Campbell, Siobhan and Farley, Paul and Sharpe, Tony (2015) From there to here : writing in a time of violence - a creative and critical thesis. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
This work explores the relationship between the environment of the linguistically and politically conflicted island of Ireland and the possibility of the creation of poetry which acknowledges such social realities as part of its remit. A collection of poems presents the lyric as formed by various aspects of witness and a critical study of the work of Padraic Fiacc and Eavan Boland addresses the political poem as well as the poem which arises from the differing forms of aesthetics which arise within a violently contested State. As Auden said of Yeats, ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’ and there’s a sense that poets have fallen into identifiable sections – those who visited the historical and present-day loci of identity issues and various other forms of conflict within their work and those who have appeared not to do so. This thesis presents the debates contextualising the many cross-currents and inter-dependencies within these apparently binary arguments.