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Irish Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century

Early in the twentieth century, the poet Austin Clarke complained at the weight placed on the shoulders of Irish poets by the dominant precedent of Yeats, the major presence in English poetry, calling Yeats the great oak that soaked up the surrounding moisture. This crushing responsibility was in some ways alleviated in the 1970s by the major group of poets in Northern Ireland who had both the talent and the subject (Ulster’s political ‘Troubles’) to survive comparison with the master. Robert Lowell called the principal talent amongst them, Seamus Heaney ‘the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats’, upon the publication of North in 1975; twenty years later, after Heaney had – like Yeats – won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the emulation was complete. Except, of course, that for other aspiring Irish poets, the position was worse: there were now two mighty oaks out of whose shadows it was necessary to escape in order to find their own writing terrain: Heaney as well as Yeats. In fact the Ulster group, both of Heaney’s generation and in the generation immediately following, were a remarkably successful collective. Heaney was born in 1939, three months after the death of Yeats, offering a neat continuity in the major figures. His dominance was recognized early, in a remarkably prescient observation by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion in the Introduction to their 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry: