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'A brief glow in the dark': Samuel Beckett's Presence in Modern Irish Poetry

Abstract:This essay examines the ways in which Irish poets writing after the Second World War have responded to the work of Samuel Beckett. It investigates the importance of the republication in the early 1970s of Beckett's essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' (1934), which advocates a literature of 'self-perception' rather than the propagation of national myths, at a time when sectarian strife forced poets to come to terms with notions of place and displacement, and the role of the artist within society. Beckett's influence can in particular be found in Derek Mahon's work, whose 'soul landscapes' owe much to his perception of Beckett as a 'visual' writer and whose expression of a 'metaphysical unease' builds upon a distinctly Beckettian view of the human condition.