Introduction

Abstract

The main intention behind this collection of essays is to attempt a definition and assessment of the poetry that has come out of Ireland since 1969 — that is, the poetry coming after Louis MacNeice (died 1963), Patrick Kavanagh (died 1967) and Austin Clarke (died 1974). The book falls roughly into two parts, the first consisting of more general essays considering the interrelationships of contemporary Irish poetry — Irish poetry and Irish history, poetry and politics, poetry and myth, poetry and place. The second part concentrates on the work of individual poets. While a determined effort has been made to ensure substantial coverage of the major poets of this period (consideration of Seamus Heaney is extended into a companion volume, Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Andrews), comprehensiveness has not been possible. Necessary considerations of space and my own limitations have prevented the inclusion of commentary on the poetry written in Irish. I have, however, still preferred to retain ‘Irish’, as opposed to ‘Anglo-Irish’, in the title, to avoid too close an identification with anachronistic conceptions of history and literature deriving from the high tone of Yeats’s cultural vision. The ‘two traditions’ originally denoted by ‘Anglo-Irish’ — the Protestant Ascendancy and the Catholic peasantry — have long been displaced by a quite different, though still colonially donated, social formation: one which, in the broadest terms, might be more accurately designated as Protestant and Catholic, or the North and the South, or Unionist and Nationalist.