Na pesquisa de Mestrado intitulada \"Seamus Heaney: Polifonia (da) Poética do Exílio\" concluímos que o poeta desestabiliza a noção de subjetividade à medida que se afasta de seu lugar de origem. Nesse sentido, encontramos o eu lírico em uma peregrinação católica em que reconstrói, simbolicamente, as fragmentações e divisões de sua comunidade nativa, uma vez que ele próprio cria diálogos imaginários entre seu passado, presente e futuro. Rompendo com as noções lineares de espaço e tempo, Heaney compõe uma poética do exílio como fruto de uma consciência polifônica, em que a atividade poética depende: 1. das personas (subalternas ou literárias) que fizeram parte de sua constituição artística; 2. da culpa de ter-se afastado da Irlanda do Norte em meio à crise civil; e 3. o desejo de liberdade proveniente da visão crítica de James Joyce. Ao fazer movimentos circulares em torno de si mesmo e de sua terra, o autor reproduz o símbolo celta do triskele, através do qual ele reflete sobre as implicações do fazer poético do autor na literatura contemporânea. / The masters research entitled \"Seamus Heaney: Polyphonic Poetics of Exile\" enabled us to conclude that, as the poet distances himself from his native homeland, he de-constructs the notion of poetic subjectivity. Therefore, in order to display this feature, the persona embraces a catholic pilgrimage through which he reconstructs symbolically the fragmentations and divisions of his own community, whilst he himself creates imaginary dialogues between his past, present and future. Overcoming the traditional chronotope of linear time and space, Heaney gives rise to an exile poetics whose polyphonic consciousness stems from: 1. the personas (subaltern or literary) that have belonged to his artistic constitution; 2. the guilt of distancing himself from Northern Ireland in the middle of a civil war; and 3. the desire of liberty provided by the critical vision of James Joyce. As long as he performs circular movements around himself and his land, the author reproduces the Celtic symbol triskele through which he reflects about the implications of writing poetry in contemporary society.

Ao apresentar criticamente ao público de língua portuguesa a obra da escritora irlandesa contemporânea Eavan Boland, por meio de uma seleção poética traduzida, que privilegia a visualidade e a ekphrase, este trabalho tece uma leitura intermediática (artes visuais e literárias) e verifica os efeitos de sentido da intermedialidade na construção do lirismo poético. Pressupondose a inevitável incomunicabilidade da linguagem, esta tese examina a intermedialidade, presente no processo de escrita entre as fronteiras do nacional e do cosmopolita e, sobretudo, do privado ao público e deste àquele, enquanto um recurso artístico, característico da pluralidade identitária da poesia, capaz de alcançar graus de comunicabilidade mais amplos, ou seja, menos deficitários. Por fim, a seleção de poemas aqui recolhidos traça o percurso íntimo da produção artística de Eavan Boland, momento em que os graus de articulação lingüística (seja por meio visual, verbal ou intermediático) assistem a uma suspensão de sua incomunicabilidade, e conseguem atingir esferas mais densas de sucesso comunicativo, fazendo vir à tona a natureza lírica da escrita: os movimentos concomitantes entre as esferas pública e privada referem-se à busca da interioridade, da subjetividade do eu-lírico, o auto-retrato da poetisa. Portanto, a partir do exercício interpretativo das traduções poéticas, bem como do estudo da intermedialidade, lê-se aqui a ekphrase como recurso poético na obra de Eavan Boland, capaz de metonimizar o transitar da voz poética na tradição irlandesa a partir de onde a poetisa fala, a nação irlandesa e a ruptura com essa tradição, a busca ao encontro do feminino, da voz da mulher e, acima de tudo, da voz poética enunciadora do fluxo comunicativo. / While presenting the work of the Irish, contemporary writer Eavan Boland to the public of Portuguese readers, by means of a poetic selection that privileges visuality and ekphrasis, this thesis establishes an intermediatic reading (visual and literary arts) and verifies intermediality´s effects of meaning in the construction of poetic lyricism. While presupposing language´s inevitable incommunicability, this thesis bears witness to the intermediality present in the process of writing in the frontiers of the national and the cosmopolitan and, above all, of the private and public and vice-versa, as an artistic tool, characteristic of poetry´s plural identity, which is capable of reaching broader, less deficient levels of communicability. Ultimately, the selection of poems here presented heeds to the intimate trajectory of Eavan Boland´s artistic production, which reveals levels of linguistic articulation (being them visual, verbal or intermediatic) that suspend its incommunicability and, then, are able to reach deeper spheres of communicative success, as it brings up the lyric nature of writing. The movements that go from the public to the private spheres of subjectivity refer to the search for interiority, for the self, the self-portrait in poetry. Therefore, from the interpretative exercise of the poetic translations, as well as from the study of intermediality, ekphrasis is here read as a poetic tool in the work of Eavan Boland, metonimic of the poetic voice´s transit within the Irish tradition, from where the poet speaks, the Irish nation and the rupture with such tradition, in search of the encounter with the Female, the woman´s voice and, above all, the poetic voice as enunciator of the communicative flow.

Ao apresentar criticamente ao público de língua portuguesa a obra da escritora irlandesa contemporânea Eavan Boland, por meio de uma seleção poética traduzida, que privilegia a visualidade e a ekphrase, este trabalho tece uma leitura intermediática (artes visuais e literárias) e verifica os efeitos de sentido da intermedialidade na construção do lirismo poético. Pressupondose a inevitável incomunicabilidade da linguagem, esta tese examina a intermedialidade, presente no processo de escrita entre as fronteiras do nacional e do cosmopolita e, sobretudo, do privado ao público e deste àquele, enquanto um recurso artístico, característico da pluralidade identitária da poesia, capaz de alcançar graus de comunicabilidade mais amplos, ou seja, menos deficitários. Por fim, a seleção de poemas aqui recolhidos traça o percurso íntimo da produção artística de Eavan Boland, momento em que os graus de articulação lingüística (seja por meio visual, verbal ou intermediático) assistem a uma suspensão de sua incomunicabilidade, e conseguem atingir esferas mais densas de sucesso comunicativo, fazendo vir à tona a natureza lírica da escrita: os movimentos concomitantes entre as esferas pública e privada referem-se à busca da interioridade, da subjetividade do eu-lírico, o auto-retrato da poetisa. Portanto, a partir do exercício interpretativo das traduções poéticas, bem como do estudo da intermedialidade, lê-se aqui a ekphrase como recurso poético na obra de Eavan Boland, capaz de metonimizar o transitar da voz poética na tradição irlandesa a partir de onde a poetisa fala, a nação irlandesa e a ruptura com essa tradição, a busca ao encontro do feminino, da voz da mulher e, acima de tudo, da voz poética enunciadora do fluxo comunicativo. / While presenting the work of the Irish, contemporary writer Eavan Boland to the public of Portuguese readers, by means of a poetic selection that privileges visuality and ekphrasis, this thesis establishes an intermediatic reading (visual and literary arts) and verifies intermediality´s effects of meaning in the construction of poetic lyricism. While presupposing language´s inevitable incommunicability, this thesis bears witness to the intermediality present in the process of writing in the frontiers of the national and the cosmopolitan and, above all, of the private and public and vice-versa, as an artistic tool, characteristic of poetry´s plural identity, which is capable of reaching broader, less deficient levels of communicability. Ultimately, the selection of poems here presented heeds to the intimate trajectory of Eavan Boland´s artistic production, which reveals levels of linguistic articulation (being them visual, verbal or intermediatic) that suspend its incommunicability and, then, are able to reach deeper spheres of communicative success, as it brings up the lyric nature of writing. The movements that go from the public to the private spheres of subjectivity refer to the search for interiority, for the self, the self-portrait in poetry. Therefore, from the interpretative exercise of the poetic translations, as well as from the study of intermediality, ekphrasis is here read as a poetic tool in the work of Eavan Boland, metonimic of the poetic voice´s transit within the Irish tradition, from where the poet speaks, the Irish nation and the rupture with such tradition, in search of the encounter with the Female, the woman´s voice and, above all, the poetic voice as enunciator of the communicative flow.

This thesis is a study of the formation and development of Ciaran Carson’s poetics from his debut in the 1970s up to and including his fourth principal collection of poems, First Language, published in 1993. Examining Carson’s recourse to different kinds of rewriting, made manifest as intertextuality and translation, it aims to account for the thematic formulation and formal realization of this poetics. The poetics is elicited from two distinct groups of poems. The first group comprises poems, given in the consecutive volumes The Lost Explorer (1978), The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1989) and First Language, in which textile techniques serve metaphorically as poetic techniques. These poems are read as formulating a poetics which is formally realized in a second group of poems in which rewriting is the dominant technique. By examining the textile/textual metaphors, and their gradual reconfiguration, and the different manifestations of rewriting in Carson’s work the thesis seeks to describe and demonstrate some of the main principles and expressions of this poetics and its development over time. The thesis sees rewriting as integral to Carson’s poetic method: Earlier texts are deliberately drawn upon and made a constitutive part of a new poem. To account for the textual relations and their effect on meaning-making perspectives are borrowed from theories of intertextuality, especially intertextuality as conceptualized by Gérard Genette and Laurent Jenny, as well as from contemporary translation studies and poetics. A theoretical framework is also provided by the textile/textual metaphors which are employed as analytical tools. It is argued that rewriting is not an end in itself but an important means for the poet to articulate his views on both aesthetic and historical issues. The thesis relates the practice of rewriting to a prominent concern in Carson’s work: the relation between form and material and how to adequately express the complicated experiences associated with Northern Ireland in poetic form. The thesis contends through detailed analysis of Carson’s strategies of rewriting that his persistent recourse to recycling discloses his attentiveness to his own poetic expression and that his poetics should be seen as both an aesthetics and an ethics – an evolving response along both aesthetic and ethical lines to the complexities of his situation and his role as a poet. / Avhandlingen är en studie av den nordirländske poeten Ciaran Carsons poetik, dess framväxt och utveckling till och med Carsons fjärde diktsamling, First Language, som publicerades 1993. Genom en undersökning av Carsons användning av olika slag av omskrivning, manifesterade som intertextualitet och översättning, syftar avhandlingen till att ge en redogörelse för hur Carsons poetik har tematiskt formulerats och formellt realiserats. Carsons poetik friläggs genom ett närstudium av två grupper dikter. Den första gruppen består av dikter från samlingarna The Lost Explorer (1978), The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1989) och First Language, där textila tekniker tjänar som metaforer för poetiska tekniker. Dessa dikter läses som formuleringar av en poetik som förverkligas i en andra grupp dikter där omskrivning är den huvudsakliga tekniken. Genom att undersöka dikternas textila/textuella metaforer och deras gradvisa omvandling samt olika manifestationer av omskrivning i Carsons verk, söker avhandlingen beskriva och demonstrera några av de huvudsakliga principerna i Carsons poetik, liksom de uttryck dessa tar sig, samt hur dessa principer och uttryck förändras över tid. Avhandlingen ser omskrivning som en väsentlig del av Carsons poetiska metod. Tidigare texter får tjäna som underlag för en ny dikt. När det gäller textuella relationer och deras betydelseskapande kraft stöder jag mig på teorier om intertextualitet, främst Gérard Genettes och Laurent Jennys, liksom på perspektiv hämtade från samtida översättningsteori och poetik. Teoretiska perspektiv ges också av de textila/textuella metaforer som används som analytiska redskap. Omskrivning är dock inte ett mål i sig för Carson, utan ett viktigt sätt för poeten att artikulera sin syn på både estetiska och historiska frågor. I avhandlingen relateras omskrivningens praktik till något som upptagit Carson i hela hans författarskap: förhållandet mellan form och material och hur de komplexa nordirländska erfarenheterna ska kunna ges ett adekvat poetiskt uttryck. Utifrån en detaljerad analys av Carsons omskrivningsstrategier hävdas att hans genomgående bruk av återanvändning återspeglar en höggradig medvetenhet om det egna poetiska uttrycket. Hans poetik ska ses som både en estetik och en etik – ett sätt att fortlöpande återknyta, längs både estetiska och etiska linjer, till den komplexa situation han befinner sig i och till hans roll som poet.

This thesis intervenes in current critical debates about space, place and landscape in late-twentieth and twenty-first century British and Irish poetry, by examining models of excavation in selected work by Geoffrey Hill, Ciaran Carson, Geraldine Monk and Alice Oswald. It argues that the influence of the spatial turn on literary criticism over the last thirty years has led to the deployment of a limited set of spatial tropes as analytical tools for interpreting the spaces and places of poetry. By deploying excavation as a critical method it seeks to challenge existing approaches that tend to privilege ideas of space over time, and socio-spatial practices over literary traditions of writing place. In doing so it develops a new model for reading contemporary poetries of place that asserts the importance of locating spatial criticism within temporal and literary-historical frameworks. The four poets examined in the thesis exhibit a common concern with unearthing the strata of language as well as material space. Starting from a premise that excavation always works over the ground of language as well as landscape it investigates the literary traditions of landscape writing in which each of these poets might be said to be embedded. After surveying the critical field the thesis sets out four principles of excavation that it argues are transformed and renewed by each of these poets: the relationship between past and present; recovery and interpretation of finds; processes of unearthing; exhumation of the dead. The subsequent chapters contend that these conventions are put into question by Geoffrey Hill’s sedimentary poetics, Ciaran Carson’s parodic stratigraphy, Geraldine Monk’s collaborations with the dead, and Alice Oswald’s geomorphology of a self-excavating earth. The critical method that underpins the discussion in each of the chapters is also excavatory in that it unearths both the historical and literary strata of specific sites (the Midlands, Belfast, East Lancashire, Dartmoor and the Severn estuary) and resonances in the work of earlier poetic excavators (Paul Celan, Edward Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Dante Alighieri and Homer). Through careful exegesis of these poets and their precursors this thesis demonstrates that by transforming existing forms of excavation, contemporary poetry is able to renew its deep dialogue with place and literary history.

Na pesquisa de Mestrado intitulada \"Seamus Heaney: Polifonia (da) Poética do Exílio\" concluímos que o poeta desestabiliza a noção de subjetividade à medida que se afasta de seu lugar de origem. Nesse sentido, encontramos o eu lírico em uma peregrinação católica em que reconstrói, simbolicamente, as fragmentações e divisões de sua comunidade nativa, uma vez que ele próprio cria diálogos imaginários entre seu passado, presente e futuro. Rompendo com as noções lineares de espaço e tempo, Heaney compõe uma poética do exílio como fruto de uma consciência polifônica, em que a atividade poética depende: 1. das personas (subalternas ou literárias) que fizeram parte de sua constituição artística; 2. da culpa de ter-se afastado da Irlanda do Norte em meio à crise civil; e 3. o desejo de liberdade proveniente da visão crítica de James Joyce. Ao fazer movimentos circulares em torno de si mesmo e de sua terra, o autor reproduz o símbolo celta do triskele, através do qual ele reflete sobre as implicações do fazer poético do autor na literatura contemporânea. / The masters research entitled \"Seamus Heaney: Polyphonic Poetics of Exile\" enabled us to conclude that, as the poet distances himself from his native homeland, he de-constructs the notion of poetic subjectivity. Therefore, in order to display this feature, the persona embraces a catholic pilgrimage through which he reconstructs symbolically the fragmentations and divisions of his own community, whilst he himself creates imaginary dialogues between his past, present and future. Overcoming the traditional chronotope of linear time and space, Heaney gives rise to an exile poetics whose polyphonic consciousness stems from: 1. the personas (subaltern or literary) that have belonged to his artistic constitution; 2. the guilt of distancing himself from Northern Ireland in the middle of a civil war; and 3. the desire of liberty provided by the critical vision of James Joyce. As long as he performs circular movements around himself and his land, the author reproduces the Celtic symbol triskele through which he reflects about the implications of writing poetry in contemporary society.

This study is devoted to five Irish language texts composed in the period between 9th and 21st centuries: four prose tales, an Old Irish tale Loinges Mac nUislenn (The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu (before 10th c.)), two Middle Irish texts Toruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghrainne (The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Grainne (c. 12thc.)) and Tochmarc Etaine (The Wooing of Etain), an 18th century Romance of Mis and Dubh Ruis, and a narrative poem Mis published by the contemporary Irish poet Biddy Jekinson in 2001. It examines the heroines of these texts, Derdrui, Grainne, Etain, and Mis, focusing particularly on their roles in the development of their respective narratives and their influence on the overall message of their texts. The texts share a strong connection in that they all, in a more or less direct way, touch upon the female experience reflected in their leading female characters, yet none of them, except for Jenkinson's poem, focuses expressly on representing female characters. Instead the texts use these characters as a means for the elaboration of male characters, reinforcing at the same time the contemporaneous patriarchal viewpoint, thus creating the ideological scheme of the text. Jenkinson's Mis reveals the underlying narrative force of these traditional female characters. It uses a traditional tale to create a new narrative which is re-centered on its female character, thus narrativizing its inherent strength. Beneath their explicitly assigned roles, the female characters in question serve as powerful narrative agents. Their impact transforms the overt ideologies of their respective narratives so that they diverge from the traditional role of the conveyors of conventional values. The examination of the female characters concentrates particularly on the effect their speech has on the development of the narrative. Although modestly represented in the discussed texts, the female words nevertheless subvert the explicit ideologies of their text by the introduction of skepticism as to the objective values suggested by the texts, thus allowing for a conversation with the prevalent discourses and in the end for the consideration of alternative discourses. The dissertation employs Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and heteroglossia, as well as his examination of the Bildungsrom, which allows for the theoretization of the connection between the texts, as well as for their re-interpretation. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.

This thesis seeks to argue for the problematising role of tradition and generational influence in the work of three Northern Irish poets publishing since the late 1990s. The subjects, Colette Bryce (b. 1970), Leontia Flynn (b. 1974) and Sinéad Morrissey (b. 1972), emerged coterminously, each publishing with major UK publishers. Together they represent a generation of assured female poetic voices. This study presents one of the first critical considerations of the work of these poets, and it remains conscious of the dominance of conceptions of tradition and lineage which are notable in poetry from Northern Ireland from the twentieth-century onwards. In suggesting that this tradition is problematised for emerging women poets by precursor-peer dominance and the primacy of male perspectives in the tradition, this thesis combines a study of poetics, themes relating to gender, detachment and paratexts. From consideration of these elements, it proposes that contemporary poets are not necessarily subject to the powers of tradition and influence, but rather, are capable of a selective approach that in turn demonstrates the malleability of contemporary traditions. The approaches are laid out in four chapters which move from a consideration of “threshold” paratexts (following from the work of Gérard Genette), including book reviews and dedications, through studies of thematic divergence and detachment, the changing status of women’s poetry traditions within Northern Ireland and beyond, the significance of gendered subjects in poetry, and influence found not in thematic or paratextual aspects, but in the individual aspects of poetic form. These aspects combine to form poems and the tradition(s) in which they continue. The thesis provides extensive coverage of the work of Bryce, Flynn, and Morrissey, combining close readings with the application of theoretical frameworks interrogating the implications of literary traditions on later writers (especially when the writers are temporally and culturally close), giving particular consideration to gender and feminist politics. It explores a variety of different critical truisms applied to the poetic generations that precede the younger poets and identifies both compliance and divergences from the contemporary Northern Irish canon. In doing so, this study simultaneously illuminates the frailties of the popular, overwhelmingly male, tradition, particularly as regards to representations of women, and provides direction for studies of post-millennial Northern Irish poetry.

‘Poetry’ insisted Ezra Pound, ‘is a composition of words set to music’: his Cantos remembered ‘Uncle Willie’ downstairs composing, singing poetry to himself. This study examines the nature and effects of W.B.Yeats’s idiosyncratic but profound sense of music. For his poems were compositions set to music. They were saturated with musical themes; syntactically he professed to write for the ear rather than the eye; and he flung himself repeatedly into the breach between music and words, composing ballads, songs, and plays with music, and performing poetry with musical instruments. My thesis is that nature of poetry, spoken, read or sung, obsessed Yeats, and I hold it self evident that such an acutely self-conscious poetry will articulate this obsession: to use his own imagery, will bear the scars of its own birth. What follows is a study of meaning, obsession, and influence, beginning with what Yeats knew and how he came to poetry: his father’s and his own vocalizations of the musical preoccupations of Scott and Shelley, viewed through the annotations of ‘the first book [he] knew Shelley in’ and the solipsistic singers and instrumentalists of his early verse. The theme of chapter two is Ireland: the musical resonances of Anglo Irish ballads and Irish verse are viewed through Yeats’s aurally-oriented canon-formation, as we examine his instinctual recitations and deliberate approach to Irish folksong through the mediation of Douglas Hyde. The aesthetics of Wagner, Pater, and the French symbolistes frame the third chapter, which describes how poetry might approach the condition of music in the motivic organization of The Wind Among the Reeds. In chapter four the impact of Nietzsche’s profoundly musical philosophy is correlated for the first time with the exact moments of Yeats’s discovery of his texts, as Yeats’s plays and poetry move from ‘Apollonian’ languor to ‘Dionysian’ energy, from dream to song and dance. My final chapter uncovers the long history of the practical experiments Yeats made to perform poetry with a ‘psaltery’, and their resonating afterlife in subsequent poetry and poets. No musician himself, Yeats’s musical sense has until now been entirely dismissed: this study shows how central it is to his art and to an understanding of the dominant aesthetic of the age.