Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State

Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State examines the poet-politicians and bureaucrats who shaped the twenty-six-county Irish state, from its pre-history in the revolutionary period through its foundation in 1922 and complicated modernisation in the 1960s to the outbreak of the Troubles. Poet-officials juggled writing the state and navigating the force-field between poetry and politics, with poetic form registering the aftershocks of this collusive antagonism. Combining political history, cultural history and literary criticism, the book grapples with major issues in the state’s history: revolution, state violence/insurgency against the state, patriarchy, partition, modernisation, as well as socialist and feminist alternatives to conservative nationalism. Poets examined in the book include W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Desmond FitzGerald, Denis Devlin, Joseph Campbell, Valentin Iremonger, Eithne Strong, Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Thomas Kinsella. It draws on new archival work in state archives and literary collections, and situates the Irish state and Irish poetry within a transnational frame. Taking up the relationship of poetry to politics, and poet-officials to state governance, it tackles a perennial question: what did poetry make happen (and not happen) in the twenty-six counties? This book is about acknowledged legislators, poetry’s formal vigilance, and how poets apprehended, consciously and unconsciously, the recalcitrant workings of power.