The term ‘modernist afterlife’ brings into sharp relief the complex question of literary temporalities. The difficulty in establishing a chronology of modernist writing inevitably troubles our evaluation of its legacy, our ability to tell its ‘life’ from its ‘afterlife’. In different geographical settings, as well as in different art forms, various patterns of formal development and thematic preoccupation can be traced, yet even within these situations there are multiple modernisms, rather than a single, coherent movement. Tyrus Miller has remarked on the capacity of late modernist texts to express the ‘aging and decline’ of modernism at the same time as they anticipate future developments. For writers in Ireland, many of whom came belatedly to modernism, the durational aspects of the movement may have seemed less clear. Ireland's cultural development in the early decades of the twentieth century was dominated by the Irish Literary Revival, which has usually been seen as antithetical to modernism. However, as Terence Brown points out, both movements play with the intersection between ‘historical time and mythological timelessness’. For revivalists and for modernists the relationship between the individual and the collective is placed within a temporal framework; the influence of both movements meant that both lyric and modernist subjects in Irish poetry tend to be understood through their shifting relationship to time. For Irish women poets of the twenties and thirties, the need to negotiate between traditional and experimental forms shed particular light on the temporalities of the female subject. In particular, the representation of death and afterlife allowed women poets to explore anxieties concerning their formation and endurance as creative artists.

The relationship between women poets and modernism in Ireland is, in turn, a complex one. Broadly speaking, international modernism moved through a period in the first decade of the twentieth century when issues of gender and sexuality were of key importance, to a phase around mid-century when modernist texts tended to be viewed within a gender-neutral frame. This pattern was reflected in approaches to literary criticism, too, as Cristanne Miller has observed: ‘Much early feminist criticism on female poets argued for the consideration of a separate women's tradition of poetry, constructed either in parallel or in opposition to men's.