ENGL 4541 Modern Irish Poetry

From pastoral to postmodernism, via world war, insurrection and Troubles, in writing by women and men, in the country or in the city, in love or in grief, the last century of Irish poetry writes about a great deal of subject matter in a variety of forms. This course will move across the contexts and history of modern Irish literature, looking at its poetry under four intertwined thematic headings: land; love; elegy; history. Poems in English and translated from Irish will be studied as they relate to these preoccupations, and students taking the course will accrue a picture of the traditions, continuities, fragmentations and innovations of the Irish poem. Authors studied range from W.B. Yeats to Leontia Flynn, from Nuala Ni Dhomnaill to Paul Muldoon, from Seamus Heaney to Vona Groarke.