In 1962, the critic Philip Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast to take up a teaching position in the English Department at Queen’s University. He came with an impressive array of literary connections. At Cambridge, he had studied with F.R. Leavis, edited the literary magazine delta, and befriended Ted Hughes. Later, in London, he chaired a weekly writing group, dubbed 'the Group', whose members included Edward Lucie-Smith, Alan Brownjohn, George MacBeth, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, David Wevill and Peter Porter, among others. These were some of the most prominent young poets and critics in England; such contacts would prove valuable when Hobsbaum convened another literary group in Belfast, where he assembled equally talented, if less confident, young writers. This chapter explores the connections between British and Northern Irish poetry in the early 1960s, and argues that the 'Belfast Group' was a crucial launching pad for the fledgling Belfast poetry scene and the success of one Belfast poet in particular: Seamus Heaney.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘late style’, as defined by Edward Said in his last book, in the work of recent and contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. It explores the anachronistic and untimely as productive ways of thinking about the critical function of art in the three poets, who are all preoccupied with what means to have come ‘too late’ to history, and to poetry. The essay explores the extent to which ‘late style’ can be understood as a function of the ‘exiled’ relationship between the artist and his audience, and to what extent it is a historical consequence of late modernity.

This chapter re-examines the poetry of the early Troubles and addresses the limitations of what was, to a large extent, an atrocity-led literature, drawing on works such as Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ and Seamus Deane’s ‘After Derry’ to reassess the role played by writers and critics at this time. Discussing both retrospective and contemporaneous interviews with authors, the chapter also addresses the ways in which writers such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley responded to the new mandate which poetry had been given after the outbreak of the northern conflict, with the relentless media exposure of the Troubles often, but not always, eliciting evasive responses to the conditions engendered by the violence. Finally, it examines the fresh formal and linguistic strategies adopted by younger poets including Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. By this time, writing the violence of the Troubles into poetry could make evasion a form of engagement which helped to preserve artistic autonomy.

Considering novels, poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose, this chapter examines how writers represented the Troubles and the gradual gains of the peace process between 1980 and 1998. It considers the historical displacements of Brian Friel’s Translations and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), the realism of Ciaran Carson’s The Irish For No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989), the staging of women’s lives during the Troubles in Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985), the phantasmagorias of Paul Muldoon’s poetry and the metaphorisations of war and violence in Medbh McGuckian’s verse, and the Belfast panoramas of Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad (1992) and Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996). Contemporary Northern writers contextualise the conflict by illuminating the country’s colonial past; they narrate structures of trauma by examining how history invades the present; they present palliative correctives to the vicious linearity of the conflict; and they project possible resolutions to the exhausted (il)logic of sectarian strife.