Modern Irish and Scottish poetry

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"The comparative study of the literatures of Ireland and Scotland has emerged as a distinct and buoyant field in recent years. This collection of new essays offers the first sustained comparison of modern Irish and Scottish poetry, featuring close readings of texts within broad historical and political contextualisation. Playing on influences, crossovers, connections, disconnections and differences, the 'affinities' and 'opposites' traced in this book cross both Irish and Scottish poetry in many directions. Contributors include major scholars of the new 'archipelagic' approach, as well as leading Irish and Scottish poets providing important insights into current creative practice. Poets discussed include W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of poetry from these islands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries"-- "To compare modern Irish and Scottish poetry is to change the critical axis. It is to unsettle categories like the "English lyric" or "Anglo-American modernism". We might begin with two Irish-Scottish poetic encounters a century apart. The Rhymers' Club, which foregathered in 1890s London, laid crucial foundations for modern poetry in English, and established the prototype for later avant-garde coteries. The Club's make-up was strikingly "archipelagic": a term that will recur in this introduction. The Rhymers' Club marks a space where literary and cultural traditions from different parts of the British Isles came into play; where late nineteenth-century aestheticism met Celticism; and, more materially, where Irish, Scottish and Welsh poets competed for metropolitan attention - W.B. Yeats with particular success"--