The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry
Edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis
Abstract
This book describes the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry, beginning with a consideration of W. B. Yeats's early work and the legacy of the nineteenth century. The broadly chronological areas that follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the twenty-first century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, and Austin Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 ‘Northern Renaissance’ of poetry, the book provides extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. It covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout – chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics – allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the book's analysis of poetic forms as well as the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions, and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. It also looks at the work of a ‘new’ generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.
Keywords:
Irish poetry,
Northern Renaissance,
women's poetry,
poetic forms,
generic diversity,
religion,
stylistics,
poets,
Ireland,
W. B. Yeats
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Oct 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199561247
- Published online:
- Jan 2013
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199561247.001.0001
Editors
Fran Brearton,
editor
Fran Brearton is Reader in English at Queen's University Belfast. She is the author of The Great War in Irish Poetry (2000) and Reading Michael Longley (2006). She recently co-edited (with Edna Longley) Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (2012).
Alan Gillis,
editor
Alan Gillis is Lecturer in English at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Edinburgh Review. He has published three collections of poems with the Gallery Press: Somebody, Somewhere (2004), Hawks and Doves (2007), and Here Comes the Night (2010). He has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and has won The Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland. As a critic he is author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005), and has co-edited Critical Ireland (2001) and The Edinburgh Guide to Studying English Literature (2010).
