Irish Poetry: An Interpretive Anthology from Before Swift to Yeats and After

by W. J. McCormack

Overview

Debates about Irish culture have long been plagued by neat oppositions between conquering England and colonized Erin, Protestant and Catholic, stolid Saxon and dreamy Celt. Yet the greatest Irish poets have scorned such simplicities.
In this avowedly interpretative anthology of Irish verse, W.J. McCormack traces creativity of contradiction through several centuries, finding poets productively at odds with their forebears, their contemporaries—even with themselves. From Yeats's tragic laughter to the quieter ironies of Seamus Heaney, from the rambunctious narratives of Merriman and Joyce to the pathos of Wilde's Reading Gaol, the same sparring spirit is found.
This exciting anthology brings together the very best in Irish poetry to reveal a broad yet sharply-focused tradition of diversity and dissidence. W.J. McCormack's compelling collection provokes a wide-ranging reconsideration of one of the world's richest literatures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814756287
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2000
Pages:	355
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

W.J. McCormack is Professor of Literary History at the University of London and head of the English Department at Goldsmith's College.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“McCormack's painstaking selection does justice to the panoply of Irish poets [and] does indeed reflect a national history, messy and complex, strident and joyful in the most tragic of circumstances.”

-Kirkus Reviews,

“Dr. McCormack's anthology is must reading for anyone who delights in the imaginative mind of the poet.”

-Council on National Literatures

Editorial Reviews

McCormack's painstaking selection does justice to the panoply of Irish poets [and] does indeed reflect a national history, messy and complex, strident and joyful in the most tragic of circumstances.”

-Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Mc Cormack, a professor of literary history at the University of London, has woven together a fascinating and problematic anthology. The subtitle, tailored to the American edition, is something of a non sequitur, since the selection includes only one poet before Swift, but 28 after Yeats. "Interpretive" refers to Mc Cormack's goal, as he states it in the introduction, of demonstrating "how Irish literature can be read, not just as a national history, but also as a less orderly and more unexpected series of assaults, dialogues, embraces, exchanges, and propositions." The selections are often avowedly sectarian and provocative, but the virtual absence of biographical information or critical notes—crucial for any American edition of such a politically oriented book—obscures the poems' sometimes surprising relationships. Also confusing is the anthology's inconsistent approach to its treatment of poems in Gaelic, some presented in English with the original Gaelic, others exclusively in English, and one just in Gaelic. One may always complain too about omissions—Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill spring to mind—but, as a whole, Mc Cormack's painstaking selection does justice to the panoply of Irish poets, from the bardic pronouncements of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille to the slyly conventional sonnets of Lady Gregory to poems by moderns like Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Derek Mahon. The inclusions from Yeats and Joyce highlight a political engagement that frequently goes unnoticed in selections of their work. Perhaps most satisfying is the generous sampling of marvelous long poems like Brian Merriman's MidnightCourt(translated by Frank O'Connor), Austin Clarke's Orphide, and Patrick Kavanagh's Great Hunger—alongside Oscar Wilde's more famous Ballad of Reading Gaol. The poems in this volume do indeed reflect a national history, messy and complex, strident and joyful in the most tragic of circumstances.

Kirkus Reviews

"Dr. McCormack’s anthology is must reading for anyone who delights in the imaginative mind of the poet."

Council on National Literatures