The history of Irish poetry, like the history of Ireland itself, has long been bound up with the broadcast voices that radiate into, and out of, its shores and the walls of its homes. This essay registers the poetic resonances of radio on the island of Ireland by considering both the traces of the medium that appear in poetry and prose by Louis MacNeice, Eavan Boland, Leontia Flynn, Seamus Heaney, and others, and by examining the cultural role and aesthetic qualities of works produced for radio, with a particular attention to Austin Clarke’s weekly poetry broadcasts (made between 1939 and 1955) and his radio play ‘As the Crow Flies’ (1942). By merging Clarke’s interest in traditional Irish prosody and myth with the demands of writing for a mass medium, ‘As the Crow Flies’ offers an allegory of the futile search for meaning, and shelter, in a world convulsed by violence.

The 1970s and 1980s were decades of intense culture wars in Ireland, as the feminist movement did battle with the forces of conservatism over a host of high-profile constitutional issues. It was also a period of feminist awakening in Irish poetry. The poetry of Eavan Boland entered this world somewhat tentatively, beginning to establish its suburban terrain and slowly shedding the more static aspects of that writer’s juvenilia. A very different poet is Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose dominant note was from the outset one of uncertainty, searching, and transition. Where Boland will focus on the theme of unrecoverable women’s lives, Ní Chuilleanáin will typically be found actively recovering submerged and lost stories and lives. Medbh McGuckian’s approach is different again, and is often characterised in terms of écriture féminine, though scholarship of her extensive use of intertextuality has added new layers of complexity to our understanding of her work. Other poets, including Nuala Archer, Paula Meehan and Rita Ann Higgins, round out this survey of a busy and radical chapter in the history of modern Irish women’s poetry.

This coda juxtaposes two of the most important Irish poets of the past fifty years, focusing in particular on the ways in which Boland and Heaney base their poetics on turns to the past, whether personal memory or cultural history. It also locates ways in which Boland and Heaney aim to transform their backward-looking glances in order to account for the complexities and uncertainties of historical change, as well as to model alternate ways to think about temporality and transition.

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) embody the textual and ideological persistence of the Irish eighteenth century in our present. These texts inhabit contemporary culture as object of memory and as model of modernity. Eavan Boland’s poetry memorialises the eighteenth as Ireland’s ‘darkest century’, re-reading The Deserted Village as a front for a hostile colonial and capitalist modernity which took accelerated and influential shape in the Irish eighteenth century. Similarly, Farquhar’s play served throughout the eighteenth century to consolidate and extend the British fiscal-military state, an ideological function highlighted in Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation Trumpets and Drums (1955). The chapter focuses on two subsequent re-imaginings, Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s stage adaptation Our Country’s Good (1988). Both texts use metaphors of performance and rehearsal to illuminate the play’s function in propagating a political modernity grounded in the transitory and transitional cultures of eighteenth-century Ireland.