In August 1970, Eavan Boland published a series of three articles in the Irish Timesentitled ʿThe Northern writersʾ crisis of conscienceʾ. In the concluding article, Boland asks: ʿhow . . . will writers in Northern Ireland articulate the crisis in progress outside and within them, the retrospect on communities it must force, the needs it imposes to reorder increasingly chaotic impressions?ʾ. How will writers cope, she continues, with ʿsuch intractable, yet urgent materialʾ? Criticism may since have become more circumspect in approaching these questions, but their underlying assumptions still prove contentious in reading contemporary Irish poetry. In effect, Boland implicitly assumes here that Northern writers are a distinct group; that they have responsibilities towards the Troubles which are not necessarily shared by their Southern counterparts; that individual anxieties and conflicts manifest the anxieties of the state; that writers are identifiable with, or speak from, a particular religious community; and that poetry will, in MacNeiceʾs phrase, ʿmake sense of the world . . . put shape on itʾ in 1930s generation style.

In a short, early lyric Michael Longley proposes a certain obstinacy, reticence and awkwardness as among the defining characteristics of his subject, 'Irish Poetry'. For Longley, Irish poetry issues forth not in glorious blossoms but 'tuberous clottings', 'a muddy/Accumulation' to be found in 'specializations of light', or, in Joycean style, 'dialects of silence' rather than the spoken word. When he imagines these elements combining in the poem's last lines, it is to form images of suffering: 'the bent spines, /The angular limbs of creatures'. The poem ends by conjuring 'the initial letter, the stance', but even this moment of self-assertion is coloured in 'lost minerals'. If Irish poetry in 2000 had fewer reasons for awkward introspection than it did in 1973, when Longley's poem appeared, its achievements in the intervening years had done much to foster a mood of buoyant well-being.

Ireland in 1999 appeared to be ending its trouble-strewn twentieth century as a remarkably prosperous, culturally confident and optimistic place. The Good Friday agreement of the previous year had moved the Northern Irish Peace Process further towards the cessation of the thirty years of violence that since 1969 had cost more than 3,500 lives. The new Northern Ireland Assembly met, briefly, for the first time. Capitalising on the benefits of a highly-educated workforce, the Irish embraced an increasingly globalised market. The Irish phenomenon of rapid growth based on foreign investment in new technologies mirrored the achievements of Asia, and the Irish economy became known as the 'Celtic Tiger'. To the world, though, Ireland still had the glamour of its ancient traditions, music and poetry. It represented a mix of authenticity and the intellectual and spiritual integrity of a cultural development which the popular stage hit of the 1990s, Riverdance,pictured stretching forwards from pre-history.

It is almost a truism of Irish literary history that the work of Austin Clarke (1896-1973), one of the Irish poets of the greatest range and achievement since Yeats, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Somehow it still hovers both in and out of the canon, frequently more honoured in the breach of oversight than in the observance of university syllabuses, summer schools, anthologies and bookshop poetry sections. Clarke was excluded by Yeats from his Faber Book of Modern Versein 1936; but while he was restored in most anthologies between The Oxford Book of Irish Versein 1958 and Patrick Crotty's Modern Irish Poetryof 1995, it was still possible for Yeats's snub to be repeated half a century later in (or out of) Paul Muldoon's Faber Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1986). Clarke remains in print, yet precariously; a Selected Poemsedited by Hugh Maxton, which was published in 1991, is still available, but the only Collectedis the 1974 edition prepared by Liam Miller of Dolmen Press with the poet himself. The contrast with, say, Patrick Kavanagh (for whom complete and selected poems are currently, and recently, in print), is marked.

Modernism and Ireland

Notwithstanding Joyceʾs representation of the Irish capital in Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake,Dublin is not generally perceived as having been a vibrantly productive location of avant-garde experimentation, as were Paris, Berlin, London and New York. While the Irish Literary Revival is arguably a strand in the knotted skein of early modernism, in the eyes of writers as dissimilar as Thomas MacDonagh and Samuel Beckett its Celticism appeared remote from the dissonant tones and epistemological preoccupations of the historical avant-garde. In Literature in Ireland(1916), MacDonagh had proposed that it was not the Revivalʾs ʿCeltic Noteʾ, but poetry written in the ʿIrish Modeʾ - a style that preserved in English some of the sound-patterns of Gaelic verse - that was to some extent comparable in its disjunctive effects to Italian Futurism. In the light of this thesis, MacDonagh's translations might be profitably read alongside those of Ezra Pound - an admirer of Literature in Ireland -whose revolutionary ʿtranslationsʾ from Chinese poetry, Cathay, had appeared the year before MacDonaghʾs critical book. But MacDonaghʾs poetic and critical career was brutally truncated in 1916, when he was executed for his part in the Easter Rising; and it was to be in the poetry of his successor as lecturer in English at University College Dublin, Austin Clarke, that the Irish Mode was most rewardingly developed during the 1920s.

If, as Seamus Heaney says, quoting Borges, 'poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on pages', then we might recognise that the issues involved in the depiction of violence may differ from reader to reader or, more generally, from one national readership - in this case Irish, British, or American and other Anglophone readers - to another. We know readers have registered their approval of Heaney's poetry in the sales figures of Waterstone's, Barnes & Noble's, and other booksellers, and this popularity has been confirmed by most of the prizes. Yet reviewers who might represent these readerships have differed widely in their responses to what the Swedish Academy praised as Heaney's 'analysis of the violence in Northern Ireland'.

The global reputation of the Irish poetry world can be attributed to many things including, at the risk of sounding too uncritical, its great variety and quality. The sociology and politics of the reception of Irish poetry, particularly in the United States, has been the subject of various levels of critical speculation. Critics have mapped the influences of the literatures of many nations on a range of contemporary Irish poets. This chapter will explore the ways some contemporary Irish poets have reached beyond Ireland to imagine and define their poetic practice. Irish poets have been greatly interested in the achievements of American, Eastern European, French and Greek poets, from Dickinson, Whitman, Williams, Frost and Lowell to Herbert, Milosz and Mandelstam, to Nerval, Cavafy and Seferis. The hold these writers and others have for a number of contemporary Irish poets - Boland, Heaney, Mahon, Kinsella, Muldoon - springs from a desire to establish human identity out of the tensions, debates and violence about national traditions and national identity.

Introduction: the position of Irish in contemporary Irish poetry

Irish literature has historically possessed what Thomas Kinsella calls a 'dual tradition', and continues to be written in the country's majority and minority languages, English and Irish, respectively. As the two languages keep up what Kinsella terms their 'dynamic interaction', many Irish readers have increasingly turned at least one of their two ears to Irish language literature, in the original, in translation, and via critiques that take into account both languages for a more comprehensive representation and understanding of Ireland's art and eras. Therefore, whereas in some quarters a narrow, monoglot view of Ireland's poetry still exists, recent critical studies of contemporary work recognise the need to account for the polyphony of voices which make up what Sean O Riordain called the 'fuaim na habhann' / riversound of the living stream of Irish writing.

Derek Mahon and Michael Longley have been publishing verse since the mid- 1960s. Both born in Belfast (Longley in 1939, Mahon in 1941), educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (or 'Inst', as it is known) and at Trinity College, Dublin (where Longley read classics and Mahon French, English and philosophy), they emerged as poets in a period marked both by a remarkable growth in artistic and literary activity in a province long regarded as inimical to the arts, and by the stirring of political energies in Northern Ireland that inaugurated decades of violence and radical change. Their careers as poets display similarities and differences as they have responded to lives lived in a period when the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom has been in constant question. Michael Longley has lived in Belfast since the 1960s, spending summers in Co Mayo. In the same period Mahon has lived in London, Dublin and New York with sojourns in France and Italy, having spent only a brief period in Belfast after graduation. The historical and personal experience with which their work engages, however, is certainly related (whatever their differing career trajectories) to the political crisis of a period in which the relationship between Britain and Ireland has been profoundly affected by the Northern Irish problem. How they both relate imaginatively to the North, to Ireland and the rest of the world in such a period, when violence was endemic, takes the critic to central aspects of their work.

In an Irish context it may not be possible to imagine poetry in relation to the 'body' of the 'nation' without evoking the still-existent border to which Medbh McGuckian starkly alludes, a political and historical fact that divides 'Ireland' into two states and at least two bodies politic. Neither is it possible, despite the growing popularity of these three women poets, to imagine the term 'Irish poet' without picturing the foregrounded and masculine body emerging from the landscape which Eilean Ni Chuilleanain challenges. Bringing together both implications, the phrase 'body of the nation' implicitly recalls the nationalist literary text to which Eavan Boland, probably Ireland's most influential feminist, alludes in her essay 'Subject Matters', The Spirit of the Nation.Concerning these 'sixpenny booklet' anthologies of nationalist ballads compiled by The Nation newspaper from 1843, Boland writes: 'in its pages the public poem and the political poem were confused at the very moment when the national tradition was making a claim on Irish poetry which would colour its themes and purposes for a century'.

The poetry of dissent, indeed the dissenting position in literature as a whole, has a long and distinguished tradition in Ireland. For reasons of political and personal sensitivity, writers have found themselves in, and often cultivated, a marginalised, observing status. The presence of aesthetic and political tensions can be linked closely to Ireland's continuing absorption of differing influences and experiences: these can both conflict with and build upon existing ideas of tradition and continuity. The adversarial position adopted by Irish writers earlier in this century focused on oppositional relations such as those between Ireland and England or between individual freedoms and the Catholic norms of the evolving state. Now violence, materialism and social exclusion have become the focus of attention and with these forms comes a complex matrix of affects neither easy to define nor to address. The poets dealt with in this chapter - Brendan Kennelly, Paul Durcan, Rita Ann Higgins and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill - are aware of the tensions inherent in these issues and of the fact that they are never fully subject to artistic or personal control. Indeed it is this lack of control that heightens the risks taken by these poets to allow their voices to be heard. All four poets are widely read, in a culture where the critical attention to poetry still far exceeds popular readership, and all the poets use vibrant humorous language and frequent public performance to maintain the dissenting voice within contemporary Irish poetry.

According to Paul Muldoon, Irish writers experience an often disabling tension between the urge to express private concerns in their work and the compulsion to address identity politics, inherited atavisms and the legacy of sectarian strife. His comments restate the competing definitions of what Seamus Heaney terms 'the government of the tongue'. This is an obligation to 'concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality'. Yet it is also a liberating manifesto, allowing the poet to submit to 'the jurisdiction of achieved form', with poetry 'as its own vindicating force'. Heaney has consistently attempted to address these apparently conflictual imperatives. In Wintering Outand North,he engaged with what are euphemistically termed 'the Troubles' by advancing images of bodies drawn from the bogs at Tollund, Grauballe and Windeby as archaeological emblems of victimhood. This poetic reflex, whilst deep-felt and instinctive, was interpreted as providing decontextualised analogies (if not unintentional justifications) for the killings in Northern Ireland. Heaney had become, according to his fellow-poet Ciaran Carson, 'the laureate of violence - a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for “the situation”, in the last resort, a mystifier'.

In an uncollected poem of 1995, ʿMacNeiceʾs Londonʾ, Derek Mahon imagines Louis MacNeice in wartime, in ʿA bunker of civilised sound, / A BBC studioʾ:

These lines capture, in a brilliant miniature, much of the complexity of Louis MacNeiceʾs cultural and historical situations. While the adjectives here - ʿmeditativeʾ, ʿclassicʾ, ʿaloneʾ, ʿwell-bredʾ, ʿdryʾ - seem to map out the distinctive qualities of the poetʾs voice, that voice is also working as ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ while it speaks from the wartime BBC to the world. Mahonʾs final line-break allows the reader to sense the distance between the intimacy and solitude of the poet and the prepared voice of the public writer: as ʿthe voiceʾ turns into ʿthe voice/ Of Londonʾ, we feel a mild and complicating shock of something ʿoutside time and spaceʾ that suddenly locates itself in a specific moment and situation.

Defining postmodernism

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the concept of postmodernism, and the associated notion of postmodernity, became a principal focus of discussion in philosophy, cultural analysis, and social and political theory. The notion of ‘postmodernism’ had originally emerged in an aesthetic context, at least as long ago as the 1930s, but the term was only used sporadically until the boom in its scope and currency from the mid-1970s onwards. This popularisation began in the domain of architecture, where the adjective ‘postmodern’ was employed to characterise the rebellion against the technocratic functionalism of the ‘international style’ which was then under way (Jencks 1991 [1978]). But from here its use spread rapidly, first to describe new developments in literature, painting and other artistic media, and then to characterise a whole range of social and cultural developments which were assumed to represent a break with the defining practices and styles of thought of the modern era. Indeed, for some of its more enthusiastic proponents, the emergence of postmodernism signalled nothing less than the transition to a new historical epoch, beyond modernity.

This epochal significance of the postmodern was given an influential pioneering formulation by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his book, La condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition), first published in 1979. Part of the success of this work, which presented a series of provocative and fertile ideas rather than a carefully constructed argument, was due to the compactness with which Lyotard defined his key term. For Lyotard, the postmodern condition was characterised by the delegitimation of ‘grand narratives’, or ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’ (Lyotard 1984, pp. 37–41, xxiv). On his account, the grand schemata of historical progress and social development stemming from the Enlightenment, whether liberal or Marxist in inspiration, had finally lost all credibility.

There is a widely shared albeit arguably mistaken view that ‘ecological’ or ‘green’ political thought is of relatively recent vintage, being a product of the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s which saw the emergence of die Grünen in Germany and green parties in Britain and France, the publication of important environmental exposés and warnings, and symbolised by the first Earth Day in 1970. But modern green thought is older still, representing a confluence of several different streams of thought and sensibility. Some have detected the first stirrings of environmental concerns as early as the sixteenth century (Thomas 1984). Others trace the first glimmerings of a green sensibility to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic movement, with their acute appreciation of mountains, dark forests and wild nature. Others find the first stirrings of an ‘ecological’ perspective in the writings of the young Marx, with his vision of the symbiotic interdependence of man and nature (Parsons 1977). Or, more broadly, one might take note of the ecological emphases of German thinkers since the time of Goethe who, with his holistic, anti-reductionist view of nature, so greatly influenced not only German Romanticism but the biological sciences, as well as later German greens such as Rudolf Bahro and Petra Kelly. British environmental thinking was spurred by reactions to the industrial revolution, with its ‘dark satanic mills’ threatening to overtake the green countryside, and has also been greatly influenced by such Romantic nature-poets as William Wordsworth and by the naturalist Charles Darwin, amongst others whose thinking has influenced modern British greens.

Four points of clarification are needed about the theme of this chapter and the title itself. First, from a non-Western perspective the twentieth century could be said to begin in 1905 when Japan defeated Russia, an event that destroyed the widespread myth of European invincibility and was celebrated by millions from China to Peru, or in 1918 when the savagery of the First World War, or what non-Europeans call a European civil war, shook their lingering belief in the cultural superiority of Europe. From a non-Western perspective, the twentieth century has not yet ended and would only do so when their agenda of cultural and economic decolonisation is completed and full equality with the West is attained. Since the beginning and the end of the twentieth century are matters of historical judgement and hence contestable, I have taken the safer route of defining it in strictly chronological terms.

Second, the lives of non-Western political thinkers do not all fall neatly within the twentieth century. Some of them continued to live well into the twentieth century but published nothing or little of substance after 1900. I ignore such writers and concentrate on those who published most or at least some of their major works in the twentieth century and participated in its intellectual life.

The twentieth century witnessed the birth of the first global order the world has known. Few would dispute that the forces of imperialism and nationalism have played a major part in bringing this world into existence. The role played by political ideas about these concepts is more contentious, if only because there has seldom been agreement about what they mean, let alone their practical importance. It is the purpose of this chapter to suggest some of the ways in which ideas and events have interacted in the making and breaking of modern empires and nation states.

In outline, the story is quickly told. At the end of the nineteenth century the world was dominated by a few major powers, whose governments were engaged in territorial, economic and ideological expansion. In the United States and Russia, expansion involved consolidating their control of the North American and Eurasian continents respectively, without significant opposition, at least until the Russians were stopped in their tracks by Japan in 1904. Elsewhere, imperial competition brought the great powers to the verge of war, although in the end they drew back from the brink, most famously in the case of Africa, where the continent was divided at the 1884 Congress of Berlin, in the interests of preserving the balance of power and European peace. This phase of international history ended with the First World War. For the previous century, however, European energies were engaged in every corner of the globe, with little regard for the interests or cultural sensitivities of the local inhabitants.