The Great War in Irish Poetry

This book explores the historical background to Irish participation in the Great War, and the ways in which issues raised in 1914-18 still reverberate in contemporary Northern Ireland. The complications of Irish politics are such that Irish memory of the Great War has often been repressed. Nevertheless, Irish writers throughout the century have been preoccupied with the events and images of the Great War. The work of the Irish poets discussed here - from W. B. Yeats and Ireland's soldier-poets through to Seamus Heaney and contemporary Northern Irish writing - challenges reductive versions of history, and of the literary canon, in relation to Ireland and the First World War.