"O poet guiding me": Dante and Contemporary Irish Poetry

This study of the reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy in contemporary Irish poetry gives an overview of the variety of poets influenced by and borrowing from Dante, and includes close readings of relevant poems. The poets discussed are Fergus Allen, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Harry Clifton, Michael Donaghy, Leontia Flynn, Seán Haldane, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Tom Matthews, Alan Jude Moore, Paul Muldoon, Gerry Murphy, and Bernard O’Donoghue. Thematically following Dante’s epic from Hell through Purgatory to Paradise, the study takes mutually complementary theories of influence and intertextuality into account, with particular focus on Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests and Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. The overarching thesis is that the contemporary Irish Dante reception, while generally characterised by an identification with Dante in terms of politics, religion, language, or exile, is shaped by the way Dante is read and reworked by prominent literary figure and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. Similarities to or corrective movements regarding Heaney’s use of Dante, or the avoidance of Dante altogether, offer an insight into the dynamics of contemporary Irish poetry