Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Ireland in poetry
- 2 From Irish mode to modernisation
- 3 Patrick Kavanagh and antipastoral
- 4 Louis MacNeice
- 5 The Irish modernists and their legacy
- 6 Poetry of the 1960s
- 7 Violence in Seamus Heaney's poetry
- 8 Mahon and Longley
- 9 Between two languages
- 10 Boland, McGuckian, Ni Chuilleanain and the body of the nation
- 11 Sonnets, centos and long lines
- 12 Performance and dissent
- 13 Irish poets and the world
- 14 Irish poetry into the twenty-first century
- Further reading
- Index
- Series List
6 - Poetry of the 1960s
the 'Northern Ireland Renaissance'
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Ireland in poetry
- 2 From Irish mode to modernisation
- 3 Patrick Kavanagh and antipastoral
- 4 Louis MacNeice
- 5 The Irish modernists and their legacy
- 6 Poetry of the 1960s
- 7 Violence in Seamus Heaney's poetry
- 8 Mahon and Longley
- 9 Between two languages
- 10 Boland, McGuckian, Ni Chuilleanain and the body of the nation
- 11 Sonnets, centos and long lines
- 12 Performance and dissent
- 13 Irish poets and the world
- 14 Irish poetry into the twenty-first century
- Further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
In August 1970, Eavan Boland published a series of three articles in the Irish Times entitled ʿThe Northern writersʾ crisis of conscienceʾ. In the concluding article, Boland asks: ʿhow . . . will writers in Northern Ireland articulate the crisis in progress outside and within them, the retrospect on communities it must force, the needs it imposes to reorder increasingly chaotic impressions?ʾ. How will writers cope, she continues, with ʿsuch intractable, yet urgent materialʾ? Criticism may since have become more circumspect in approaching these questions, but their underlying assumptions still prove contentious in reading contemporary Irish poetry. In effect, Boland implicitly assumes here that Northern writers are a distinct group; that they have responsibilities towards the Troubles which are not necessarily shared by their Southern counterparts; that individual anxieties and conflicts manifest the anxieties of the state; that writers are identifiable with, or speak from, a particular religious community; and that poetry will, in MacNeiceʾs phrase, ʿmake sense of the world . . . put shape on itʾ in 1930s generation style.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry , pp. 94 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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