The Poetry of Eastern European Ireland: Stereotypes and Appropriations

Abstract

In 1988, towards the close of the turbulent decade, which in Northern Ireland started with the drama of hunger strikes and in Poland with the strikes in Gdańsk dockyards, the foundation and subsequent suppression of “Solidarity”, Seamus Heaney published The Government of the Tongue, his controversial critical book centered on the question of the poet’s, and poetry’s, responsibilities in a world of suffering and social injustice. In these polemical essays Heaney put forward an image of Eastern European poetry as the exemplary literature not only to be studied, but also to be followed. Heaney discussed at length the works of such poets from beyond the Iron Curtain as the two Poles, Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, the Russian Osip Mandelstam, and the Czech poet, Miroslav Holub.