Modern Irish Literature - Douglas Dunn (essay date 1973)

Douglas Dunn (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: “The Speckled Hill, the Plover's Shore: Northern Irish Poetry Today,” in Encounter, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December, 1973, pp. 70-6.

[In the following essay, Dunn discusses the contemporary poetry of Northern Ireland, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, James Simmons, and John Montague.]

In the North of Ireland, poets—most of them young—are faced with the cruel but interesting difficulties of realising their attitudes to violence and history. In a recent survey of contemporary Irish literature compiled by the French critic Serge Fauchereau, political topicality is elicited from poets in a series of interviews.1 What emerges is that to be a poet in the country of Yeats is at the present time an embarrassment. Michael Longley talks of poetry being a force to be reckoned with, quoting with touching literary and political naïvety Shelley's remark about “unacknowledged legislators.”...

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