Modern Irish Literature - Adrian Frazier (essay date 1979)

Adrian Frazier (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: “Irish Poetry After Yeats,” in The Literary Review, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Winter, 1979, pp. 133-44.

[In the following essay, Frazier presents an overview of Irish poetry after W. B. Yeats's death, focusing on Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Ciarán Carson, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon.]

All readers of poetry will admit that one great poet has come out of Ireland in the twentieth century: William Butler Yeats. The enormous appeal of his poetry, especially to Americans, has resulted in a large Irish tourist industry. There are daily buses to Ballylee and Coole Park, summer schools in Sligo (now called “Yeats Country”), critical books on display in the windows of Dublin bookshops, and Anglo-Irish literature programs offered to foreign students in all the main universities. But if the Land of Poets and Dreamers has become a museum for pilgrims and critics, few of these visiting readers have...

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