Featuring contributions from some of the major critics of contemporary poetry, Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry offers an accessible, imaginative, and highly stimulating body of critical work on the evolution of British and Irish poetry in the twentieth-century. Covers all the poets most commonly studied at university level courses. Features criticisms of British and Irish poetry as seen from a wide variety of perspectives, movements, and historical contexts. Explores current debates about contemporary poetry, relating them to the volume's larger themes. Edited by a widely respected poetry critic and award-winning poet.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Modern Poetry: Transition and Trauma - Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen
• Thomas Hardy
• Extract from British Poetry in the Age of Modernism - Peter Howarth
• Edward Thomas
• Extract from The Poetry of Edward Thomas - Andrew Motion
• Wilfred Owen
• Extract from Poetry of Mourning - Jahan Ramazani
• 2 Forms of Modernism: Things Fall Apart - W. B. Yeats; T. S. Eliot; D. H. Lawrence
• W. B. Yeats
• Extract from Our Secret Discipline - Helen Vendler
• T. S. Eliot
• Extract from He Do the Police in Different Voices - Calvin Bedient
• D. H. Lawrence
• Extract from ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’ - Tom Paulin
• 3 Poetry of the Thirties: Between Two Fires - W. H. Auden; Louis MacNeice; Stephen Spender
• W. H. Auden
• Extract from ‘The 1930s Poetry of W. H. Auden’ - Michael O’Neill
• Louis MacNeice
• Extract from Louis MacNeice - Peter McDonald
• Stephen Spender
• Extracts from The Ironic Harvest - Geoffrey Thurley
• 4 Poetry of the Forties: Realism and Rhetoric - Keith Douglas; Dylan Thomas
• Keith Douglas
• Extract from ‘I in Another Place’ - Geoffrey Hill
• Dylan Thomas
• Extract from The Romantic Survival - John Bayley
• 5 Post-War Poetry: Featureless Morning, Featureless Night - Philip Larkin and the Movement
• Philip Larkin
• Extract from Out of Reach - Andrew Swarbrick
• The Movement
• Extract from The Movement - Blake Morrison
• 6 Beyond the Movement: No Bloodless Myth - Ted Hughes; Sylvia Plath; Geoffrey Hill
• Ted Hughes
• Extract from ‘Ted Hughes: The Double Voice’ - Margaret Dickie
• Sylvia Plath
• Extract from Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning - Christina Britzolakis
• Geoffrey Hill
• Extract from ‘History to the Defeated’ - Alan Robinson
• 7 Situated Sequences and Marginal Voices - Basil Bunting; Hugh MacDiarmid; Thomas Kinsella; Stevie Smith; Tony Harrison
• Hugh MacDiarmid, Thomas Kinsella, and Basil Bunting
• Extracts from The Modern Poetic Sequence - M. L. Rosenthal; Sally M. Gall
• Stevie Smith
• Extract from A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry - Jane Dowson; Alice Entwistle
• Tony Harrison
• Extract from The Poetry of Tony Harrison - Luke Spencer
• 8 Northern Irish Poetry: The Poles of Our Condition - Seamus Heaney; Derek Mahon
• Seamus Heaney
• Extracts from The Poetry of Seamus Heaney - Neil Corcoran
• Derek Mahon
• Extract from Poetry in the Wars - Edna Longley
• Afterword
• Recommended Reading