Transnational Poetics

Abstract

There is of course an element of artificiality in hiving off ‘Northern Irish’ poetry from ‘Irish’ poetry more generally, especially when the poets themselves identify with a conglomerate cultural Irishness and disregard political partition. Nevertheless, I have retained ‘Northern Irish’ as a means of designating a group of poets who are all products of a particular geographical, historical and cultural matrix which has uniquely shaped their responses to both their native place and the world beyond. Equally, there is an element of artificiality in hiving off ‘American connections’ from the network of precursors, rivals and supporters in which any poet is inscribed: the creative imagination in its infinitely mysterious operations is no respecter of national or any other kind of boundary. However, the long history of transnational human and cultural flows between Ireland and America gives ‘American connections’ a special force in the consideration of Northern Irish poetry in its international contexts. Northern Irish, like Irish poetry more generally, largely as a result of, or reaction to, its colonial inheritance, has a particular reputation for being insular or nativist in comparison with other modern and contemporary poetry, and this makes it all the more interesting as an example of what a transnational critical methodology can bring to light and a more strictly ‘Irish’-centred approach neglect to see.