Contemporary Irish Poetry - Department of English | New York ...

Irish Poetry After Yeats
Syllabus
Instructor John Waters E-mail Jpw7@nyu.edu
Phone 212 998 3950 Office tba
Hours
Office Glucksman Ireland House One Washington Mews
Course Description and Goals
This course will read in depth the most challenging poetry written by Irish poets since the
ascendancy of W.B. Yeats. We will seek to address the most pressing questions facing
poetry criticism in the Irish Studies field: the struggle with Yeats’s commanding
example; the relation of poetry to national partition and the civil crisis in Northern
Ireland; the confining and liberating aspects of tradition; the use of translation as a means
of finding voice; the agency of poetry in forcing change within a conservative cultural
climate; the challenge of postmodernism to national literatures, and the arrival of
prosperity in Ireland and the consequent need to revise our conceptions of Irish culture.
The poets we will read include Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Denis Devlin, John
Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael
Longley, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ni
Dhomhnaill, Ciaran Carson, Vona Groarke and Medbh McGuckian.
Course Requirements
This class will be conducted as a seminar. Class participation is an essential component
of the work we will be doing together. It is expected that you will come to class having
done the assigned reading for the class discussion. We are reading exciting, challenging,
demanding poetry, and if you are not prepared you will know a very unpleasant and
shaming nakedness.
Twice during term students will be required to circulate to the class a one-page, single
spaced close reading of a poem or passage, distributed via e-mail the day before the poem
will be discussed. Before this reading is distributed, you will have to have it read and
approved by four of your classmates; they are expected to make suggestions and help you
refine your ideas.
Three papers are required, a 6-page essay due during week 6, a 6-page essay due during
week 10, and a 15 to 18 page essay, on a topic chosen in consultation with me, due on the
final day of class.

Required Texts
Coursepack of selected poems and essays
Austin Clarke, Selected Poems ed. W.J. McCormack, Penguin
Thomas Kinsella, Selected Poems 1956-1973, Wake Forest Press
Selected Poems, 1973-1988, Wake Forest Press
Ciaran Carson, Selected Poems, Wake Forest Press
Belfast Confetti, Wake Forest Press
The Star Factory, Granta
Michael Longley, Selected Poems, Wake Forest Press
Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems, Wake Forest Press
John Montague, Collected Poems, Wake Forest Press
The Rough Field, 6 th Edition, Wake Forest Press
Peggy O’Brien, ed., The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry
Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, Farrar Strauss & Giroux
Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996, FSG
Derek Mahon, Selected Poems, Penguin
Matthew Campbell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry,
Cambridge UP
Terence Brown, Ireland A Social and Cultural History 1922 to the Present, Cornell UP
Reading Schedule
Week One
Topics: Introduction. The Poetics of translation and adaptation in the Irish Revival.
Catholic responses to Yeats’s poetry. The Censorship Act
Required Readings: W.B. Yeats, Selected poems (CP); Austin Clarke, Selected Poems,
complete
Suggested Reading: Brown, Ireland, Chapter One; Augustine Harmon, Austine Clarke,
His Life and Work; Alex Davis, Irish Poetry of the 1930s
Week Two
Topics: Poetic Regionalism and the Ireland of the 1940s; Northern Protestant Poetics and
Cosmopolitanism
Required Readings: Patrick Kavanagh, Selected Poems, CP; Louis MacNeice, Selected
Poems, CP
Suggested Reading: Brown, Ireland, Chapters 2 and 3; Seamus Heaney, “Another Look
at Kavanagh” in Preoccupations; Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh, Born-Again
Romantic; Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice, a Study.
Week Three
Topics: Ireland and the cultural climate of the 1950s; Modernism and national style
Readings: Denis Devlin, Selected Poems, CP; Brian Coffey, Selected Poems, CP;
Thomas Kinsella, Selected Poems 1956-1973, especially Nightwalker
Suggested Reading: Alex Davis, A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic
Modernism; Brian John, Reading the Ground: Poetry of Thomas Kinsella; Dillon
Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce Chapters 2 and 3

Week Four
Topics: The beginnings of the Northern poetry revival
Required Readings: John Hewitt, Selected Poems, CP; John Montague, Poisoned Lands
and The Rough Field; Seamus Heaney, early poems, especially Death of a Naturalist
Suggested Reading: Terence Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster; Irish
University Review 1989, vol. 1, Special Issue on John Montague; Dillon Johnston, Irish
Poetry After Joyce Chapters 3 and 4
Weeks Four and Five
Topics: The Northern Crisis and the Northern Revival – Heaney and Mahon; The Belfast
Group
Required Readings: Seamus Heaney, Door Into the Dark, Wintering Out, North, Field
Work; Derek Mahon, Night Crossing, Lives, The Snow Party; Michael Longley, No
Continuing City, An Exploded View
Suggested Reading: Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on the
Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland; Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry
and Northern Ireland; Edna Longley, The Living Stream; Norman Vance, Irish Literature,
A Social History, Chapter 6; David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the
Postcolonial Moment, Chaper 2
Essay #1 Due
Weeks Six and Seven:
Topics: Women Poets and Gendered Poetics
Required Readings: Eavan Boland, New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image,
The Journey and Other Poems; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Acts and Monuments, Site of
Ambush, The Rose Geranium
Suggested Readings: Patricia Haberstroh, Women Creating Women: Contemporary
Irish Poets; John Kerrigan, “Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry”
in Critical Quarterly, 1998, vol. 40 (4); Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the
Woman and the Poet in Our Time
Weeks Eight and Nine
Topics: Narrative Poetry and Poetics; Poetry and Violence
Required Readings: Paul Muldoon, Why Brownlee Left, Quoof, Meeting the British;
Brendan Kennelly, Cromwell
Suggested Reading: Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish
Poetry; Reading Paul Muldoon; Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon; Terence Brown, Ireland’s
Literature: Selected Essays; John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness Into
History; John Hufstader, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stone: Northern Irish Poetry and
Social Violence
Weeks Nine and Ten
Topics: Ciaran Carson’s Belfast
Required Reading: Carson, The Irish For No; Belfast Confetti; Last Night’s Fun; The
Star Factory

Suggested Reading: Guinn Batten, Southern Review Special Issue, Irish Poetry, 1995;
Conor McCarthy, Criticism, 2004
Essay #2 Due
Weeks Eleven and Twelve
Topics: Translation; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Ciaran Carson, The Inferno; The Alexandrine Plan; The Tain; Ní Dhomhnaill, The
Astrakhan Cloak (translations by Paul Muldoon); The Water Horse (translations by
Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian)
Week Thirteen
Topics: The Poetics of Gender and History
Require Reading: Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems; Vona Groarke, Flight and Juniper
Street
Week Fourteen
Essay #3 Due
Conclusion