Modern Irish Literature - Kevin P. Reilly (essay date 1980)

Kevin P. Reilly (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: “Re-Membering: Irish Poetry After Yeats,” in Eire-Ireland, Vol. XV, No. 3, 1980, pp. 120-26.

[In the following essay, Reilly responds to Adrian Frazier's essay on “Irish Poetry after Yeats.”]

The keynote poem in The Literary Review's Winter, 1979, issue on “Irish Poetry after Yeats” is Michael Longley's “On Hearing Irish Spoken.”1 The poet eavesdrops on a conversation between two fishermen gliding together in their currachs, and hears only “An echo of technical terms, the one I know / Repeating itself at desperate intervals / Like the stepping stones across a river in spate.” Longley, a Belfast Protestant and native speaker of English, feels himself cut off from the drowning echo of Ireland's native language. The central problem elaborated in this collection of essays, interviews, and poems is that of being cut off from one's culture and, therefore, from...

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