Northern Irish poetry and the news

Abstract

For Seán O’Brien, Louis MacNeice was a poet ‘capable of that serious immediacy where poetry and journalism share a border’. This thesis examines how that border has been maintained in Northern Irish poetry since the 1960s. Dealing with the work of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Leontia Flynn, and Alan Gillis, it asks: how has news discourse shaped poetry’s language and forms, its senses of violence, event, memory, and place? How differently do poets and journalists approach conflict and peace? How has poetry kept pace with evolving media cultures?

The thesis questions the long-established notion that poetry and the news are oppositional, and even adversarial, modes of discourse. As the Introduction notes, this narrative began with the romantic disdain for technological communication and was perpetuated by modernist distinctions between literary and journalistic culture. Reading poems alongside news coverage of the Troubles and the ensuing peace process, the thesis argues that Northern Irish poetry has, in fact, been profoundly affected by print journalism and by photojournalistic and televisual images.

The first chapter of the thesis discusses Heaney’s and Longley’s early responses to the Troubles, arguing that their attempts to move beyond ‘journalistic’ representations of violence were often deeply fraught. With its second chapter, the thesis turns to the culture of global news that emerged in the 1960s, testing Mahon’s and Muldoon’s appraisals of ‘the Richter Scale / Of world events’. The thesis’s third chapter considers the news’s basic currency of events, showing that, for Carson and McGuckian, ‘objective’ accounts are liable to dissolve into fragmentary assemblages. With its fourth chapter, the thesis examines the coverage of the Northern Ireland peace process and the clichéd ‘talk’ that has attended it. It argues for the complexity of poetry’s response to what Heaney calls ‘media-speak’. A coda on Flynn’s poetry concludes the thesis. Looking back on Heaney’s and MacNeice’s work, Flynn offers poetic form as something that might resist the fragmentation and ephemerality of media discourse.

Thesis is embargoed until 31st July 2030.

Date of Award	Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Northern Ireland Department for the Economy
Supervisor	Fran Brearton (Supervisor) & Gail McConnell (Supervisor)