Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry From Burns to Heaney [Hardcover]

Are literary ideas of originality and imitation, allusion and influence inherently political if the poems emerge from different sides of a border or of a colonial relationship? Taking as a framework the history of relations between Ireland, England, and Scotland since the 1707 Union, the book explores this question through a series of close readings.

1. 'What's Past is Prologue'
2. ScottishBards and English Epigraphs: Robert Burns's 'A Winter Night'
3. The Grand Old Ballad in Coleridge's 'Dejection'
4. James Clarence Mangan and Percy Bysshe Shelley
5. The Homes of England
6. 'The Irish for No'
7. Seamus Heaney and the Caught Line
Epilogue: George Mackay Brown, 'All Soul's'
Conclusion: George Mackay Brown, 'All Soul's' (text of poem)
Bibliography
Index

The author evidently set out to initiate avenues of approach to a fruitful territory of understanding between the three nations; and in this she has been triumphantly successful. --The Wordsworth Circle