Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the two world wars and throughout the present Troubles in Northern Ireland, poets have insisted on not serving any political or nationalist case. As the war poets were attacked for failing to write their country's battle hymns, so today's Ulster poets are victims of improper 'expectations': while poets as citizens may support various causes, poets as writers cannot settle for anything less than 'full human truths'.For Edna Longley, the price of that imaginative freedom is 'eternal vigilance'. She shows how Edward Thomas wrote for England, but not for its war. How Keith Douglas kept a moral eye on his subject even as he shot to kill. And yet how an unjust Ulster 'hurt' Seamus Heaney into poetry.Edna Longley relates contemporary Northern Irish poetry to the overall history of 20th century poetry in English. She argues that the most important poets have stuck quite deliberately to their armoury of difficult traditional forms, adapting and extending them in response to modern wars, conflicts, oppression and injustice. In this important collection of interconnected essays, Edna Longley also traces the influence of W.B. Yeats, and considers the work of Louis MacNeice, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The wars of the title are not merely the civil and national confrontations of this century; they are also those struggles in the modernist camp that have at times been almost as bloody as those of military battle. Edna Longley attempts to balance the two struggles and show how poetics intend to shore up the actions in the public arena, and at times she succeeds in doing so. The problem of the book-one which gives it an unevenness-is that at times the correlation of the two battlefields is tenuous. Often, in the spots where the warfare focus is blurred, the esthetic observations are more telling. This is particularly true in the treatment of Edward Thomas. The close interaction of poetry and warfare is less successfully handled. A much fuller, more varied, and even politically complex analysis is called for. It seems indicative of this book's limited scope that the cauldron of the Spanish Civil War, where such issues were so starkly revealed, is scarcely mentioned. However, the undeclared war in Northern Ireland does evoke perceptive observations on Heaney, Mahon, Muldoon, and Macniece, but there are no references save to Yeats concerning ``The Rising'' in the South. This is not in any way a full study of the subject; but, in passing, its observations on 20th-century poetry are provocative. A book for graduate students familiar with the field.-E.F. Callahan, College of the Holy Cross

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita in the School of English, Queen's University Belfast. Her publications include an edition of Edward Thomas's prose writings, A Language Not To Be Betrayed (1981) from Carcanet, and four critical books: Louis MacNeice: A Study (1988) from Faber, and Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (1994) and Poetry & Posterity (2000) from Bloodaxe. She also edited The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (2000) and Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).