Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Modern Irish Literature - Dillon Johnston (essay date 1974)

Dillon Johnston (essay date 1974)

SOURCE: “‘The Enabling Ritual’: Irish Poetry in the 'Seventies,” in Shenandoah, Vol. XXV, No. 4, Summer, 1974, pp. 3-24.

[In the following essay, Johnston compares works by Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Richard Murphy, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Seamus Deane, Richard Ryan, and Paul Muldoon.]

But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Make no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.
                                                                                W. B. Yeats
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards.
                                                                                Seamus Heaney

After Austin Clarke's death, on March 19th of this year, his body was...

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