The history of Irish poetry, like the history of Ireland itself, has long been bound up with the broadcast voices that radiate into, and out of, its shores and the walls of its homes. This essay registers the poetic resonances of radio on the island of Ireland by considering both the traces of the medium that appear in poetry and prose by Louis MacNeice, Eavan Boland, Leontia Flynn, Seamus Heaney, and others, and by examining the cultural role and aesthetic qualities of works produced for radio, with a particular attention to Austin Clarke’s weekly poetry broadcasts (made between 1939 and 1955) and his radio play ‘As the Crow Flies’ (1942). By merging Clarke’s interest in traditional Irish prosody and myth with the demands of writing for a mass medium, ‘As the Crow Flies’ offers an allegory of the futile search for meaning, and shelter, in a world convulsed by violence.

Migration to England has been a better-known context for the development of Caribbean writing, but migration to Canada also shaped the region’s literary history during this period. The Windrush generation that went to England in the 1950s interacted in important ways with Canada; on the one hand, there was a parallel migration of Caribbean people and writers to Canada during this period, while on the other hand, many of the writers who first went to England visited Canada and some later relocated to Canada. This migratory experience complicated the idea of Caribbean writing as responding primarily to a British metropole and offered different ways of thinking about blackness, exile, diaspora, and belonging. Although it is Toronto that has become the major hub for Caribbean artistic activity in Canada, Montréal was an important meeting point during this period and in 1968 was the venue for the Congress of Black Writers which brought together luminaries, writers, and activists from the region, the USA, and Africa in the context of the Black Power movement. The Caribbean demographic in Canada was affected in the 1950s and 1960s by the Canadian government’s recruitment of officially ‘single’ women as domestic workers and later by significant numbers of Caribbean nationals of Indian as well as African descent. An important issue is how the migratory demographic affected the writing during the period.

One of the most significant components of a formative modern Irish literary canon in the middle decades of the twentieth century is its interaction with a neighbouring British literary tradition. In its emphasis on this mid-century hinterland the chapter seeks to revise existing concepts of ‘resurgence’ in the Irish poetry of the 1970s, and explores instead the aesthetic inheritances, connections and continuities that define this period. It initially discusses how members of the poetic coterie in 1940s Dublin, Austin Clarke and Valentin Iremonger, responded in different ways to the publication of Freda Naughton’s A Transitory House by Jonathan Cape in 1945. In being dismissed or praised for its detachment from Ireland, this – her first and only volume - offered a sounding board for anxieties about these writers’ status in relation to England. A similar kind of anxiety is found in the Ulster poetry and criticism of John Hewitt, Roy McFadden and particularly Robert Graecen during these years, writers who held an awkward position in relation to both British and Irish traditions. It then tracks a series of engagements through the 1950s, when Philip Larkin was in Belfast and Donald Davie was in Dublin, locations which were far more productive for the latter than the former.