Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid
- 2 Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics
- 3 Louis MacNeice among the islands
- 4 Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry
- 5 Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland
- 6 Contemporary affinities
- 7 The Classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry
- 8 Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney
- 9 Reading in the gutters
- 10 ‘What matters is the yeast’: ‘foreignising’ Gaelic poetry
- 11 Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East
- 12 Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names
- 13 Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry
- 14 ‘The ugly burds without wings’?: reactions to tradition since the 1960s
- 15 ‘And cannot say / and cannot say’: Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the dialogue of the deaf
- 16 On ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’: Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon
- 17 ‘No misprints in this work’: the poetic ‘translations’ of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner
- 18 Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines, 1945–2000
- 19 Outwith the Pale: Irish–Scottish studies as an act of translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- References
16 - On ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’: Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid
- 2 Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics
- 3 Louis MacNeice among the islands
- 4 Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry
- 5 Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland
- 6 Contemporary affinities
- 7 The Classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry
- 8 Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney
- 9 Reading in the gutters
- 10 ‘What matters is the yeast’: ‘foreignising’ Gaelic poetry
- 11 Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East
- 12 Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names
- 13 Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry
- 14 ‘The ugly burds without wings’?: reactions to tradition since the 1960s
- 15 ‘And cannot say / and cannot say’: Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the dialogue of the deaf
- 16 On ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’: Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon
- 17 ‘No misprints in this work’: the poetic ‘translations’ of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner
- 18 Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines, 1945–2000
- 19 Outwith the Pale: Irish–Scottish studies as an act of translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- References
Summary
Douglas Dunn's sonnet ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’, from his second collection, The Happier Life (1972), celebrates what its speaker also claims to have missed out on in his youth. ‘My youth’, he writes, ‘was as private / As the bank at midnight, and in its safety / No talking behind backs, no one alike enough / To be pretentious with and quote lines at’. If there is a certain security and solidity to this kind of isolation, there is also by implication an acknowledgement that allied with the youthful pretension of young poet-friends is a competitive and critical dialogue that helps bring the mature poetic voice into being. Significantly, the poem is also, in its way, a love poem, evocative of Morgan's ‘The Unspoken’, with its ‘talking in whispers in crowded bars / Suspicious enough to be taken for love’. The love of literature, talking about poetry in public, is as potentially subversive as the homosexual love that dare not speak its name in Morgan's poem. There may be a 1890s homoeroticism and decadence to the ‘Two young men, one rowing, one reading aloud. / Their shirt sleeves fill with wind …’; but the closing image – ‘from the oars / Drop scales of perfect river like melting glass’ – is about capturing in poetry an ideal, and therefore in true decadent sense a transient beauty, a passing moment symbolic also of the aesthetic potential inherent in the friendship.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry , pp. 265 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011