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Poetry in Modern Ireland: Where Postcolonial and Postmodern Part Ways

Poetry in Modern Ireland: Where Postcolonial and Postmodern Part Ways Christina Hunt Mahony This paper is not about the Uterary burden of the past, but rather about four middle-aged male, canonical poets writing in Ireland today and the poems they have written occasioned by the death of their (biological) fathers. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Thomas KinseUa and Paul Durcan were aU born between 1927 and 1944, and thus are no longer young men. Each of them has been composing elegiac poems for his father which have become more complex with the aging perspective of their authors, and are weighted even more heavüy by the association of the death of the father with the death of tradition in Ireland. These four poets are members of a poetic generation in Ireland which is the first to face the fuU impUcations of modernity there. They are Ireland's modernists--not the displaced generation represented by Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevey. Those writers were European modernists who did the bulk of their writing outside Ireland; and, as has been suggested by Terence Brown in his Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1979, those men were rejected in the '30s and later by their colleagues and the reading pubUc in Ireland as being http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

Poetry in Modern Ireland: Where Postcolonial and Postmodern Part Ways

Mahony, Christina Hunt
The Comparatist , Volume 20 (1) – Oct 3, 1996
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University of North Carolina Press
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Copyright © Southern Comparative Literature Association.
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1559-0887
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Abstract

Christina Hunt Mahony This paper is not about the Uterary burden of the past, but rather about four middle-aged male, canonical poets writing in Ireland today and the poems they have written occasioned by the death of their (biological) fathers. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Thomas KinseUa and Paul Durcan were aU born between 1927 and 1944, and thus are no longer young men. Each of them has been composing elegiac poems for his father which have become more complex with the aging perspective of their authors, and are weighted even more heavüy by the association of the death of the father with the death of tradition in Ireland. These four poets are members of a poetic generation in Ireland which is the first to face the fuU impUcations of modernity there. They are Ireland's modernists--not the displaced generation represented by Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevey. Those writers were European modernists who did the bulk of their writing outside Ireland; and, as has been suggested by Terence Brown in his Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1979, those men were rejected in the '30s and later by their colleagues and the reading pubUc in Ireland as being

Journal

The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Oct 3, 1996

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