Poetry After 1922
John Hewitt (1907–1987), whom many consider to be the founding father of Northern Irish poetry, also came from a rural background but lived in Belfast and was amongst the first Irish poets to write of the sense of alienation that many at this time felt from both their original rural and new urban homes.
Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) was associated with the left-wing politics of Michael Roberts's anthology New Signatures. MacNeice's poetry was informed by his immediate interests and surroundings and is more social than political. As an urban Northerner, MacNeice could not idealize his native landscape as did John Hewitt, and with his Belfast Anglican background could not sympathize with a romantic view of Catholic Ireland. He felt estranged from Presbyterian Northern Ireland with its "voodoo of the Orange bands", but felt caught between British and Irish identities.
Richard Rowley's early poems, in The City of Refuge (1917), were rhetorical celebrations of industry. His next volume, City Songs and Others (1918), included his most quoted poem The Islandmen, and is regarded as containing his most original work: Browning-like monologues straight from the mouths of Belfast’s working-class.
Read more about this topic: Literature Of Northern Ireland
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“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
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