SOURCE: O'Neill, Michael. “John Montague and Derek Mahon: The American Dimension.” Symbiosis 3, no. 1 (April 1999): 54-62.

In the following essay, O'Neill examines the influence of American poetry on Mahon, citing Frank O'Hara and Hart Crane as important predecessors. O'Neill notes the importance of Mahon's outsider status in his approach to representing both place and time.

A westward gaze can be found in the poems of many twentieth-century Irish poets as they look to American poetry and culture for imaginative confirmation and enlargement. The present essay explores the effect of this gaze on the work of two of the finest post-war Irish poets: John Montague, famously an internationalist trail-blazer, and Derek Mahon, equally famously a poet of restless exile and uprooted search for ‘home.’

In his autobiographical piece ‘The Figure in the Cave’, John Montague writes with a sense of gratitude about the course of his career that might seem...