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Irish Literature

S/LI/432. Did 20th-century Irish poetry react against the pastoralism of W.B. Yeats?

WORDS:: 3800
DATE:: 2010
PRICE:: 39.99 GBP

The paper argues that the Irish romantic poet, W.B. Yeats, placed particular emphasis on the continuity of Irish poetic tradition and therefore pastoralism. In order to establish an individual voice, some contemporaries may have rejected the pastoral mode in favour of a more individual and unique poetic persona. The paper presents the work of Patrick Kavanagh (born 1904) who lived as an ordinary farmer in his youth and whose work was reflective of a rural national conscience. But the paper shows how his work ‘The Great Hunger' depicts the rural landscape as arid, dull and spiritually infertile, and that during the 1940s, the poet's output achieved a stark anti-romantic realism.

KEYWORDS: Poetry, literature, W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, pastoralism, ruralism,

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