Edna Longley

A guide to the poetry of Louis MacNeice and its lasting place in 20th-century literature. Edna Longley argues that MacNeice's work absorbed the communal experience of four decades, not just the 1930s, and enters into the life of the senses and the psyche.

A Study

Louis MacNeice

Edna Longley's second collection of essays for Bloodaxe investigates the links between Irish literature (especially contemporary poetry), Irish culture and Irish politics. The Living Stream takes its title from Yeats's poem 'Easter 1916': 'Hearts with one purpose alone/ Through summer and winter seem/ Enchanted to a stone/ To trouble the living stream...' By questioning the ﬁxed purposes of both nationalism and unionism, literature has helped to make living streams ﬂow in Ireland. Edna Longley shows in particular where recent Northern Irish writing, together with the critical debates it has occasioned, ﬁts into this process of change.In her introduction, which includes a hard-hitting critique of The Field Day Anthology, Edna Longley argues that it's time for Irish literary criticism to adopt the "revisionist" approach that characterises the writing of Irish history, which would mean paying more attention to religious factors, to literary relations with Britain, and to the cultural diversity that underlies creative diversity. These ideas inform her consideration of such topics as: the historical imaginations of Northern Irish poets; Belfast in literature; Protestant writers after Irish Independence; the Thirties generation of Northern Irish writers; the inﬂuence of Louis MacNeice; aesthetic differences between poetry from the North and from the Republic. The book also contains a reﬂection on the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising, and Edna Longley's controversial pamphlet From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands.

Literature & Revisionism in Ireland

The Living Stream

In the two world wars and throughout the present Troubles in Northern Ireland, poets have insisted on not serving any political or nationalist case.

Poetry in the Wars

This book from renowned poetry critic Edna Longley presents fresh, dynamic perspectives on W. B. Yeats' enduring legacy.

Yeats and Modern Poetry

Scholars and critics commonly align W. B. Yeats with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the modernist movement at large. This incisive study from renowned poetry critic Edna Longley argues that Yeats' presence and influence in modern poetry have been sorely misunderstood. Longley disputes the value of modernist critical paradigms and suggests alternative perspectives for interpreting Yeats - perspectives based on his own criticism, and on how Ireland shaped both his criticism and his poetry. Close readings of particular poems focus on structure, demonstrating how radically Yeats' approach to poetic form differs from that of Pound and Eliot. Longley discusses other twentieth-century poets in relation to Yeats' insistence on tradition, and offers valuable insights into the work of Edward Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Wilfred Owen, Hugh MacDiarmid, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Her postscript addresses key issues in contemporary poetry by taking a fresh look at Yeats's enduring legacy.

Peter Mackay

Fran Brearton

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.

Edna Longley

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