The Great War in Irish Poetry explores the impact of the First World War on the work of W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice in the period 1914-45, and on three contemporary Northern Irish poets, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley. Its concern is to place their work, and
memory of the Great War, in the context of Irish culture and politics in the twentieth century. The historical background to Irish involvement in the Great War is explained, as are the ways in which some of the events of 1912-1920--the Home Rule crisis, the loss of the Titanic, the Battle of the
Somme, the Easter Rising--still reverberate in the politics of remembrance in Northern Ireland.

While the Great War is perceived as central to English culture, and its literature holds a privileged position in the English literary canon, the centrality of the Great War to Irish writing has seldom been acknowledged. This book is concerned with the extent to which recognition of the importance
of the Great War in Irish writing has become a casualty of competing versions of the literary canon. It shows that, despite complications in Irish domestic politics which led to the repression of "official memory" of the Great War in Ireland, Irish poets, particularly those writing in the "troubled"
Northern Ireland of the last thirty years, have been drawn throughout the century to the events and images of 1914-18.


Brearton (Queens Univ., Belfast) contends "Irish involvement in the Great War was, and has remained, a problematical subject precisely because the issue was entangled from the beginning with Irish domestic problems." In the aftermath of the Great War, historians supplied "two distinctive literatures to the two Irish states, and helped to fashion two distinctive iconographical traditions." The author divides his defense of these theses into two major parts: "The Art of War" and "The Northern Renascence." In the first part, Brearton reflects on three poets: W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice, men whose reputations as poets revealed the two "distinctive ... traditions." In part 2, Brearton argues that the troubles in Northern Ireland had their origins "in the earlier part of the century, notably the Great War and its demand for bloody sacrifices.'" Here he discusses poets Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley, suggesting their effort to return to "the buried past of the Great War" and an articulation of a new "cultural form." Essentially sociohistorical, this original study bears contrast to more structural/analytic studies--e.g., Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney (CH, Mar'99). Brearton's fine bibliographic offerings are particularly welcome. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. F. L. Ryan; Stonehill College