\u27Recent Irish Poetry\u27 and Recent Irish Poetry

A key text in twentieth-century poetic debate in Ireland is Samuel Beckett\u27s \u27Recent Irish Poetry\u27, published in 1934. Beckett was then twenty-eight years old and in the midst of what his poem \u27Gnome\u27 calls the \u27years of wandering\u27 before his decision to settle in Paris in 1937. Entirely out of sympathy with Free State Ireland, he used the essay to offer a damning analysis of the complacency and simple-mindedness of the great majority of its poets. Depending on their reaction to \u27the new thing that has happened, namely the breakdown of the object\u27 in contemporary culture, Irish poets divide for Beckett into two groups, \u27antiquarians and others\u27. The former greatly outnumber the latter, and are subjected to acid derision. While T.S. Eliot called for the extinction of personality, Beckett demonstrates how Irish poetry was lacking even enough personality to extinguish