Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

<p>This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland Gillian Clarke John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical contention for these Irish Welsh and Scottish poets and it relates this engagement to wider concerns with gender nation and nature which have shaped contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Covering a substantial number of works from the 1980s to the 2010s the book discusses how Boland and Clarke as women poets from the Republic of Ireland and Wales react to a male-dominated and Anglocentric lyric tradition and thus rework notions of the Romantic. It examines how Burnside and Jamie challenge adopt and revise Romantic aesthetics of nature and environment. The book is the first in-depth study to read Boland Clarke Burnside and Jamie as post-Romantics. By disentangling the aesthetic and critical conceptions of Romanticism which inform their inheritance it develops an innovative approach to the understanding of contemporary poetry and literary influence.</p>