Modern Irish Literature - Seamus Deane (essay date 1976)

Seamus Deane (essay date 1976)

SOURCE: “The Appetites of Gravity: Contemporary Irish Poetry,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 1, January-March, 1976, pp. 199-208.

[In the following review, Deane assesses works by Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, and Richard Murphy.]

Reading these five books, [Wintering Out, North, Notes from the Land of the Dead and Other Poems, The Snow Party, and High Island,] I am reminded of what R. P. Blackmur wrote in 1948: “Almost the whole job of culture has been dumped on the artist's hands.” In Ireland, where this is particularly true, most writers have become wearied by the attritional quality of their relationship to their society and its history. Given the example of W. B. Yeats, the political and economic depression, the society's fixed loyalties and fissile emotions, it was difficult for an Irish poet of the thirties and forties to see his...

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