The Clash of Ireland: Literary Contrasts and Connections [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONIn typical Irish fashion, some would say, it was the second and not the first day of the Irish Conference in Leiden in October 1987 that the Irish Ambassador, His Excellency Mr James Kirwan, opened. Perhaps the scholars of the first day, devoted to James Joyce, in eschewing official blessing appropriately reflected the bohemian light that their hero of exile and cunning is still thought of as offering in his heady mixture of verbal virtuosity and narrative polyphony. Indeed in his opening speech the Ambassador did note that Joyce had visited the Netherlands and had had a number of misadventures, which he (the Ambassador) did not care to dwell on.However, Yeats apparently had spoken of comedy as "a character standing on the dykes and laughing" and tragedy as "a drowner of dykes" (although it was not clear from the Ambassador's account whether these graphic characterizations arose directly from Yeats's own experience of the Low Countries); and as it happened, the name of Yeats continued to echo in various papers that followed the Ambassador's speech, and features in an even more notable way in this collection of essays, which expands and augments the proceedings of that day. Peter van de Kamp takes us surefootedly through Yeats's poetic syntax, revealing the grammar and rhetoric of poetry's magic and manipulation, while Peter Liebregts usefully reviews the cultural and aesthetic inspiration that Yeats received from Homer and his ideological exploitation of the first of all poets. E.J. van Hulst examines the parallel and divergent tracks of two master manipulators of that poetic magic, Yeats, of course, and Rainer Maria Rilke.Inevitably, perhaps, Yeats's work and name is mentioned or hovers behind several of the papers dealing with contemporary Irish poets, although here one notes the almost equal recognition given to the influence and challenge of Seamus Heaney, as the master poet of his generation. August J. Fry gives us a moving account of his own personal encounter with Heaney's first three volumes; Tjebbe Westendorp takes Heaney as one of his starting points in considering