts Council, London

20. Keats, letter of Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817

21. Harald Swedner, “The Authorised Culture”, in Explorations in Cultural Policy and Research, Council of Europe, 1978

22. from President Robinson;s inaugural speech

23. John Keats, letter to Benjamin Biley, 22 November, 1817