SOURCE: “The Speckled Hill, the Plover's Shore: Northern Irish Poetry Today,” in Encounter, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December, 1973, pp. 70-6.

In the following essay, Dunn discusses the contemporary poetry of Northern Ireland, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, James Simmons, and John Montague.

In the North of Ireland, poets—most of them young—are faced with the cruel but interesting difficulties of realising their attitudes to violence and history. In a recent survey of contemporary Irish literature compiled by the French critic Serge Fauchereau, political topicality is elicited from poets in a series of interviews.¹ What emerges is that to be a poet in the country of Yeats is at the present time an embarrassment. Michael Longley talks of poetry being a force to be reckoned with, quoting with touching literary and political naïvety Shelley's remark about “unacknowledged legislators.” But the edicts of poetic legislation are as violable as...