Irish Poetry After Yeats

(4 Credits)

This course will seek to address the most pressing questions facing poetry criticism in the Irish Studies field: the cultural consequences of Irish independence; the relation of poetry to the civil crisis in Northern Ireland; the confining and liberating aspects of tradition and the impact of the Irish Literary Revival; the use of translation as a means of finding voice; the agency of poetry in forcing change within a conservative cultural climate; the challenge of postmodernism to national literatures, and the arrival of prosperity in Ireland and the consequent need to revise our conceptions of Irish culture. The poets we will read include Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Medbh McGuckian.