CHANGING THE AXIS

To compare modern Irish and Scottish poetry is to change the critical axis. It is to unsettle categories like the ‘English lyric’ or ‘Anglo-American modernism’. We might begin with two Irish-Scottish poetic encounters a century apart. The Rhymers' Club, which foregathered in 1890s London, laid crucial foundations for modern poetry in English, and established the prototype for later avant-garde coteries. The club's make-up was strikingly ‘archipelagic’: a term that will recur in this introduction. The Rhymers' Club marks a space where literary and cultural traditions from different parts of the British Isles came into play; where late nineteenth-century aestheticism met Celticism; and, more materially, where Irish, Scottish and Welsh poets competed for metropolitan attention – W. B. Yeats with particular success. In ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1922), his memoir of the 1890s, Yeats recalls how he once out-manoeuvred the Scottish poet John Davidson: