Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry

This is the first book to provide comprehensive treatment of Robert Lowell’s engagements with Irish poetry. It includes original contributions by leading and emerging scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.

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 Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry concludes with a previously unpublished introduction Seamus Heaney gave to a reading by Lowell in Ireland in 1975, which is followed by a reminiscence by Marie Heaney.