This chapter explores the submerged yet generative relationship of influence between the poetries of Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – two major Northern Irish poets of very different backgrounds and primary aesthetic dispositions. Notwithstanding their respective signature identifications with modernity, flux and hybridity on the one hand and tradition, continuity and community on the other, the chapter proposes that Heaney turns to MacNeice in order to seek out new directions for his own growth as artist. The chapter centrally argues that these two poets share a common concern with renewing the relationship between immutable reality and the alterity of dream-life. In consequence, their engagements with territorial conflict lead both poets to open vital space for non-conformity with the totalizing logic of enforced national destiny. Within this space, MacNeice and Heaney offer a linked vision of creativity renewed rather than foreclosed through recognizing human frailty in the face of mortality.

This chapter focuses on Northern Irish poetry in the twenty-first century and looks in particular at the work of Alan Gillis, Leontia Flynn, and Sinéad Morrissey in order to understand the relationship between the formal dynamics that have underpinned Northern Irish poetry – a general and continuing commitment to lyric conventions and to “the well-made poem” – and the shifting social and cultural conditions of Northern Ireland in the two decades since the Good Friday Agreement. Examining the ways that Gillis, Flynn, and Morrissey absorb and refract the compositional styles and formal tendencies of several precursor poets, this chapter suggests that all three aim to find what remains viable within the gallery of shapes, tones, and modes that have characterized Northern Irish poetry since the 1960s in order to catch and represent contemporary conditions in the North.