POETS & PLACES IN A CHANGING IRELAND

Tutor: Evan Jameson. H.Dip Ed. M.A. Literature and Culture (UCD).

‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…’

Why did Sligo and its misty waters have such a grip on WB Yeats’s imagination? Why was Seamus Heaney forever haunted by his first home, Mossbawn?  How did a childhood in Dublin 8 influence Thomas Kinsella, and how did Dublin 1 inspire Paula Meehan?

This course will explore the fascinating lives and unforgettable work of some of twentieth-century Ireland’s greatest poets and the places they helped to immortalise. Over twelve weeks, we will examine how specific locations in rural Ireland, in inner-city and suburban Dublin, and in the North, shaped a host of great talents. 

While the primary focus will be on the homeplaces of the poets, we will also look at each writer’s relationship with a changing Ireland.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, this was a predominantly rural part of the United Kingdom where emigration was deeply entrenched.  By the end of the century, it had become an independent republic where most people lived in urban locations.  We will look at how poems from those radically changing times tell us so much about the realities of life here, and about the challenges faced by ordinary Irish people. 

This course consists of 12 sessions and in each one, we will consider an individual poet and how they respond to the place or places that influenced them, and to the Ireland of their time. Using a range of visual stimuli and looking at the historical context, we will consider a range of key poems and the themes explored within them. 

By the end of the course, you should be able to discuss how places are of definitive importance to Irish poets. You should also be able to identify the major concerns and stylistic hallmarks of the most important modern Irish poets. You may also gain some understanding of how successive generations of Irish poets are ‘in conversation’ with one another through their work. 

Poets and places explored in the sessions will include:

• WB Yeats, Sligo and the Big House.
• Francis Ledwidge: the soldier poet and his love of Slane, Co.Meath. 
• Patrick Kavanagh in Monaghan and Dublin: the enduring voice of rural Ireland. 
• Thomas Kinsella: An urban poet made in Inchicore and Kilmainham. 
• Seamus Heaney, Mossbawn and the Troubles: a poet’s permanent homesickness. 
• Eavan Boland: exile in Dublin city as a woman poet and new beginnings in Dundrum.
• Paula Meehan and the legacy of a Dublin city upbringing.
• Emigrant poets and Ireland: complex relationships. 
• Modern poets in a globalised Ireland. 

Tuesday evening – 5.00 – 6.30pm                                            12 week               €145