Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Literature and politics
- 2 The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: poetry in English
- 3 The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: prose in English
- 4 The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: drama in English
- 5 The Irish Renaissance, 1880–1940: literature in Irish
- 6 Contemporary prose and drama in Irish 1940–2000
- 7 Contemporary poetry in Irish: 1940–2000
- 8 Contemporary poetry in English: 1940–2000
- 9 Contemporary prose in English: 1940–2000
- 10 Contemporary drama in English: 1940–2000
- 11 Cinema and Irish literature
- 12 Literary historiography, 1890–2000
- Afterword: Irish-language literature in the new millennium
- Afterword: Irish literature in English in the new millennium
- Guide to major subject areas
- Index
- References
8 - Contemporary poetry in English: 1940–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Literature and politics
- 2 The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: poetry in English
- 3 The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: prose in English
- 4 The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: drama in English
- 5 The Irish Renaissance, 1880–1940: literature in Irish
- 6 Contemporary prose and drama in Irish 1940–2000
- 7 Contemporary poetry in Irish: 1940–2000
- 8 Contemporary poetry in English: 1940–2000
- 9 Contemporary prose in English: 1940–2000
- 10 Contemporary drama in English: 1940–2000
- 11 Cinema and Irish literature
- 12 Literary historiography, 1890–2000
- Afterword: Irish-language literature in the new millennium
- Afterword: Irish literature in English in the new millennium
- Guide to major subject areas
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
Any consideration of Irish poets as a collective, much less a coherent, body of study may be skewed by two misconceptions of the ‘Irish’ ‘poet’. First, there is a popular tendency to think of that poet as a heroic individual who represents or embodies ‘Irishness’, standing in for the other and – according to this view – lesser poets of his (we use the gender deliberately) generation. Yeats served this purpose during the first Irish literary Renaissance until the year of his death, just before this chapter begins; likewise Seamus Heaney is misconstrued as the single and singularly gifted poet for the second such Renaissance in Ireland. Yet if this misconception needlessly narrows two rich and broadly various periods in Irish literary history, so does its corollary: that the ‘Irish poet’ is a faceless figure carried forward from the bardic past, his or her individual strengths or even eccentricities effaced by the relentless march of tradition.
In the Anthology of Irish Writing produced by Field Day, itself a literary collective, Seamus Deane argues that most nineteenth-century Irish poets ‘survived by clinging on to an organized grouping’ and that ‘this structural organization of Irish writing was to persist into the twentieth century, with the Irish Revival and the northern poets as the dominant groups’. While such groupings can be convenient to critics, in actuality Irish poetic movements have been incoherent and short–lived after and, partially, because of William Butler Yeats. A history of Irish poetry over the last six decades of the twentieth century begins with a handful of poets struggling not to succeed the great poet and chef d’école Yeats but to gain independence from his dominant influence
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Irish Literature , pp. 357 - 420Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006