No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The only attempt at a systematic analysis and classification of Irish accentual verse -metres available to scholars remains that of Prof. Tadhg 6 Donnchadha ('T?rna') , the most recent editions of whose work are half a century old. The present thesis represents a second attempt at the same task, taking into account the contributions of Irish scholars and editors since 6 Donnchadha's time as well as those of more recent metrical scholarship generally. Following a survey of 6 Donnchadha's work and an assessment of its influence upon later editorial practice, an attempt is made to summarise the various schools of metrical scholarship which have emerged in the context of English poetry, with the aim of discovering what principles, if any, might be useful in the construction of a metrical theory for Irish accentual verse. This examination of foreign metrical models is justified on the grounds of the rhythmical similarity between English and Irish, both of which may be described as strongly 'stress -timed' languages. Linguistic phenomena are, indeed, central to the choice of an appropriate theoretical model, and Ch. 3 is devoted to a phenomenologically -based discussion of the role of rhythm in spoken Irish and its implications for verse -structure. Chapters 4 through 10 represent the central part of the thesis and are given over to a taxonomical survey of Irish verse -types, in which the principal criterion for inclusion in a given category is the number of stressed syllables in a line. Chapter 11 discusses the various stanzaic forms, both simple and complex, used by Irish poets, as well as certain supra -stanzaic organisational devices such as refrains and ceangal ver- ses. In this context also the form known as tri rann agus amhr?n, often likened to an Irish sonnet, is examined. The ornamentation of verse is the subject of the following chapter, with emphasis placed as much upon the position and function of ornament within the line /stanza as upon the character and linguistic significance of the types of ornament employed. A final chapter is devoted to discussion of the musical context of verse, with particular attention paid to the ways in which musical metre differs from verse -metre, and the implications of such differences for a system of versification primarily transmitted through a musical medium.

This essay aims to find a correlation between the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the social-cultural context of its time-period. With the aid of conceptual history, representations of fundamental concepts can be revealed in the written text. The methodological approach is based on Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte where concepts are used for timing history. The two concepts in focus in the essay are 'crisis' and 'the Golden Age'. The results found in the analysis of Yeats' poems displayed to a high amount the representation of the concept of 'crisis', revealing that crisis in the society at that time is reflected in Yeats' poems, but representations of the counter-concept 'the Golden Age' was only partly found in poems from his later collections. A suggestion for further research is to perform a study where several contemporary poets are investigated simultaneously with the aid of conceptual history.

Fast Enough is a collection of poems that plays on the potential implications of its title when thinking about history, time, place, nationality, religion and culture. These things are always in flux, there are no fixed systems, no solutions can be endorsed. There is a nagging anxiety and sense of being overwhelmed by these forces as the poems negotiate and come into contact with them. Formally the poems are interested in the possibility of the stanza, a controlled but arbitrary use of line and rhyme, the use of enjambment and variations in tone or delivery, from the colloquial to the intellectual. They use both urban and bucolic imagery, interspersing this to disorientate and confuse. The collection aims to unsettle, to propose and reject when thinking about the relationship of poetry to historical and contemporary pressures; the result is an unattached individualism. The poems offer a critique and inform. Distance and detachment are important elements for these poems as they move between England, Ireland, America and Europe. This is both a search for subject matter, and a signal of their interest in peripherality, the margins, the interstices and an angular or askance approach to place. Often a composed outsiderliness can be sensed in the subject matter, or in alienated but open speakers who are strangers in their own country or another, and existentially aware (or alert – alert to the dangers of past, present and future events/selves) observers. The critical element of this thesis, Places Where a Thought Might Grow: Culture, Liminality and the Troubles in Derek Mahon’s Lives (1972) and The Snow Party (1975), is a long piece of academically engaged literary criticism that assesses Mahon’s second and third collections of poetry. Using a theoretical filter of liminality, the work argues that Mahon strategically or deliberately writes the liminal into his poetry as a form of dissent against the cultural fixity apparent in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. This derives from a profound sense of alienation from his Northern Irish, Protestant/Presbyterian inheritance and a reluctance to assume a role akin to that of a communal spokesperson. To do so the work considers important and specific poems from both collections. These are contextualised around the Troubles, an era when unique and overwhelming political and religious extremes decisively and long lastingly impacted Mahon’s poetry. It reads these collections as a two-part project in which Mahon implements liminal, peripheral and interstitial ideas (through the use of place, objects, subject matter and form) to interrogate absolutism and tribalism in the province. The work also argues that Mahon’s poems, influenced by existentialism, millenarianism and postcolonialism, are liminal zones where identity and subjectivity can be freely re-conceptualised and the unwieldy, prescriptive influence of such things as nationalism and history broken down. The poetry of some of Mahon’s Northern Irish contemporaries (notably Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon) is considered. The study also proposes that the influence of the writers Samuel Beckett and Louis MacNeice (key literary catalysts in Mahon’s divorce from his Northern Irish origins) are simultaneously at work in both collections, creating unresolvable tensions and paradoxes in these poems.

The anxiety produced by the Celtic Tiger collapse created a cultural demand for cognitive frames that made the dramatically altered social circumstances and processes leading to the new economic conditions relatable. To understand the 2008 financial collapse's impact on Ireland, the nation's leading newspaper, the Irish Times, predictably employed tropes in service since the Great Depression, including human body and geological metaphors for the economic system, while rarely using metaphors such as the casino economy or the networked economy that more aptly described the level of speculation in an economic system structured by the realities of the information age. Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger poets exemplify the reciprocity between journalistic discourse incorporating economic tropes and Irish and Northern Irish poets’ use of this discourse as a method of social critique invested in the political policy direction of their nation. Irish poetry, absorbed in a more intensive version of linguistic expression and experimentation than journalistic discourse and economic rhetoric, provides insight into the effect of economic metaphors on the socio-cultural circumstances of the nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--McMaster University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 283-296). Also available via World Wide Web.

This dissertation will examine the works of five contemporary Northern Irish poets who lived through the Troubles, a period of intense sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about thirty years from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Colette Bryce, and Leontia Flynn each write in different experimental modes to express the traumatic experiences of the Troubles. Through a discussion of selected works by these poets, this dissertation will develop a revision of established trauma theory and suggest a mode of reading works about trauma that emphasizes the generative potential of writing about trauma with non-normative narrative styles and poetic techniques. Carson’s middle-era poetry transposes post-traumatic responses into poetry, using poetic form and atemporal narrative to draw the reader in. McGuckian’s deeply interior poems initially seem to resist interpretation, but ultimately, the reader as witness plays an important role in processing traumatic experiences. Muldoon’s playful and allusive poetry reflects on traumatic experiences without becoming stuck in any repeating narrative, emphasizing the generative potential for using poetry to transform the past into infinite imaginative possibilities. Colette Bryce and Leontia Flynn, writing in the “post-Agreement” era after the ceasefire, each seek distance and alternate perspectives that allow them to both look back at the past and look forward into the future. / English

In Eavan Boland’s Domestic Violence, it is through the conflation of the secret with the female body that secrets become the way to simultaneously expose, as well as mediate, one of Boland’s most often addressed themes: a split between the public image of Irish woman as mythic symbol and the private realities of the lives of actual women. This paper argues that these are poems that, even as they explore the relationship between the secret and the body, simultaneously begin to embody the secret themselves. In so doing, it is the poems themselves that ultimately become the secret possessors, revealing and concealing in equal measure as they open up a counter-narrative to the public myths of the Irish woman through their repossession of the body and of desire.