Women have paid a historically high price under the patriarchal Irish Catholic church. The wrongs of the church do not detract, however, from the rich vein of poems written by Irish women informed by Catholic spirituality. Traditionally, women have been scapegoats for the fallout from patriarchal theocracy, and any resistance has begun with acts of bodily reclamation. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill reaches into Celtic tradition for paradigms of female empowerment that overturn more recent misogynistic palimpsests, and Medbh McGuckian filters an anti-colonial poetics through an engagement with her radical and ecstatic strain of Catholic spirituality, re-envisioning the leaders of the 1798 rebellion as ‘feminine Christs’. Earlier women poets engaging with religious material have fallen into neglect – Katharine Tynan’s Catholicism is often cited in evidence against her – and large bodies of work now pass unnoticed, such as the heavily female contributions to the Jesuit-edited The Irish Monthly. Restoring their work to visibility, and that of more recent writers such as Eithne Strong and Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, helps us read the work of Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian in a more informed and spiritually literate context.

This chapter explores the submerged yet generative relationship of influence between the poetries of Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – two major Northern Irish poets of very different backgrounds and primary aesthetic dispositions. Notwithstanding their respective signature identifications with modernity, flux and hybridity on the one hand and tradition, continuity and community on the other, the chapter proposes that Heaney turns to MacNeice in order to seek out new directions for his own growth as artist. The chapter centrally argues that these two poets share a common concern with renewing the relationship between immutable reality and the alterity of dream-life. In consequence, their engagements with territorial conflict lead both poets to open vital space for non-conformity with the totalizing logic of enforced national destiny. Within this space, MacNeice and Heaney offer a linked vision of creativity renewed rather than foreclosed through recognizing human frailty in the face of mortality.

Introduction: the Irish history wars and women’s voices

This chapter explores the idea of history as addressed in Irish women’s poetry, illustrated by examples from the work of the current two most senior practitioners in the field, Eile´an Nı´ Chuilleana´ in (b. 1942) and Eavan Boland (b. 1944). Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin – poet, scholar, essayist, editor and translator – published her first main collection in 1972 and her seventh in 2009. Born in Cork, she is an Associate Professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin who specialises in Renaissance literature, literature and folklore, and literature and translation. Eavan Boland – poet, critic, teacher, essayist and editor – has published ten main collections of poetry since her first book in 1967. Born in Dublin, she is Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Stanford University.

Ní Chuilleanáin and Boland, in the famous words of the latter, ‘began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed’. As foundational presences in the by now well populated and recognised field of Irish women’s poetry, their work continues to enable and challenge their peers, among whom are the poets Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley, Kerry Hardie, Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, Colette Bryce and Leontia Flynn.