CIRCUMVENTING YEATS: AUSTIN CLARKE, THOMAS KINSELLA, SEAMUS HEANEY (IRISH POETRY)

The poetry of Yeats asserts more than a poetic authority: it has also delineated and fostered several imaginative myths, two of which--that of the Celtic Twilight and that of the Anglo-Irish "intellectual tradition"--have been taken for true images of Ireland. Irish poets after Yeats, challenged by both his authoritative poetic voice and his imaginative myths of Ireland, faced a formidable task as they undertook to establish their own poetic authority and to identify or invent myths of their own.;Thomas Kinsella's Ireland is a place of psychic fragmentation. In his most distinctive poetry, he embraces that fragmentation, both in form and content. By calling on archetypal figures from the collective and personal unconscious, he attempts to recover the buried contents of the Irish psyche and, in so doing, begin what he regards as a necessary process of individuation, national and personal.;Seamus Heaney's Ireland is a pastoral landscape into which violence has erupted. His early poetry details that landscape, his later poetry the divisions and the violence to which it has been subjected. His myth of "North," a place of ritual sacrifice annually repeated, is a deterministic one. The tensions between Heaney's instinctive pleasure in poetry and the uses to which he feels he must put that poetry parallel the pastoral landscape itself and the violence with which it must come to terms.;The work of these poets displays a "swerve" away from the poetry of Yeats. Each has manufactured their own version of the language, created distinct points of view, and experimented with poetic form. This dissertation explores those strategies of circumvention.;Austin Clarke spent much of his career in the "shadow" of Yeats. He first developed a Celtic-Romanesque image of Ireland to circumvent Yeats's influence. Later, he developed a "neo-Catholic" poetry (a phrase Yeats himself offered Clarke). Clarke's "neo-Catholic" Ireland stresses social criticism and satire. His poems play with a variety of prosodic devices to accentuate their difference from those of Yeats.