Kirjahaku

In the two world wars – and throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland – poets insisted on not serving any political or nationalist case. As the war poets were attacked for failing to write their country’s battle hymns, so the Ulster poets were victims of improper ‘expectations’. In this seminal critical study Edna Longley argues that while poets as citizens may support various causes, poets as writers cannot settle for anything less than ‘full human truths’. The price of that imaginative freedom is ‘eternal vigilance’. Edna Longley shows how Edward Thomas wrote for England, but not for its war. How Keith Douglas kept a moral eye on his subject even as he shot to kill. And yet how an unjust Ulster ‘hurt’ Seamus Heaney into poetry. Edna Longley relates contemporary Northern Irish poetry to the overall history of 20th-century poetry in English. She argues that the most important poets have stuck quite deliberately to their armoury of difficult traditional forms, adapting and extending them in response to modern wars, conflicts, oppression and injustice. In this important collection of interconnected essays, she also traces the influence of W.B. Yeats, and considers the work of Louis MacNeice, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon.

Edna Longley’s second collection of essays for Bloodaxe investigates the links between Irish literature (especially contemporary poetry), Irish culture and Irish politics. The Living Stream takes its title from Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’: ‘Hearts with one purpose alone/ Through summer and winter seem/ Enchanted to a stone/ To trouble the living stream…’ By questioning the ?xed purposes of both nationalism and unionism, literature has helped to make living streams ?ow in Ireland. Edna Longley shows in particular where recent Northern Irish writing, together with the critical debates it has occasioned, ?ts into this process of change. In her introduction, which includes a hard-hitting critique of The Field Day Anthology, Edna Longley argues that it’s time for Irish literary criticism to adopt the “revisionist” approach that characterises the writing of Irish history, which would mean paying more attention to religious factors, to literary relations with Britain, and to the cultural diversity that underlies creative diversity. These ideas inform her consideration of such topics as: the historical imaginations of Northern Irish poets; Belfast in literature; Protestant writers after Irish Independence; the Thirties generation of Northern Irish writers; the in?uence of Louis MacNeice; aesthetic differences between poetry from the North and from the Republic. The book also contains a re?ection on the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising, and Edna Longley’s controversial pamphlet From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands.