The Poet and Poetry: Yeats, MacNeice and Heaney

ECTS allocation:                   10
Teaching Faculty:                  Prof Terence Brown
Contact:                                 1 x 2 hours/week in Michaelmas term

Ireland is often represented as a land in which poetry is a natural product of the national character. In fact the poet in Ireland has often been challenged to justify his or her art and Irish history has placed heavy demands on aesthetic practice. What exactly the poet's role should be has been a major preoccupation of some of the country's best-known poets.

This course, through a reading of a selection of the critical writings of W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney, will consider how their views of the Irish poet's role developed and changed during the course of their careers. It will also study, through readings of selected individual poems, how their different aesthetics affected their own poetry in marked ways. This will involve assessing how they variously responded to political and social crisis, to violence and to the challenge which modernity presented to poetry itself. The iconic status of Yeats for both MacNeice and Heaney will also be addressed as the course affords an opportunity to study the work of three of Ireland's best known poets as theorists and practitioners.

Texts
W.B.Yeats: The Major Works , ed. Edward Larrissey, Oxford: World's Classics, 2001.
Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald, Faber and Faber, 2007.
Opened Ground: Seamus Heaney Selected Poems, 1966-96, Faber and Faber, 1996.
Key critical statements by Yeats are to be found in W.B. Yeats: the Major Works.
Key critical statements by MacNeice and Heaney are to be found in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice , ed. Alan Heuser, Clarendon Press, 1987 and Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers,Selected Prose, 1971-2001, Faber and Faber, 2002.

Biographies
Students, while being directed to the more recent works by Roy Foster and Terence Brown, are reminded that Richard Ellmann's Yeats: The Man and the Masks , 1948, remains an essential text highly relevant to this course.
Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice , Faber and Faber, 1995.
Dennis O'Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney , Faber and Faber, 2008. This work, while in no sense a standard biography, contains much biographical material as well as commentary by Heaney relevant to this course.

Relevant critical works will be referred to as the course proceeds.