Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism

This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, in nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland’s precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry’s inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh: major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study.