Counterpoetics of Modernity
On Irish Poetry and Modernism
- Offers a fresh approach to Irish poetry, bringing together well-known poets with new and exciting innovative work
- Combines illuminating close readings of poetry with reflections grounded in critical and aesthetic theory
- Introduces a number of contemporary Irish poets whose work has not received sufficient critical attention
- Puts Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics
- Challenges conventional assumptions about the forms and values of Irish poetry
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, to 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.
Preface
Part I: Spectres of Modernity
1: Overture: The Burden of Discontinuity: Criticism, Colonialism and Anti-Modernism
2: Crossing Over: On James Clarence Mangan’s "Spirits Everywhere"
3: 1913-1916-1919: Yeats’s Dates
4: ‘To Live Surrounded by a White Song’, or, The Sublimation of Race in Experiment: On the Margins of Susan Howe
Part II: New Things That Have Happened
5: New Things That Have Happened: Forms of Irish Poetry
6: Intricate Walking: Scully’s Livelihood
7: Rome’s Wreck: Joyce’s Baroque
Conclusion: Conduits for the Humane
Bibliography
In its adoption and recasting of Édouard Glissant’s notion of a counter or forced poetics as an alternative to the frequently anodyne critical conceptions of Irish modernism, Lloyd’s study constitutes a groundbreaking account and authoritative re-evaluation of innovative Irish poetries from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
[...] a book that I believe will be seen as a key moment in our understanding of what is most vital in Irish poetry.
The new things that happen happen somewhere, not nowhere, and that which is counter, is counter to some specific set of circumstances. Lloyd’s great strength here is to bring out into the light of critical examination the specifics of a distinctly Irish counterpoetics. …in a book that I believe will be seen as a key moment in our understanding of what is most vital in Irish poetry.
Lloyd’s treatment of often overlooked poets and their influence is profound. Counterpoints of Modernity is a major contribution to scholarship of Irish poetry.
Summing Up: Essential.
Lloyd’s treatment of often overlooked poets and their influence is profound. Counterpoints of Modernity is a major contribution to scholarship of Irish poetry.
Summing Up: Essential.
Counterpoetics of Modernity represents a significant contribution to our understandings of not just contemporary Irish poetry but also of modernism itself. It undermines the sense of both a givenness and a homogeneity within modernist literature, its sensibilities and implications. This book is at once the kind of close reading we are used to but it is also impressively expansive – taking up Irish poetry of the 1930s, contemporary Irish poetry, and Irish poetry from as far back as James Clarence Mangan and the first half of the 19th Century. Yet it remains incise, thorough, coherent, suasive.
Counterpoetics of Modernity represents a significant contribution to our understandings of not just contemporary Irish poetry but also of modernism itself. It undermines the sense of both a givenness and a homogeneity within modernist literature, its sensibilities and implications. This book is at once the kind of close reading we are used to but it is also impressively expansive – taking up Irish poetry of the 1930s, contemporary Irish poetry, and Irish poetry from as far back as James Clarence Mangan and the first half of the 19th Century. Yet it remains incise, thorough, coherent, suasive.
