Irish Poetry Research Articles

Exploring Contrasts: Depiction of Irish Rural Life in Yeats and Kavanagh

This paper aims to investigate the depiction of Irish rural life in selected poems by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. Modern Irish poetry presents two contrasting perspectives on the portrayal of rural Ireland. Some poets like W. B. Yeats, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney, along with other leading Irish poets, romanticize the Irish countryside, portraying it as charming, magnificent, and idyllic. These poets prefer to live in tune with nature, tempted by its pastoral landscape and inspired by its idealized tranquility. In contrast, other modern Irish poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Michael Hartnett, and many others, reject this idealized vision of the countryside. Instead, they offer a stark portrayal of rural Ireland, exposing its harsh realities and revealing the poverty, struggles, and hardships encountered by Irish peasants. This article, accordingly, seeks to explore these two different literary traditions within modern Irish poetry, with a focus on W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh as representatives of opposing attitudes. Specifically, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats and The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh serve as the concentration for this study. In reaching its conclusions, the article finally reveals the divergent perspectives portrayed within the two poems, highlighting how Yeats and Kavanagh employ distinct poetic techniques to present their attitudes, sharply contrasting each other.

The Harp and the Eagle: teaching Irish Poetry in Mexico

Ireland and Mexico share a long tradition of intercultural relationships. The Latin American nation has received significant influence from the mind-frames and oeuvre of Irish or Irish-descended thinkers, and authors. In the field of literature, the presence of Irish writers in Mexico has been equally relevant. A number of them are constantly referenced in middle- to higher-education institutions as paradigmatic examples of the Anglophone belles lettres. Nevertheless, and with the possible exception of Yeats, limited academic and pedagogic attention has been paid to Irish poetry, almost exclusively in English, until comparatively recent times. As of the mid-2000s, the School of Philosophy and Literature (FFyL) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has witnessed a surge in academic efforts to promote the verse production of Anglo-Irish poets in the country. With the publication in 2003 of the anthology Una lengua injertada [A Grafted Tongue] and, more recently, with the establishment of the Contemporary Anglo-Irish Literature Research Project, FFyL-UNAM have inaugurated a new era for the study of (Anglo-) Irish verse in Mexico and Spanish-speaking America. This article will explore the critical and pedagogical approaches with which FFyL-UNAM have tackled the teaching of (Anglo) Irish poetry over at least one decade.

Contribution of Seamus Heaney to Irish Poetry

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.

Seamus Heaney and John Montague: Place and Identity in Irish Poetry

Seamus Heaney and John Montague: Place and Identity in Irish Poetry

Modern Literature

Abstract This chapter has eight sections: 1. General; 2 Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post-1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry Pre-1950; 7. British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Jennifer Sorensen; section 2(a) is by Robbie Moore; section 2(b) is by Marta Donati; section 2(c) is by Rebecca Roach; section 3(a) is by Katherine Parsons; section 3(b) is by Rebecca Roach; section 4(a) is by Sophie Stringfellow; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; section 5 is by Catriona Fallow; section 6(a) is by Wei Zhou; section 7 is by Mae Losasso; section 8 is by David Wheatley.

Re-thinking Eating Disorders as Cultural Pathologies in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Case Study

Eating disorders—a generic term that includes anorexia nervosa, bulimia, binge eating and many other subtypes of problematic relationships with food and eating—are situated at the interface of disciplines as varied as medicine, biology, history, cultural studies, gender studies and the social sciences. Although the reasons behind the development and experience of an eating disorder are individual as well as cultural, these pathologies tend to be analysed from either an exclusively biomedical perspective—which often excludes the cultural factor—or oversimplified as being the result of the stereotypes of beauty imposed on the female body in western cultural traditions. This essay, in contrast, looks at eating disorders as multi-layered metaphors of cultural dissidence within the social order and literary traditions of contemporary Ireland. It is divided into distinct, though interrelated, sections: a brief introduction to eating disorders; a consideration of the problems posed in the representation of emaciated corporealities; a taxonomical classification of the primary sources found in the course of my research; and the analysis of Mary O’Donnell’s poem “Reading the Sunflowers in September” as a case study to illustrate the literal and metaphorical employment of anorexia in contemporary Irish poetry. Although the análisis is philological, the perspective adopted is that of the Medical Humanities, in that I will make use of literary, cultural and biomedical literature in order to provide a view that is complementary to the scientific discourse around anorexia nervosa. O’Donnell’s poem will be considered in relation to European visual arts, particularly photography, in order to enhance the transnational dimension of eating disorders. At the same time, the close reading of the poem under analysis will be complemented by a comparative analysis with other Irish poems of the late 20th and early 21st centuries to underline the relevance of the national context in interpreting the representation of this disease. Ultimately, this essay aims to proffer new perspectives on the pathology and to contribute to the social understanding of those who experience it.

Forms of Resistance: Witnessing Violence in Recent Experimental Irish Poetry

The inhospitability of the lyric mode to marginal and dissenting perspectives means Irish poetry has always found subversive ways of witnessing violence. Some recent Irish poetry locates resistance in formal innovation, as a means of bearing witness to acts of institutional, racial and structural violence that disfigure Irish society. As Carolyn Forché observes in Poetry of Witness, this aesthetic is often sited in the social sphere, between the personal and political, and seeks radical representative techniques to recentre those who have been subjected to processes of erasure through violence. Kimberly Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME, FELISPEAKS’s Dubh, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi’s “Exile” and Cherry Smyth’s Famished are studied to outline the powerful forms of resistance at work in innovative Irish poetry. The article explores the ideological and political implications inherent in the ethics of poetic witness that indict the state and its apparatuses.

Literary Imitation in Three Poems Attributed to Tahirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn

Abstract Throughout both modern and contemporary periods of Iranian poetry, the figure of Tahirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn as a poet has been largely ignored, while some focus has been placed upon her historical roles. Although a large part of this active disregard for her poetry has undoubtedly stemmed from politico-religious intolerance, it has also partially resulted from a lack of detailed information and primary sources. This article advances our understanding of Tahirih the poet by comparing three of the most famous poems attributed to her – “Ay ʿāshiqān, ay ʿāshiqān shud āshikārā wajh-i ḥaqq,” “Ay bi sar-i zulf-i tu sawdā-yi man,” and “Jadhabāt shawqik uljimat bi-salāsil al-ghamm wa-l-balā” – all of which are “literary imitations” (istiqbāl), with the original pieces composed by Rumi, Hātif, and Jāmī, respectively. By comparing Tahirih’s poems with the previous pieces, we gain access to the subtleties and nuances that inform us about the poetic persona of this historical figure.

Institutions and Shadows: Jonathan Swift, Enlightenment and Recent Irish Poetry

This article traces Jonathan Swift’s legacy in the work of three modern Irish poets: Jessica Traynor, Rita Ann Higgins and Derek Mahon. I use two motifs to explore this inheritance: institutions and shadows. Using the work of Genevieve Lloyd, I argue that meaningful engagement with Enlightenment’s legacy must recognise its moral ambiguity and emotional complexity through the metaphor of shadow. Institutions, whether in the case of St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin (Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital, founded by Swift), the residential institutions of the twentieth century or the modern apparatus of Direct Provision, embody a continuing legacy of suffering, control and containment. Imagination and empathy are the difficult but necessary means through which these legacies must be acknowledged and confronted.

Useful and Necessary Book about Outstanding Personalities from Afghan History and Culture

MGIMO University published the second edition of the book Afghan Novels and Stories by Ye. D. Ostrovenko. Yevgeniy Dmitrievich served as Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan in 1992 and was the first ambassador to present credentials signed by the President of Russia to the head of the Afghan state. His book makes a great contribution to strengthening bilateral ties between Russia and Afghanistan, expanding the horizons of knowledge about this country, its history and culture. Candidate of Historical Sciences, Ye. D. Ostrovenko worked for many years both in Afghanistan itself and in the central apparatus of the USSR and Russian Foreign Ministries in the Afghan direction and knows Afghanistan firsthand. He saw more than fifty years of the history of relations between the USSR and Russia with Afghanistan pass before his eyes, and often participated in them personally. The book is in a rare genre combining history, including archives and other historical materials, and fiction. It revolves around personalities, yet manages to show a bigger picture of the history and politics of the country and its peoples. The book tells about a number of outstanding personalities, but special attention is drawn to the poet and warrior Khushhal Khan Khattak (XVII), the first ruler of the independent Afghan state Ahmed Shah Durrani (XVIII), statesman and diplomat Muhammad Wali Khan (late 19th – early 20th centuries). Some of the novels present unique findings of the author. So, in the process of creating the story Canal E. D. Ostrovenko relied on the experience of his practical work as a translator and his novel can be considered original historical evidence. Through the collection of short stories readers get acquainted with the peculiarities of Afghan life, learn about the difficult, and sometimes dangerous, everyday life of Russian diplomats. The new edition includes two newly published novels Pashtun scholar, devoted to M. G. Aslanov, the author of the Pashtu-Russian dictionary, and Warrior fighting with two swords. Book by E. D. Ostrovenko is written in excellent Russian and is easy to read. The author makes extensive use of classical Afghan and Iranian poetry, which arouses additional interest among specialists, including students of the Afghan languages — Pashto and Dari. The book was met with a favorable reception by the Afghans themselves, receiving a wide response and high praise from the Afghan diaspora in Moscow. It will be a useful read not only to students studying Afghanistan, but also to anyone interested in the culture of this wonderful country with its complex and multifaceted history.

THE OLD IRISH POET: MAGICIAN, SEER OR STORYTELLER

The purpose of the study is to consider the structure of Old Irish poetry by the example of several principles of its division: by time, the function of the poet and the addressee of the poetic message.
 The main research materials used are Old Irish sagas, which contain poetic elements, as well as foreign and Russian research in the field of Celtology, affecting the development of Old Irish poetry.
 The relevance of the research is due to the fact that the relationship of druids, filids and bards in Old Irish poetry is not clearly established and is the subject of scientific discussion and many interpretations.
 The methodology of the research consists in using the method of comparative analysis of Old Irish poetry, during which the change of influence of poetic groups (druids, filids and bards) is considered. Understanding this shift is also impossible without analyzing the historical and cultural context (the Christianization of Ireland, Viking raids, the weakening of the monastic way of life and other social and cultural aspects).
 As a result of the conducted research, it was found that along with the change in influence, the recipient of the poetic text also changes: from appeals to the higher powers of the druids – to the visionary rituals of the filids – and further to a wider audience of bards.
 The results of the research allow us to take a broader look at the problem of the formation of Old Irish poetry not only in literary terms, but also from the point of view of cultural development.

Bone and marrow/Cnámh agus smior. An anthology of Irish poetry from medieval to modern ed. by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Bone and marrow/Cnámh agus smior. An anthology of Irish poetry from medieval to modern ed. by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern ed. by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern ed. by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

XIVModern Literature

Abstract This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post-1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry Pre-1950; 7. British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Jennifer Sorensen; section 2(a) is by Chris Mourant; section 2(b) will resume in 2023; section 2(c) is delayed by parental leave and will resume in 2023; section 2(d) is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Katherine Parsons; section 3(b) is by Rebecca Roach, with thanks to Samuel Cooper, and covers work in 2020 and 2021; section 4(a) is by Sophie Stringfellow; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; section 5 is by Catriona Fallow; section 6(a) will resume in 2023; section 6(b) is by Joshua Richards; section 7 is by Alex Niven and covers work in 2020 and 2021; section 8 is by David Wheatley.

Alliteration as a mechanism of cohesion: a new way of concatenation of adjacent lines in Latin poetry

This article aims to analyse the cohesive function of Latin alliteration in cases in which it serves as an element for linking together the hemistichs in the same line or hemistichs in adjacent lines. At an extra-versal level, three forms of alliterative cohesion are distinguished: 1) by enjambment (the words sounding the same at the start that belong to the same syntactical unit flow over the limits of the line); 2) by vertical correspondence (the words sounding the same at the start are placed in successive lines where they occupy the same metric position); 3) by concatenation at the end of each line and the beginning of the subsequent line (… X/X… X/X…, etc., or … X/X… Y/Y…, etc.). The alliterative cohesion by concatenation at the end of each line and the beginning of the subsequent line has been studied due to its systematic use in ancient Irish poetry, but not in Latin, where, as it is shown in this article, there is evidence of the phenomenon. The existence of this cohesive procedure in Latin is verified in poets from different literary periods: Lucretius, Vergilius, Silius Italicus, Prudentius and Claudius Claudianus. This type of studied concatenation is also found in Greek poetry (Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus). This leads us to surmise that it is a phenomenon inherent to the Indo-European tradition.

Review of Bone and Marrow / Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern, by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds)

Review of Bone and Marrow / Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern, by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds) (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2022), 963 pp., ISBN: 9781943667000, $35.95 (paperback)

Representing Contemporary Life and Searching for the Sacred in Dennis O'Driscoll's Poetry

Abstract: Dennis O'Driscoll's poetry expresses with honesty and depth the workplace ennui, the many dissatisfactions bred by consumer culture, and the search for social belonging and a sense of the sacred that people try to create in their lives. His poetry explores our engagements with the world through his acute perception of the fraying contours and the emotional and spiritual impoverishment of life in a mainly secular world. O'Driscoll's clear-eyed vision and colloquial language reveal a freedom from fashionable idioms and ideas that makes him a salutary presence in the world of Irish poetry and beyond.

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

Reviewed by: The Slain Birds by Michael Longley Fred Dings MICHAEL LONGLEY The Slain Birds Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2022. 96 pages. MICHAEL LONGLEY'S new verse collection, The Slain Birds, is mostly a book of miniatures, some poems not exceeding four, five, or even two lines, appearing two per page in eighteen instances; consequently, we read eighty-eight poems in seventy pages. In only a few cases do the poems achieve a length greater than half a page. This matters because, with Longley working in the tradition of poetry being an essential art, it places great pressure on the language to achieve the poetic in a few words. The poet does achieve that benchmark frequently, sometimes as luminously as a dwarf star, but other times, the poems can seem merely notational or observational. The Slain Birds would be a great book if it were edited to 70 percent of its current length, but as such it is only a good book. Patient readers will be rewarded. At his best, Longley uses nuance and carefully selected detail (uncrowded by the inclusion of the superfluous) to attain affecting resonance with few words. Consider the imagery in the following poem, "Agony": "To die like the skylark / parched on a mirage // Or like a tired quail / after crossing the sea [End Page 90] / losing the will to fly and / dying in the first bushes // But not to live lamenting / like a blinded goldfinch." The second image has the pathos of Shelley's "sick eagle looking at the sky." Similarly, what might seem at first like merely descriptive language in "Shell" becomes quickly consequential: "The spring tide keeps us from walking any farther / Towards the sea, so we sit on a reedy bank / And you pick out from wool and seaweed and droppings / A shell and slip into your handbag its spirals / With the fisherman's float I rescued from the lake / Where, more than fifty years ago, we honeymooned. / The ravens in conversation overhead might be / Discussing us or that sheep dead in a hollow / With its yellow ear-tag and delicate black feet." Here, we also hear the powerful influence of that best of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, in "Adam's Curse." In these two examples, then, we hear Longley at his most poetic and in relation to the best in English-language poetry; however, more times than I would like, these poems seem merely descriptive or of little consequence. For example, consider the poem "Dream": "I dreamed I had written a poem / About the beech tree in our garden. / I tried to find it in our notebook, / I sensed the beech tree taking shape, / Three hundred years of summer leaves." Even if the reader summons the frequent appearance of the beech tree in Western literature and perhaps its specific importance in Irish mythology as providing the slices of bark on which Ogma, a god of poetry and writing, wrote, and even if the reader summons the idea of the body of three hundred years of Irish poetry taking leaf in a time of growth and the poet's own season adding to it—even if the reader brings all of this to the poem, is it enough then for this particular poem to attain effective resonance? The problem poses the larger question: Is mere description or mention of cultural symbols enough for a poem? It's a matter of aesthetic value and province, perhaps. The better question might be, Is the language of the poem optimal? When thinking of descriptive poetry and image, I sometimes recall the influence of Rodin on Rilke, and how Rilke sought to write poems that realized the object of their gaze as fully as did Rodin's sculptures. Rilke's object-poems (dinggedichte), poems like "The Spanish Dancer" and "The Panther," find the language, the shape of sound, that brings the objects (and their interiors) optimally and vividly present. Perhaps that is the project at which some of Longley's poems succeed and others don't; however, to end with another example of Longley's success, I quote a two-line poem, "Eyelid," about the poet's daughter examining the dead...

Identical Emblems Of The Irish Pride: Seamus Heaney And W.B. Yeats

Modern Irish nation saw the rise of Two Nobel Laureates from its side who breathed air into Irish poetry and endeavoured to represent the true picture of the Irish people. They shed light upon the atrocities the Irish faced. Yeats yearned for the Irish prosperity and grandeur in a most outspoken manner as a sage even though he was a Protestant, belonging to a generation planted by the British to uproot Catholicism. He spoke against the British tyranny towards the Irish. Heaney, a Catholic following the footsteps of Yeats adopted a different dimension to explain such plights. He gave vent to domestic experiences, deriving poetic inspiration from his surroundings to bring a larger impact on Irish poetry. At the same time, he respects and acknowledges Yeats’ eminence and his influence. The current paper shall address the two Nobel Laureates from a comparative angle, particularly in light of their poetic contributions

SHADES OF A WOMAN’S TIME: THE CHRONOTOPIC REVISION OF HISTORY IN SELECTED POEMS OF EAVAN BOLAND’S OUTSIDE HISTORY

Eavan Boland has been acclaimed as the foremost feminist poet of modern Ireland, and, although she has been accused of resorting to a depoliticized escapist poetry, her poetry stands for a convergence of both the political/national and the feminine in her homeland. Defined and credited as a nation with a mythological history, Ireland has always already been represented through a temporally male perspective. Correspondingly, in the established canon of Irish poetry, time, mostly as a retrospective concept, is a masculine appropriation of history coupled with the archetypal male and female roles, whose spatio-temporal import are to accommodate to the authorized reductionist historiography. Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope is not only an attempt toward the mutual realization of the time/space motif in a literary work, but also the means to the embodiment of a consciousness, an identity. This study attempts to demonstrate how Boland, in a selection of poems from her collection Outside History (1990), specifically, The Achill Woman, The Making of an Irish Goddess, Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of God, and the eponymous poem Outside History, introduces a series of chronotopes which assist her in redefining Irish national history with a feminine hue in the guise of herstory. Furthermore, it will be argued that her poetry may well be seen as a venture to replace the authoritative concept of time as mythology and fiction with a real history.