SOURCE: An introduction to Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney, University of California Press, 1986, pp. 1-15.

In the following essay, Garratt traces the evolution of Irish poetry from the Irish Renaissance to the international acclaim of Seamus Heaney.

The following essay offers a reading of Irish poetry since Yeats and attempts to explain a main current, or preoccupation, in the writing of certain poets from the 1930s to the 1970s. As a reading it is selective both in its choice of poets and in its critical vantage point. I have chosen these particular poets because I believe that they represent the major voices in Irish poetry after Yeats. In most cases I do not anticipate any arguments; enough critical attention already has been paid to these writers to justify their inclusion in any book about twentieth-century Irish poetry. When dealing with very recent or...