Location: Coleraine
Information on this page is divided into sections on:
In a poem entitled Mosaic John Hewitt makes a plea for people to understand the whole picture and not selective pieces when reviewing historical personalities and events.
This guide, with examples from the John Hewitt Collection held at Ulster University in Coleraine as well as links to other John Hewitt web sites, aims to present "the whole mosaic" of his life and work. It contains examples from his personal library and literary manuscripts that reflect his activity and influence within the arts and across the whole community in the north of Ireland. All go to make up a life that is much more than a "handful of coloured stones in the dust".
The Collection comprises the personal library and literary archive of the poet John Hewitt which he bequeathed to the University. It is one of the most significant collections in the UK and Ireland, of modern and contemporary Irish literature and of the manuscript holdings in that literature. It is a unique resource for researchers particularly in Irish poetry but also in modern Irish culture, history and folklore. The Collection was catalogued after receipt of a £50,000 HEFCE grant in 1995.
The Collection is available during the Library's opening hours.
Please arrange an appointment with the Special Collections Team
(John Hewitt Bookplate designed by John Luke)
External links and resources at other institutions
The superb library of over 5,000 books and journals, with its emphasis on Anglo-Irish literature, is an invaluable resource for the academic community. It includes rare volumes from the 'weaver-poets' of the eighteenth century and journals which Hewitt edited, as well as those to which he contributed. The library also preserves first editions of virtually every collection of Irish poetry since the 1950's.
The literary archive covers over 50 years of Hewitt's prolific and varied writing career. It contains notebooks of poems composed between 1926 and 1984, over 3,500 0f which are unpublished. The manuscript material includes a copy of John Hewitt’s unpublished autobiography “A North Light”, radio scripts from the 1940's and notes for his book about the rhyming weavers. There are also short stories, verse plays and reviews of books and art exhibitions.
The Collection reflects Hewitt's enormous activity and influence on the development of art and literature in Northern Ireland, and provides an exciting resource for those engaged in research into our cultural heritage.
The Ulster Poetry Project includes a digital library of books from the John Hewitt Collection. More items are being digitised including Hewitt's poetry notebooks. Contact Frank Ferguson for more information.
John Hewitt (1907-1987)
John Hewitt is remembered as the 'father figure' and prophetic precursor of the current generation of Ulster poets. He was born in Belfast and educated at Methodist College and Queens University. From 1930 he worked in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery and in 1957 he became the Art Director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry. He returned to Belfast on his retirement in 1972.
He began writing poetry in the 1920's and his first collection No Rebel Word was produced in 1948. During the 1940's and 1950's he broadcast talks and composed essays reflecting his interest in the idea of 'regionalism' as it related to the arts in Ulster. He also established himself as a reviewer and art critic. In 1951 he gained the MA degree at Queens with a thesis on Ulster poets 1800-1870. Whilst in Coventry he began working on his unpublished autobiography A North Light.
Between 1972 and 1987 he was remarkably productive, publishing seven poetry collections, a book on the rhyming weaver-poets of Antrim and Down, and monographs on the artists John Luke and Colin Middleton.
John Hewitt's achievements have been recognised in his native place both during his life time and since. In 1978 the Arts Council for Northern Ireland produced a short film of his life and work and in 1981 he was made a Freeman of the city of Belfast. Honorary doctorates were conferred upon him by the University of Ulster and the Queens University of Belfast. His lasting contribution to the arts in Ulster is celebrated at the John Hewitt International Summer School held each year in Garron Tower on the Antrim Coast.
John Hewitt began writing poetry in 1924 whilst still at school and in that year alone composed over 600 poems. During the next sixty years he penned over 4,000 more and produced 20 collections and pamphlets of verse. Although his calling as a poet seems to have been established early, a manuscript fragment, kept by him and dated 1925, reveals his doubts as to whether his initial creative burst would come to fruition.
Throughout his life he followed the same pattern of carefully transcribing completed poems from rough draft into a series of notebooks. The archive at Coleraine holds 47 of these which date from 1926 until 1984. Far fewer of the drafts themselves have been preserved and the reason for this is well documented in the poem On the Preservation of Worksheets. He suggests it would be as absurd to preserve these workings of poems as to hoard " the fringe of filing on the workshop floor". However, one feels it cannot be coincidence that this particular poem has been kept for posterity!
His first published collection No Rebel Word, was completed in 1948 but it was not until twenty years later that the second Collected Poems 1932-1967 was produced by MacGibbon and Kee, after encouragement from John Montague. The 1970's and early 1980's saw a period of prolific publishing with Blackstaff Press, producing seven volumes that contained both revisions and new work like the autobiographical sequence Kites in Spring.
Conacre was privately printed in 1943 and regarded by John Hewitt as the first part of a trilogy of poems concluded by Freehold and Homestead. It voices a sense of alienation by the speaker of the poem who cannot feel at home in either the countryside of his ancestors, or within the city where he resides. In his own copy of the pamphlet John Hewitt outlines the publishing history of the poem and the reaction by contemporaries to it, including the use of a section for a Queens University English examination 1945! 
The Bloody Brae: a dramatic poem is based on a massacre of Catholics by Cromwellian soldiers at the Gobbins, Islandmagee in 1642. It was written in 1936, broadcast on The Northern Ireland Home Service in January 1953 (or 1954) and performed by the Lyric Players in 1957. Frank Ormsby in the Collected Poems considers it to be a "morality on the nature of responsibility and necessity to escape from the destructive cycles of atrocity and revenge"
With such a relevant theme it is not surprising the play was revived by the Lyric Theatre and performed again in 1986.
The Day of the Corncrake: poems of the nine glens was published by the Glens of Antrim Historical Society in 1969 and again in 1984, illustrated with paintings by Charles McAuley. Most of the poems were composed between 1949 and 1953 and are to be found in John Hewitt's notebooks held at the archive in Coleraine.
John Hewitt, in his autobiography A North Light, describes how a visit to the barber's and a chance reading 
of a "rectangle of newsprint" led him into a life as an art gallery man.
During an exciting period in the 1930's he was a prime mover in the collaboration of a group of younger artists and
sculptors who came together as The Ulster Unit. An exhibition was held in December 1934 and John Hewitt wrote the forward for the catalogue including humorous Notes on the Art of Picture Buying.
It also included a Colin Middleton wood engraving on its cover and a section where the contributing artists explained their principles and intentions. John Luke emphasized his desire to represent "spatial relations of form and masses as perceived in nature or imagination".
John Hewitt took on the role of 'secretary' to the unit and his motivation is explained in a section of his unpublished autobiography held in the archive at Coleraine. The accounts, written in a notebook of Roberta Hewitt's and held in the Public Record Office, reveal the lack of financial success of the enterprise. However, the Belfast Newsletter's report of the exhibition describes the considerable impact it had on contemporary Belfast.
For the first part of his career he worked in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery until, in 1957, he was appointed as Art Director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry.
John Hewitt described himself politically as "a man of the left" and although his views were, as Tom Clyde has put it, more akin to "classic British liberalism", he certainly took an active role in the political sphere. He and Roberta were involved in The Left Book Club, the Labour Party, the Fabian Society and the Belfast-based Peace League.
He saw himself continuing the line of dissenters stretching back to the heroes of the '98 rebellion. Men like Toland, Templeton and Hope had an important attraction for him. However, much of John Hewitt's ideology was influenced in the 1940's by the works of LePlay and Patrick Geddes as expounded by Lewis Mumford. He began to consider the concept of the "region" in relation to the political and cultural life of the north of Ireland and his ideas were most clearly delineated in an article Regionalism: the last chance published in The Northman in 1947. In a letter to John Montague, written in 1964, he explains how a sense of regional identity could be a way forward into a federal unity between the different parts of Ireland
| In I Found Myself Alone, an Arts Council film from 1978, John Hewitt described his personal library as "a working collection" and it was indeed just that. Many of the 5,000 books and pamphlets are referred to in his writing and used as source material for his ideas. The library is particularly strong in poetry collections from the 1800's onwards. There are a number of rare and valuable items of the rhyming weaver poets of the north which John Hewitt actively sought to collect. The library also preserves first editions of virtually every collection of Irish poetry since the 1950's, many of which are personally inscribed to him. |
John Hewitt contributed articles, reviews and criticism to a wide variety of magazines and newspapers ranging from The Trade Union Searchlight through to The Ulster Young Farmer but he was most often associated with the literary journals-Lagan, The Bell, Rann and Threshold. His busiest period as a reviewer came during the 1950's when he produced the MacArt column for the Belfast Telegraph and wrote reviews of plays and exhibitions for the pages of the Irish Times. Nearly 200 pieces were written between 1951 and 1955. After leaving Belfast in 1957 he became poetry editor of the new journal Threshold, contributing regular criticism of current Irish poetry.
| In a talk for Radio Eireann, written in 1950, John Hewitt describes the discovery of the "Country Poets" of the north, who were writing during the nineteenth century, and how they provided him with:
a whole storehouse of information on the life, loves and usages of my own people which can illuminate and colour the bare lines of textbook history Throughout his life he collected information about, and books by, these "rural bards" and particularly those privately printed for the handloom weavers writing in the Ulster-Scots dialect. In 1948 he produced a series of articles in a trade journal Fibres, Fabrics and Cordage about the lives and verses of these Rhyming Weavers; men like Herbison of Dunclug and Campbell of Ballynure. In 1951 he was awarded an MA degree by The Queens University of Belfast for a thesis entitled Ulster Poets 1800-1870 and from this, some twenty years later, a book entitled Rhyming Weavers was published by the Blackstaff Press. The archive at Coleraine records how John Hewitt researched his material for the many talks, broadcasts and articles he compiled with the aim of giving these poets a significant place within the cultural heritage of Ulster. Included are photographs, letters and copies of books of verse. |
Co-operative Art Exhibition
transcribed from
The Co-operative Home Magazine, June, 1954
Mr. John Hewitt, M.A., F.M.A., deputy director of Belfast museum and art gallery, opened the exhibition of paintings in the Donegall Place gallery, the work of members of the co-operative art club, held under the auspices of the education department of Belfast Society.
Mr. Hewitt said it was part of his responsibility to visit exhibitions of all kinds, and he particularly enjoyed seeing the work of the amateurs and scouting around for budding artists. The amateur artist was the normal citizen waking up- feeling he must do something. His pictures might be well made or they might not be well made; but when once started on the road there was no limit to the enjoyment the artist would achieve and the enjoyment he gave to other people. The amateur was indeed acting as a missionary although he might not possess the great potentialities of the professional.
It was pleasing that so many of the pictures shown were representative of parts of their own province. It was important that people should know their own places- look at them affectionately and become aware of them ... Art had become more important to the world than ever before, said Mr. Hewitt. Through the cinema, television, reproduction of pictures in books, many people had come to know of Chinese pottery, Negro sculpture, and other forms of art in countries they were never likely to visit. These influences changed people's minds, made them realise they belonged to a world community, and tended to make people more nationally minded. This international idea was in the minds of the pioneers of the co-operative movement, a great movement of the people themselves, and it was gratifying to find co-operators in Belfast interested in amateur painting.
The John Hewitt Collection is in two parts, books are held in the special collections room, but notebooks, papers, manuscript and other items are in closed access. All requests to consult the collection should be made to the Special Collections team by email.
A man may objectively inherit
a role in history,
reluctantly or with devotion,
soldier, functionary, rebel,
engaging himself as an instrument
of required stability or urgent change.
But the bystanders accidently involved,
the child on an errand run over by the army truck
the young woman strayed into the line of fire,
the elderly person beside the wall when it fell
are marginalia only,
normally excluded from documents.
History is selective. Give us instead
the whole mosaic, the tesserae,
that we may judge if a period indeed
has a pattern and is not merely
a handful of coloured stones in the dust
John Hewitt
If I should be remembered after this,
pray providence it be by happy men
who do not feel the skull behind the kiss,
the bony knuckles round the rusting pen,
but summon from the stiff archaic words
a heart whose pulse in its best moments was
free on the wing, as natural as the birds,
as clear and common as the year's first grass.
For I was nourished by the normal year,
leafmold and frosted clod and sudden rain,
and though a sick age ran its steep career
the quiet voices were not all in vain
John Hewitt
It should not matter how I shaped my lines,
hit on a cadence; shuffled adjectives,
replaced a showy word with one that gives
a truer texture, or, precise, defines
a signal smudged by clumsy countersigns,
or altered phrase to mark a change of gear
when word proposing word at once combines
to make some level of intention clear.
Should I expose each stutter of my thought,
each accident of memory or of sense,
through which the structure to completion brought
is seen as weapon forged in self defence?
No more absurd than that I'd hoard and store
the fringe of filings on the workshop floor
John Hewitt
Notes on the art of picture buying
Never buy a picture because it reminds you of a place where you once spent an enjoyable holiday. A photograph is cheaper.Buy pictures to feed your soul, as Hafiz nearly said.
Avoid the derivative repetitive artist. If he's not perpetually enriching his own experience he can't possibly enrich yours.
If an artist solves your imaginative or aesthetic problems you ought to solve his financial problems.
Reproductions are referential data for students.
Wouldn't you like to have been the first to buy a Monet or a Matisse? Take a chance now!
What was good enough for your father is just too bad.
Buy a picture before its painter becomes famous.
Sculpture lasts.
Have something in your house made by a human being for a human being.
John Hewitt
An extract of a letter written to John Montague 1964
By trying to waken folk to the concept of the Region, it seemed to me the necessary step to prize Ulster loose from the British anchorage: then and only then, when free in ideology, the unity with the other part of our island could be realised and established. The North cannot be invaded, and taken by force in the Republic: if simply outvoted by a nationalist majority resentment would remain, but, realising themselves for what they are for the first time, not Britain's pensioners or stranded Englishmen and Scots, being instead a group living long enough in Ireland to have the air in their blood, the landscape in their bones, and the history in their hearts, and so, a special kind of Irish themselves, they could with grace make the transition to federal unity.
I always maintained that our loyalties had an order to Ulster, to Ireland, to the British Archipelago, to Europe; and that anyone who skipped a step or missed a link falsified the total. The Unionists missed out Ireland: the Northern Nationalists (The Green Tories) couldn't see the Ulster under their feet; the Republicans missed out both Ulster and the Archipelago; and none gave any heed to Europe at all. Now, perhaps, willy nilly bundled in the European rump of the Common Market, clearer ideas of our regional and national allegiances and responsibilities may emerge, or our whole sad stubborn conglomeration of nations may founder and disappear for ever.
Sept 6th '25
I am beginning to wonder whether my poetic output is the green shoot foreboding a beautiful plant later or but the fungus outgrowing from my fervent love of Literature, with no deep root embedded in my nature
