Irish Poet Research Articles

A Comparative Study of Postwar Literature (Iranian Defense and Vietnam’s War) a Komunyakaa’s and Aminpour’s Poems

The comparative study tries to find the common points in two different authors’ works and in this kind of studying so many other common but the hidden points may be revealed. Postwar literature is somehow one of the best literary genres for finding the common factors and features that the poets have tried to present in their works elements such as desire to be winner, cruelty, inhumanity, and absurdity of the war. The Iranian poet late Qaisar Aminpour(1961-2007) and Yusef Komunyakaa ( 1947) from Bogalusa, Louisiana, are among the great American and Iranian poets whose works so many times have been interpreted and analyzed. The finding the outstanding and the most important points and themes in the postwar poems of these two poets is the main aim of this literary comparative study.

“One soft kiss” in a derelict world

Abstract The paper focuses on the contemporary Irish poet Alan Gillis’s latest collection, The Readiness, with special attention paid to “Metropolis” and “Vespers,” two long poems that come in the latter part of the volume. In them, the pressures of late modernity, which are thematised throughout The Readiness, are given sustained attention, revealing loneliness and dereliction as the most excruciating aspects of an individual’s life. While the bleak perspective on late modern existence is characteristic of Gillis work to date, I show that the poems included in this collection, each in its own distinct way, discover relief from the alienation in the establishment of meaningful relationships with other people.

Finding a language that works for them: Gerald Dawe on young people’s engagement with poetry

ABSTRACT Gerald Dawe is one of the most significant Irish poets of the past few decades. In this interview he describes his formation as a poet and banks on his experience as a literary critic and educator to discuss the status of poetry within contemporary education. He shares his views on how young people can be encouraged to engage with the reading and writing of poetry.

Comparison of Personality Dimension of Alexander as Depicted in the Films Alexander (2004) and Alexander the Great (1956) with Persian Poetic Iskandarnāmas, Especially Shāhnāma, Niẓāmī’s Iskandarnāma, and Āyina-yi Iskandarī

Abstract Alexander the Great, the world conqueror who brought the Achaemenid dynasty to its knees, has attracted the attention of many Iranian poets and writers. There are numerous poetic and prose works entitled Iskandarnāma (Treatise on Alexander). Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma and Niẓāmī’s Iskandarnāma are among the most well-known poems narrating Alexander’s life. In addition, several films have been made about Alexander’s life in the West, the most famous of which are Alexander (2004) by Oliver Stone and Alexander the Great (1956) by Robert Rossen. The present descriptive study identifies different dimensions of Alexander’s character in Shāhnāma and Iskandarnāma and compares them with those portrayed in the above-said films. The results show that Alexander’s complex character is composed of four distinct dimensions. Alexander is sometimes an ordinary human being entangled with fear, prone to misjudgment, and an avid lover of love and elaborate festivities. He is an envoy and a warrior. He is also compassionate, generous, resourceful, and politically quite apt. Finally, he has at times the qualities of a prophet and is pious to no end. The films didn’t behoove Alexander’s mysticism or benevolence and focused most tersely on his pillage, murder, and plunder. The literary Alexander of Iran represents a far more dramatic persona than does the film adaptation.

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.

In-Between Traditions: the Poetry of Adília Lopes and Rita Ann Higgins

How much can poetry survive multiculturalism? A comparative approach between the Irish poet Rita Ann Higgins and the Portuguese poet Adília Lopes can provide us with some clue. Yet, questions regarding aesthetics and the contemporary discussions on identity, feminisms and belonging are still left open. Unless we aim at reading comparatively snapshots of two of the most humorous poets of our times.

دراسة مدى تأثر الشاعر اقبال لاهوري بأفكار الشعراء والصوفيين الايرانيين

There is no doubt that Llama Muhammad Iqbal Lahori is one of the greatest bilingual poets in the Indian and Pakistani subcontinents, and Persian poetry and literature had a great influence on the development of his personality and creativity. As a result of his education in Persian poetry and literature, and his upbringing in the school of great poets such as Al-Firdosi, Wasnai, Wahafiz, and Malay, etc., Iqbal Man was able to compose beautiful songs in the form of masnavis, ghazals, and quatrains, which reflect the poet's thoughts and intellectual perceptions. Of course, Rumi had a great contribution and direct influence on Iqbal, but in this article, the focus is more on Maulvi. Therefore, the research in the poems of Iqbal shows that there are many similarities between the poems of Iqbal and Rumi, which make these two poets closer to each other. Because Iqbal was influenced by Rumi in the structure and content of the poem, and he took many of my thoughts, and the power of nature and the capacity of scholars, and expressed them in an innovative way suitable for the present era. Kan al-Mathnavi al-Rouhi by Moulana and Diwan Shams al-Ghazliat are the main references for Iqbal in reaching al-Rumi's thoughts. In this article, the theme of analyzing and evaluating the influence of Iqbal Lahori on the works and thoughts of the great poets of Iran using the method of Al-Analyz al-Maqaran. And the results obtained show that Iqbal was influenced by the great works and thoughts of Iranian poets and mystics, especially Maulana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi.

Thomas Davis’ “The Sack of Baltimore”: A Literary-Historical Perspective

This article is an attempt to read Thomas Davis’ poem “The Sack of Baltimore” (1845) from a literary-historical perspective. It explores Davis’ representation of the sack of Baltimore village, West Cork, Ireland as a historical event depicted from a literary angle. A typical nineteenth-century historical Irish ballad, “The Sack of Baltimore” has not only remained at the margins of literary studies, but even where it has received attention, it has mainly been treated as a historical source material on an Algerian piratical raid that has come to be called “the sack of Baltimore”. This paper proposes that we need to reread the Irish poet’s narrative poem with a stronger interest both in its literary composition and historical contexts. Only in this way would it be possible to do justice and draw more sustained attention to this hitherto understudied lyrical narrative poem.

The Celtic Strobe Light: Thomas Kinsella, Trevor Joyce and the Translation of Nationalist Residues in the Mid-Twentieth Century

According to John Goodby and Marcella Edwards, ‘many Irish poets in the 1960s and 1970s turned to translation from Irish in a way that suggests the difficulty of coming to terms with rapid modernization’. Although this may sound like a reasonable conclusion to make of a period of significant social, cultural and economic upheaval, Goodby and Edwards rely on a false binary in their assertion. Referred to by Joe Cleary as the ‘repression-modernization dyad’ through which ‘all sorts of things get drastically simplified’, this is the notion that a clean break was effected by the transfer of power from Éamon de Valera to Seán Lemass in the late 1950s; that traditionalism and economic nationalism were replaced wholesale by dynamism and economic progressivism. According to such an unnuanced view of mid-century Ireland, then, the ‘difficulty’ faced by those poets who turned to translation from Irish appears to be the difficulty of reconciling traditional literary categories with the onslaught of a modernising agenda which apparently reserved no space for them. This article problematises such a ‘drastically simplified’ account by arguing that poetic translations from Irish in the Lemass years and shortly thereafter played a variety of conflicting cultural roles, as opposed to merely articulating the complexities of rapid economic and social change. The crux of such a claim revolves around a paradox in mid-century Ireland: namely, the persistence of what Raymond Williams would call ‘residual’ nationalism, which jarred with the expansionist economic agenda of the Lemass government. As such, this article juxtaposes Thomas Kinsella’s Tain (1969) with Trevor Joyce’ The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976) to illustrate how some texts proved amenable to the state’s newfound ‘paradoxical conflation of the “economy” and the “nation”’, as Conor McCarthy puts it, while others sought to expose the ‘contradictions and gaps within Irishness as it is now’.

P. B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of ‘The Sensitive-Plant’

This essay investigates the literary exchanges between the Irish poet and agronomist George William Tighe and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Pisa, where the former lived with Margaret King Mount Cashell, alias ‘Mrs Mason’, a radical Irish writer and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley began daily visits to the Mason-Tighe household, sourcing from Tighe's library a wealth of reading material on agricultural chemistry and botany, alongside Irish political and historical titles. Tighe's previously unexamined papers showcase his interests in Irish and Italian literature, republicanism, botany, and agriculture and reveal his links with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Taking as a case study the first poem Shelley composed in Pisa, I argue that Tighe's agricultural pursuits shaped Shelley's political and botanical imagination in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and exerted a significant influence on Shelley's later poetry as a whole.

Advaita Vedānta and the Poetic Exploration of Transcendence in W.B. Yeats’ Poetry

This paper delves into the intricate interplay between Vedānta philosophy and the pursuit of universality in select poems by the esteemed Irish poet, W.B. Yeats. Drawing upon the philosophical tenets of Vedānta, which emphasize the inherent unity of all existence, this study examines how Yeats, a poet deeply influenced by the Eastern thought, grapples with and explores these profound ideas in his poetic oeuvre. Through an in-depth analysis of select poems, I aim to unravel the nuanced ways Yeats engages with Vedānta philosophy, seeking to transcend cultural and temporal boundaries in his quest for a universal poetic vision. Furthermore, the paper endeavours to elucidate why it is imperative to comprehend World Literature through Indic perspectives, challenging the foreign origins of the term. The argument posits the need to develop a theoretical framework rooted in the Indian viewpoint to comprehend literature from diverse global traditions.

Translation as Metonymy: Bijan Elahi’s Persian Variation on Cyrano de Bergerac

In this article, I develop a model for world literature as a patchwork comprised of translations that cross boundaries of language, genre, style and culture. Through a close reading of the modernist Iranian poet Bijan Elahi’s (d. 2010) translations of a poem by the Sufi martyr and poet al-Ḥallāj (d. 922) and the play Cyrano de Bergerac by the French playwright Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), I demonstrate how translation can be used as a comparative method to conjoin, constellate and patch texts and ideas together regardless of their similarities or differences.

Telling Lives: Irish Poets in the Archive

In recent years there has been a significant rise in the publication of Irish documentary poetry, and an increased number of poets engaging with archival materials as part of their creative practice. This is linked to state commemoration processes and the light these have shed on questions of inclusion and remembrance. Archives play an important role in mediating challenging episodes in our history, and in affording space to the marginalised. In this essay I will focus on the systematic exclusion of the experiences of women from national narratives, and the subsequent erasure of their voices from both commemoration of, and creative engagement with, the past. In different ways, Julie Morrissy’s Radical!: Women and the Irish Revolution and Vona Groarke’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara explore archival materials and their role in helping to re-imagine the lives of previous generations of Irish women.

ЖЕНСКИЙ ЛИРИЧЕСКИЙ СУБЪЕКТ В СТИХАХ ПАРВИН ЭТЕСАМИ

In modern literary criticism, the emergence of gender theory in textual criticism and the study of the issue of the concept of a female lyrical subject is an important topic. In the present work, we consider the feminine lyrical subject in the poems of the great Iranian poet Parvin Etesami, in whose poems the feminine lyrical subject is creative, active, speaking and thinking. Parvin’s feminist views at the time she lived and in that society were unique; she, as a representative of all Iranian women, directly expressed the feminine point of view on many issues and where it comes from the person of a woman (the feminine gender is used in grammatical constructions) and with woman’s point of view. Such themes include women’s right to education, as Etesami openly discusses in her poems.

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.

The Cultural Impact of the Persian Language in and around Bidlis

Abstract It may seem perplexing, in the beginning, to see Iranian poet Khayyām's rubaies and other Persian poems on the gravestones of Bidlis from the late nineteenth century. However, when scrutinizing Bidlis's political and cultural history, it is clear that Persian language and culture has deep, longstanding roots in this city and been integrated into high Iranian-Islamic culture in both respects. Based mainly on primary archival sources and inscriptions, I touch on the adventures and preponderance of Persian—the lingua franca of the rulers of Bidlis, a Kurdish principality located on the Ottoman-Iranian frontier—and its intellectuals after the city was integrated into the Ottoman world, and thus the decaying ascendancy of Persian. Mohammad Amin Riyāhī's book, Nofūz-e zabān o adabīyāt-e Fārsī dar qalamrov-e Osmānī, is a well-known study in this respect, but mostly focuses on the adventures of Persian in and around court circles. Another comprehensive book on the subject, The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, illustrates the frontiers of Persian's usage in the vast geography stretching from China, Central Asia, and India to the Ottoman world. By focusing on a limited area like Bidlis, the region's most prestigious principality, this article attempts to elucidate the impact of Persian in the Ottoman-Iranian frontiers, unearthing its influence as a language of both diplomacy and literature as well as a lingua franca of Bidlis intellectuals in the lands ruled by Kurdish rulers.

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

AbstractEyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English‐language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he has received belies his importance as an anticipator of the momentous literary‐historical processes that would transform India's public sphere in the 19th century. This essay offers a contextual reading of Saint Thomas's Mount (1774), his earliest extant poem, which is avowedly modelled on canonical English topographical poems like Alexander Pope's Windsor‐Forest (1713) and makes use of a host of neoclassical conventions, but which also differs from them in terms of the kind of landscape that is represented (Irwin's is a tropical landscape, with abundant mangoes, palms, and Oriental fauna, unlike Pope's pleasant, idyllic British park). However, Irwin's target readership being chiefly metropolitan, he contends with the difficulty of highlighting India's irreducible foreignness while simultaneously trying to ensure that readers in London do not find the Oriental descriptions too alien, incredible, and unrelatable. The authorial strategies he adopts to navigate this difficulty constitute the focus of the first part of the essay. The second (and final) part seeks to shed light on his hybrid, hyphenated identity as an Indian‐born Irish poet, and on his perception of himself as somehow fundamentally unlike those Britons who never ventured beyond the geographical confines of Europe, let alone setting down roots in places on the very fringes of the British empire. The affiliative bonds he forges with expatriate colonial officials living in and confronting the hardships of life in the monsoonal tropics mark him as a member of the steadily growing community of Anglo‐Indians in the Indian subcontinent. While noting the shifting connotations of the term ‘Anglo‐Indian’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, this essay will also examine the implications of identifying Irwin as a member of this initially amorphous but steadily growing community.

Revising Robert Burns and the ‘No Female Bards’ of Ulster-Scots Poetry

John Hewitt’s claim to ‘no female bards’ as part of the revival of what he called the rhyming weaver poets tradition narrowed the scope of scholarly interest, just as the once popular claim that many of the writers in this tradition were simply Robert Burns imitators had done. A variety of publications have provided a range of in-depth studies on the impact of Robert Burns in Ireland, and have done much to challenge the latter claim. However, the presence and output of Ulster-Scots women writers within this wider area of scholarship remains little known. Consequently, by exploring poetry from three writers, Olivia Elder, Sarah Leech and Margaret Dixon McDougall, this essay aims to advance several lesser-known eighteenth and nineteenth-century female Irish poets, add depth to the study of Ulster-Scots women’s writing, and provide new perspectives on Burns in Ireland.

Влияние лермонтовской традиции на современного иранского поэта Шафии Кадкани

Man and nature are two inseparable elements of the world, and the unbreakable connection and coexistence between them is the origin of all kinds of literary works. From ancient times to the present day, we often see poems about nature both in Russian and Persian literature. Using the Natural objects and phenomena in the form of myths and symbols in literary works and giving them personality have various reasons, including political ones. Sometimes poems may be composed under the influence of a poet from another country. This influence can be seen in contemporary Iranian literature. Among the contemporary Iranian poets who are very familiar with the ideas and works of Russian poets and writers is the Iranian naturalist (пейзажист) poet Shafiei Kadkani. He composed his poem “Happy Journeys!”) based on Lermontov’s “The Rock” and “The black Clouds” poems. Both poets have used natural images such as plant (растение), breeze (ветерок), blossoms (цветения), rain (дождь), desert (пустыня), dust (пыль), horror desert (пустыня ужаса), rock / cliff (утес) and black clouds (тучи), which have a symbolic role. By comparing the poems, we can see that they are similar in terms of content and have the same message. And some of the symbols of Shafiei Kadkani are the same as the symbols of Lermontov, such as the desert, or they are chosen in terms of meaning very close to the symbols of Lermontov, such as “rock / cliff and milkvetch” or “small clouds and breeze”, as well as the dynamic movement of small clouds and breeze, which are the symbol of transition and change. Like Lermontov, Shafiei Kadkani also complains about the situation of his society, but symbols like “blossoms and rain” at the end of Shafiei Kadkani’s poem, unlike Lermontov’s poems, promise the morning of freedom, prosperity and transition, but with doubts.

On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland

On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland