Modern Irish Literature - John Drexel (essay date 1989)

John Drexel (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: “Threaders of Double-Stranded Words: News from the North of Ireland,” in New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 2, Winter, 1989, pp. 179-92.

[In the following essay, Drexel reviews works by Ciarán Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Paul Muldoon.]

Fifty years after his death, Yeats's influence on Irish poetry is finally beginning to fade. It isn't that the current generation has discounted him—to the contrary. But if there is a presiding figure now for younger Irish poets to contend with, it's Seamus Heaney. Heaney's accomplishment in our day may not match that of Yeats in his, but Heaney is by far the most visible Irish poet currently at work.

Yeats's dominance was such that those gifted poets who followed closely on his heels, chronologically speaking—Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum, and Denis Devlin, among others—were driven into real or figurative exile. Not even the...

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