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 alertness to the languages and literatures of Scotland that marks Seamus Heaney’s work in all its stages is rooted in an awareness of the Scottish derivation of much of the distinctive lexis of his native region. Ignorance of and even antipathy towards Lowland dialect and culture occasionally surfaces in Irish writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance in Carleton and Yeats. Heaney’s enthusiasm for Scotland was in some respects anticipated by James Joyce, another etymologically obsessed Irish writer, though it is notable that, unlike the novelist’s, the poet’s interests included the Highland Gaelic as well as the Lowland English and Scots aspects of Scottish literary achievement. The chapter traces Heaney’s sustained engagement with Scotland in his separate capacities as editor, translator and poet and concludes by examining key intertexts between his poetry and that of Hugh MacDiarmid.

In 1962, the critic Philip Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast to take up a teaching position in the English Department at Queen’s University. He came with an impressive array of literary connections. At Cambridge, he had studied with F.R. Leavis, edited the literary magazine delta, and befriended Ted Hughes. Later, in London, he chaired a weekly writing group, dubbed 'the Group', whose members included Edward Lucie-Smith, Alan Brownjohn, George MacBeth, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, David Wevill and Peter Porter, among others. These were some of the most prominent young poets and critics in England; such contacts would prove valuable when Hobsbaum convened another literary group in Belfast, where he assembled equally talented, if less confident, young writers. This chapter explores the connections between British and Northern Irish poetry in the early 1960s, and argues that the 'Belfast Group' was a crucial launching pad for the fledgling Belfast poetry scene and the success of one Belfast poet in particular: Seamus Heaney.

This essay argues that the niche occupied by contemporary Irish poetry in global Anglophone literature is a function of its formal conservatism and resistance to theoretical reflection. Irish poetry offers a moderate and palatable alternative to poetic work that works in a more thoroughgoing fashion through the violence of the present. Its conservative formalism is a hedge against confronting form with the conditions poetry must engage with. Accordingly, much of recent Irish poetry paradoxically furnishes a convenient and consumable commodity form even where it seems to offer an alternative to the economic and ecological spectacle of global transformations. But a number of poets have found formally innovative ways to accommodate both the political violence of the Troubles and the depredations of neoliberalism in Ireland while at the same time drawing on the long history of Irish resistance to such effects of colonialism and capitalism.

This chapter re-examines the poetry of the early Troubles and addresses the limitations of what was, to a large extent, an atrocity-led literature, drawing on works such as Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ and Seamus Deane’s ‘After Derry’ to reassess the role played by writers and critics at this time. Discussing both retrospective and contemporaneous interviews with authors, the chapter also addresses the ways in which writers such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley responded to the new mandate which poetry had been given after the outbreak of the northern conflict, with the relentless media exposure of the Troubles often, but not always, eliciting evasive responses to the conditions engendered by the violence. Finally, it examines the fresh formal and linguistic strategies adopted by younger poets including Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. By this time, writing the violence of the Troubles into poetry could make evasion a form of engagement which helped to preserve artistic autonomy.