Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation

The award of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney recognized not only the aesthetic achievement of his work, but also its political urgency. Here Steven Matthews presents a genealogy of Irish poetry which centres upon Heaney's recent preoccupation with the relations between poetry, politics and history. Writing from the perspective of Irish critical responses to the poetry, he discusses a wide range of work from John Hewitt through Heaney himself to Paul Muldoon. All of these poe