The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott was an early and heretofore relatively unrecognized exemplar for Seamus Heaney, who began reading Walcott in the 1960s and continued engaging with his work his entire career. Walcott’s example enabled Heaney to realize that he could be true to his mixed and multiple linguistic, cultural, literary, and political inheritances, and further, that dwelling amongst such identities could be a position of poetic strength. This essay shows how Walcott confirmed Heaney’s penchant for memorializing historical atrocities committed against members of minority communities across the “Black and Green Atlantic.” At the same time, Walcott’s nuanced poetry modeled how Heaney might enrich and complicate his poetry of witness by seeking rapprochement with such perpetrators through registering their common humanity through their local language. Walcott’s poetic integrity thus influenced Heaney’s continuing attempts to draw on the divisive conflict in Northern Ireland by exploring how literature might not linger on the wound of racialized resentment but finally transcend that situation and ascend into a condition akin to Walcottian song.

Recent initiatives to increase representation in the Irish arts sector are much-needed, although the aspirational model of hospitable hybridity remains exclusionary for many new Irish writers from diverse backgrounds. This chapter offers an overview of the critical and academic discourse on recent Irish poetry, reflecting on statistical, scholarly and anecdotal evidence of and responses to ‘diversity work’ (Ahmed). The chapter surveys the work of Black Irish poets and poets of colour currently writing, performing and publishing in Ireland, suggesting that the alternative methods of publication embraced by some of these writers (spoken word poetry, e-publications, multimedia innovations, and collaborative ventures) exemplify the barriers to entry for poets of color and, at the same time, challenge the mainstream publication industry’s authority as the pathway to publicizing and circulating creative work. In conclusion, the chapter offers a brief study of works by Denise Chaila, Dagogo Hart, Felispeaks and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, demonstrating the diversity of aesthetic, formal and thematic concerns under consideration in contemporary Irish poetry.

Recent discussions in Irish geopolitics have often been coded in spatial language, particularly in the recurring motif of soil. For instance, Ireland was the last country in Europe to grant citizenship on the basis of jus soli (“right of soil”) until the 2004 referendum made citizenship determined by the nationality of one’s parents (jus sanguinis or “right of blood”). Or to take a more recent example: one of the great dangers posed by Brexit is the possibility of creating a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This essay traces how the motif of soil has been central to conceptions of Irish national and racial identity, from The Nation’s famed motto, “To foster a public opinion and make it racy of the soil,” to Seamus Heaney’s infamous bog poems, which wrestle with themes of kinship, lineage, and soil. I argue that such spatial language must be read as more than just figurative and instead as revealing the material relationships between race, place, and geopolitics, which have been and will continue to be crucial to Ireland’s global identity.

This chapter considers the poetry of leading Irish poets (including W. B. Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy) and how their poems encountered World War One both in contemporary time and also retrospectively, in the poems of Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, among others. An important feature of this chapter is the retrieval of several forgotten or neglected voices, including Winifred Letts and Mary Devenport O’Neill. The politics of ‘Empire’ and the role of Irish nationalism are considered in the context of the country, north and south, concluding with a survey of Irish poets writing today and their understanding of the problematic legacies of World War One in relation to Irish literary, cultural, and political history.

The gapped and fractured nature of Irish poetic tradition was from the outset a central theme in the work of Eavan Boland (1944–2020). Its gaps are the products of historical traumas which have often expressed themselves in gendered fashion: while Irish tradition has found abundant use for feminised embodiments of the nation, it has been less comfortable with allowing female experience agency to speak in its own right. Boland’s career engaged vigorously with this historical silencing. I address this dilemma through the prism not just of Irish nationalist historiography but the European Romantic tradition, from Hegel to Wordsworth and Keats. Among the dramas Boland confronts is personal testimony versus positions of exemplarity, in which the poem speaks for and from absences in the historical record. This often places Boland in conflict with the mythic imperatives of Irish poetry, a dissonance registered by the poet in the jagged surfaces of her texts. Situating Boland in the historical moment of recent debates within Irish studies adds an extra dimension to the experience of reading these poems, while also helping us appreciate the way in which their successes have been effectively internalised in subsequent Irish women’s poetry and criticism.

Over many decades, the poetry of Paula Meehan has given a voice to urban (Dublin) working-class experience, and in doing so, to paraphrase Yeats on Synge, expressed a life that had never before found expression in poetry. This is Meehan’s world, yet her world contains so much more too, in poems that encompass Buddhism, environmental concerns, and the classical world. Class consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of Meehan’s artistic vision, rather than a thematic add-on, and critical engagement with her work requires a decisive reorientation of conventional aesthetic categories. A key piece of revisionism present in the poems is Meehan’s critique of domestic space: as against convention, it is often public spaces that are welcoming, where domestic spaces are fraught with tension and violence. To her critique of domestic spaces and class politics, Meehan has notably added in her recent work a sophisticated strain of ecopoetics, taking us beyond human exceptionalism and into a deeper realm of connection with the natural world.

This chapter is an overview of the ways in which Seamus Heaney engages with Greek and Latin mythologies and literatures in his work, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Aeneid VI (2016), and from allusions to more sustained forms of intertexuality, including versions. First discussing classical presences in his early poetry, the chapter shows how Heaney became increasingly interested in Greek and Latin literatures after the late 1980s, at a time of personal and political crises in Northern Ireland. It explains that, in those years, classical texts helped him address family deaths as well as contemporary violence in the North. Finally, it argues that in his rewritings of Sophocles, and in his classical poetry, mostly inspired by Virgil, Heaney ultimately revisits Ireland as a classical and secular space, reflecting social and cultural changes on the island, in the context of the Northern Irish peace process, as well as of globalisation.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘late style’, as defined by Edward Said in his last book, in the work of recent and contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. It explores the anachronistic and untimely as productive ways of thinking about the critical function of art in the three poets, who are all preoccupied with what means to have come ‘too late’ to history, and to poetry. The essay explores the extent to which ‘late style’ can be understood as a function of the ‘exiled’ relationship between the artist and his audience, and to what extent it is a historical consequence of late modernity.

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.

This coda juxtaposes two of the most important Irish poets of the past fifty years, focusing in particular on the ways in which Boland and Heaney base their poetics on turns to the past, whether personal memory or cultural history. It also locates ways in which Boland and Heaney aim to transform their backward-looking glances in order to account for the complexities and uncertainties of historical change, as well as to model alternate ways to think about temporality and transition.

The position of the Cork poet J. J. Callanan (1795–1829) as a transitional figure between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish poetry is more complicated, and more revealing of its historical moment, than is implied in the usual assessments of Callanan as the first Irish poet to have found ways of reshaping poetry written in English to accommodate the formal qualities of poetry written in Irish. An analysis of Callanan’s one collection, The Recluse of Inchidoney (1829), paying particular attention to its use of doppelgangers and its indebtedness to Callanan’s English romantic contemporaries, makes it clear that Callanan occupied a conflicted, dual poetic space, informed by a desire to bring to light, in a fully sympathetic way, the Irish-speaking culture that was still flourishing in rural Ireland in the 1820s, but also recognising the force of Ireland’s English-speaking culture, grounded in a colonialist confidence, that had come to dominate Irish poetry in the eighteenth century.