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• Nature (as) Language in the Poetry of Seán Lysaght

  Wit Pietrzak

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  50

  The article focuses on a selection of poems by the Irish poet Seán Lysaght to demonstrate that in his work, Lysaght looks to explore nature’s intricate design, its pre-human and pre-linguistic layers of significance through investigations of birds, arguing that rather than offering culturally or politically inflected images of wildlife and landscape, as Irish poets from W. B. Yeats through Patrick Kavanagh all the way to Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have been wont to do, Lysaght sets the vast natural world, which eludes apprehension in language, against the modern world and its obsession with material productivity and pragmatic efficiency. This aspect of Lysaght’s poetry is discussed against the background of Heaney, Yeats, and William Wordsworth, who are shown to share some insights with Lysaght, but from whose influence he strives to steer away.  (WP)

• “What stood in the Post Office / With Pearse and Connolly?”: Heroism, Timeliness, and Timelessness in Some of Yeats’s Plays

  Edit Bődy

  Views:

  269

  The essay discusses a frequently recurring type of hero found in William Butler Yeats’s plays, including the last one, The Death of Cuchulain (1939). This hero-figure occurs quite early in Yeats’s oeuvre: The Green Helmet (1910), for example, already focuses on the definition of hero and heroism and different versions of this hero type also occur in other plays, such as The King’s Threshold (1904) and The Player Queen (1922). In dramas, where this motif plays an important role, his source is in part Nietzsche’s tragic hero completed with other features. As early as The Green Helmet, Yeats defines what makes a hero: apart from bravery, also gaiety, a kind of ecstasy is needed. Cuchulain’s goal to become the hero, smiling even in the shadow of death, is achieved in Yeats’s last play, and the Cuchulain-image emerging from the Anima Mundi binds past and present. (EB)

• Editor's Notes

  Csilla Bertha

  Views:

  38

  Editor's Notes

• In Memoriam Tom Murphy (1935-2018)

  Csilla Bertha

  Views:

  54

      

• Irish History, Ethics, the Alethic, and Mise En Abîme in John Banville’s Fiction

  Joakim Wrethed

  Views:

  323

  A controversy within John Banville scholarship focuses on his seemingly ambivalent relation to his Irishness. The dominance of Banville’s philosophical topics has seemingly rendered the specifically Irish issues redundant. However, there are Irish traits that have significance for more subtle themes or motifs in certain novels. These passages often appear as side-paths in the eccentric protagonists’ meandering narration. In The Blue Guitar, Oliver Orme mentions that his “namesake Oliver Cromwell” attempted an attack upon the town in which his childhood home is situated, but eventually “the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russet-coated captains” on the hill where the house stands and where “the Lord Protector’s tent” had been erected. Such casual remarks on violent historical incidents harbor a key to a particular Banvillean ethics. The frequently recurring prose structure of thematized mise en abîme and the mazes of signifiers indicate that no historical ontology in terms of a meta-narrative seems to exist. However, many of Banville’s novels revolve around the disclosure of a truth. This alethic element questions an all too convenient reliance on a completely constructivist understanding of history and thereby of Irish historical events appearing in the Banvillean oeuvre. (JW)

• Competing Traditions: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Irish Literatures between Realism and Experimentation

  Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

  Wit Pietrzak

  Views:

  94

    

• Sensory Data and Performance Practice in Blue Raincoat’s 2015 Production of W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand (1904)

  Rhona Trench

  Views:

  38

  From the topography of dolmens, cairns, passage tombs, sea cliffs, holy wells, and lakes of County Sligo, Yeats’s narratives continued to be strongly inspired by “the waters and the wild” of its landscape. In 2015, Sligo’s resident professional theatre company, Blue Raincoat, staged a series of events entitled “A Country Under Wave” honoring the celebration of the poet-playwright’s 150^th birthday. This paper examines their production of On Baile’s Strand (1904) on Streedagh Beach in June 2015, which opened “A Country Under Wave,” and explores the ways in which the specific features of the location were key to ensuring that this ritual drama could play effectively because it penetrated its surroundings in different ways. Special attention is paid to examining how we might perceive and understand a performance in the outdoors without a designed stage, lighting, and technologically designed sounds. (RT)

• “If I Should Die”: Attitudes to the Dead Hero in British Poetry of the Great War

  István D. Rácz

  Views:

  62

  When we read the poems of the Great War today, we interpret them both as historical documents and as works of art. World War I poetry wished to open the readers’ eyes to the horror that they were unable to imagine in the home country. As a consequence, the representation of the victim position proved to be particularly important both in populist texts (such as John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”) and in poems undermining the conventional idea of heroism (such as those by Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden). Furthermore, a comparison between two poems about war heroes, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” and Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” demonstrates the difference between war poetry and modernist literature. Yeats views and considers the problem of the dead hero from a distance, whereas Brooke represents his own situation from within. Both texts (although very different both in character and in artistic value) contribute to our better understanding of the war experience. (IDR)