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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“It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one’s eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)