- Oxford Handbooks of Literature
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: The Limits and Openness of the Contemporary
- Modernist Survivors
- The Thirties Bequest
- The Unburied Past: Walking with Ghosts of the 1940s
- ‘Obscure and Doubtful’: Stevie Smith, F. T. Prince, and Legacy
- The Movement: Never and Always
- ‘In Different Voices’: Modernism Since the 1960s
- Two Poetries?: A Re-Examination Of The ‘Poetry Divide’ In 1970s Britain
- A Dog’s Chance: The Evolution of Contemporary Women’s Poetry?
- Cat-Scanning the Little Magazine
- Books and the Market: Trade Publishers, State Subsidies, and Small Presses
- ‘Space Available’: A Poet’s Decisions
- Contemporary Poetry and Close Reading
- ‘All Livin Language is Sacred’: Poetry and Varieties of English in these Islands
- Misremembered Lyric and Orphaned Music
- ‘The Degree of Power Exercised’: Recent Ekphrasis
- Cinema Mon Amour: How British Poetry Fell In Love With Film
- Singing Schools and Beyond: The Roles of Creative Writing
- Historical and Archaeological: The Poetry of Recovery and Memory
- London, Albion
- The ‘London Cut’: Poetry and Science
- ‘Dafter than We Care to Own’: Some Poets of the North of England
- Auden in Ireland
- ‘Other Modes of Being’: Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Paul Muldoon, and Translation
- Writing [W]here: Gender and Cultural Positioning in Ireland and Wales
- The Altered Sublime: Raworth, Crozier, Prynne
- Dislocating Country: Post-War English Poetry and The Politics of Movement
- Multi-Ethnic British Poetries
- European Affinities
- Scottish Poetry in the Wider World
- The View from the Usa
- Audience and Awkwardness: Personal Poetry in Britain and New Zealand
- Speech Acts, Responsibility, and Commitment in Poetry
- ‘Is a Chat with me your Fancy?’: Address in Contemporary British Poetry
- ‘There Again’: Composition, Revision, and Repair
- Reparation, Atonement, and Redress
- Contemporary Poetry and Belief
- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Poet
- Contemporary Poetry and Value
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
From the 1930s onwards, W. H. Auden has been a powerful influence on Irish poets. But because his poetry does not obviously intersect with any of the major recent narratives of Irish poetry—literary nationalism, critical revisionism—the range of his influence is under-appreciated. While his example can be felt in the adoption of specific poetic forms—the ballad, the verse-letter—his influence can be found, more generally, in a questioning of the relationship between the poet and his audience—to whom is the poem directed? What is the poem for? How should the poem compete with other forms of discourse? Looking at three Irish poets—Patrick Kavanagh, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon—this essay argues that, in the grandiose wake of Yeats and the Revival writers, it is the deflationary, anti-hubristic stance of the later Auden that was crucial for the development of Irish poetry.
Keywords: poetry, Ireland, Auden, form, influence, audience, deflationary
John Redmond is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. He has written two books of poems, a poetry writing handbook, and has recently edited the Selected Poems of James Liddy (2011). His critical study of twentieth-century British poetry, Poetry and Privacy, will be published by Seren in 2012.
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- Oxford Handbooks of Literature
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: The Limits and Openness of the Contemporary
- Modernist Survivors
- The Thirties Bequest
- The Unburied Past: Walking with Ghosts of the 1940s
- ‘Obscure and Doubtful’: Stevie Smith, F. T. Prince, and Legacy
- The Movement: Never and Always
- ‘In Different Voices’: Modernism Since the 1960s
- Two Poetries?: A Re-Examination Of The ‘Poetry Divide’ In 1970s Britain
- A Dog’s Chance: The Evolution of Contemporary Women’s Poetry?
- Cat-Scanning the Little Magazine
- Books and the Market: Trade Publishers, State Subsidies, and Small Presses
- ‘Space Available’: A Poet’s Decisions
- Contemporary Poetry and Close Reading
- ‘All Livin Language is Sacred’: Poetry and Varieties of English in these Islands
- Misremembered Lyric and Orphaned Music
- ‘The Degree of Power Exercised’: Recent Ekphrasis
- Cinema Mon Amour: How British Poetry Fell In Love With Film
- Singing Schools and Beyond: The Roles of Creative Writing
- Historical and Archaeological: The Poetry of Recovery and Memory
- London, Albion
- The ‘London Cut’: Poetry and Science
- ‘Dafter than We Care to Own’: Some Poets of the North of England
- Auden in Ireland
- ‘Other Modes of Being’: Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Paul Muldoon, and Translation
- Writing [W]here: Gender and Cultural Positioning in Ireland and Wales
- The Altered Sublime: Raworth, Crozier, Prynne
- Dislocating Country: Post-War English Poetry and The Politics of Movement
- Multi-Ethnic British Poetries
- European Affinities
- Scottish Poetry in the Wider World
- The View from the Usa
- Audience and Awkwardness: Personal Poetry in Britain and New Zealand
- Speech Acts, Responsibility, and Commitment in Poetry
- ‘Is a Chat with me your Fancy?’: Address in Contemporary British Poetry
- ‘There Again’: Composition, Revision, and Repair
- Reparation, Atonement, and Redress
- Contemporary Poetry and Belief
- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Poet
- Contemporary Poetry and Value
- Index
