SOURCE: “An Ulster Renaissance? Poets from the North of Ireland, 1965-1980,” in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1981, pp. 5-23.

In the following essay, Brown discusses the poetry of Northern Ireland poets Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, and Derek Mahon.

The first poem in a recent anthology Poets from the North of Ireland (edited by Frank Ormsby and published in 1979) included the line about a Northern poet:

His rainy countryside didn't, scholastically, exist. … 

Whether it can be said to exist poetically in any worthwhile sense will be the subject of this paper as it seeks to marshal evidence to show that since the mid 1960's a distinctive school of poetry has established itself in the North of Ireland, so that the poetic stirrings there in the period can be usefully understood as an Ulster Renaissance. The primary question to which answers will be sought is whether the revival of...