Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry

Eve Cobain, Philip Coleman

• Publisher: Peter Lang Group
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788745109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first book to provide comprehensive treatment of Robert Lowell's engagements with Irish poetry. Including original contributions by leading and emerging scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the essays in the volume explore topics such as Lowell and W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, and Denis Devlin, as well as the ways in which the American poet's work was read by later Irish poets Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Leontia Flynn, and others. In addition to exploring the ways that several poets have engaged with Lowell, the book encompasses a wide range of thematic concerns, from Lowell and ecology to the politics of identification. The book also includes essays on aspects of Lowell's engagements with Irish-American contexts, as well as contributions by contemporary poets Gerald Dawe, Paul Muldoon and Julie O'Callaghan. Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry concludes with a previously unpublished introduction Seamus Heaney gave to a reading by Lowell in Ireland in 1975, which is followed by a reminiscence by Marie Heaney.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction (Philip Coleman / Eve Cobain)
• The Orator and the Poet: J.V. Luce on Robert Lowell (Anna Chahoud)
• Oration on the Conferral of an Honorary DLitt Degree on Robert Lowell by the University of Dublin, Trinity College, 31 May 1976 (John Victor Luce)
• Robert Lowell at Castletown House (Paul Muldoon)
• Robert Lowell in Dark Times (Steven Gould Axelrod)
• Names and Naming: Robert Lowell and the Boston Irish (Frank J. Kearful)
• Weaving the Great Clan: Robert Lowell, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King (Alex Runchman)
• From Terrible Beauty to Stale and Small: W.B. Yeats’s Influence on Robert Lowell’s Political Poetry (Adam Beardsworth)
• Robert Lowell and Louis MacNeice: Reading Likeness through Elegy (Calista McRae)
• Rebels in Formal Dress: Robert Lowell, Denis Devlin and their Transatlantic Literary Network (Karl O’Hanlon)
• ‘thudding in a big sea’: The Oceanic Ecologies of Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney (Stephen Grace)
• Waiting for the New Life: Reading Robert Lowell in Bangor, Co. Down, in the 1970s (Gerald Dawe)
• Name and Shame: ‘Identification in Belfast’ (Michael Hinds)
• Lost Connections: Reading Family in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Robert Lowell (Lucy Collins)
• Radical Tensions: Robert Lowell, Charles Altieri and Catherine Walsh (Ellen Dillon)
• ‘The way we are living’: Robert Lowell and Leontia Flynn (Eve Cobain)
• Seamus Heaney Introducing Robert Lowell in Kilkenny, 1975 (Julie O’Callaghan)
• Introduction to Robert Lowell Reading at Kilkenny Arts Week, Kytler’s Inn, Kilkenny, 28 August 1975 (Seamus Heaney)
• Afterword (Marie Heaney)
• Notes on Contributors
• Index