One might begin an essay that will sketch a general picture, before looking in more detail at Seamus Heaney's and, to a lesser degree, Derek Mahon's poetry, with James Joyce laying in to ‘romanticism’ (with a small ‘r’): ‘in realism you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people's lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal.’ To the degree that Romantic poetry embodies the pursuit of an ‘unrealizable or misconceived ideal’, it tends to provoke opposition in contemporary Northern Irish poets, aware, among other things, of the political havoc caused by abstract idealism. John Montague, for instance, forcing himself in ‘Tim’ to ‘drink / from the trough of reality’, declares in The Rough Field that ‘No Wordsworthian dream enchants me here / With glint of glacial corrie, totemic mountain’. Still, Romantic poetry, as inaugurated by Lyrical Ballads, itself seeks to ‘choose incidents and situations from common life’, albeit with a ‘certain colouring of imagination’, and by means of ‘a selection of language really used by men’. Moreover, who is more alert to the way the ‘ideals’ may be ‘misconceived’ than poets such as Keats and Shelley? With some justice, Aidan Day contends that Alastor can be read as ‘a demonstration of the solipsistic emptiness of an inward-looking spiritual orientation’, even if it is the case that Shelley has an ‘inward’ sympathy with the Poet's need to image ‘to himself the Being whom he loves’.