Irish-Scottish Poetry Project
The AHRC project, “Relations and Comparisons between Irish and Scottish poetry since 1890” is based at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, in Queen’s University, Belfast, in association with the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies in Aberdeen University. It is run by Professor Emerita Edna Longley, Dr. Fran Brearton, Reader in English and Assistant Director of the Heaney Centre, and Dr. Peter Mackay.
Started in 2006, the project will come to an end during 2009.
The project was developed out of a feeling that it is time for Irish-Scottish literary studies to move into a more consistently comparative phase. Historians have done more strictly comparative work than literary scholars. And even when there is comparative literary work done, many scholars are often interested in poetry because it is ‘Scottish’ or ‘Irish’, not because it is poetry. This project will place poetry to the fore, while employing a comparative approach.
‘Comparison’ is about difference, about distinctiveness, as much as identity. A comparative approach will counter inward or insular perceptions of the literature of these islands. Scottish or Irish exceptionalism may well have been the enemy of Scottish or Irish particularism - what do they know of Scottish or Irish poetry who only know these rather uncertain canons? A consistently comparative approach will illuminate the pattern whereby some Scottish commentators – on cultural politics too – rhetorically invoke Ireland, only to move on fast, while most Irish commentators don’t even mention Scotland at all. Lady Gregory’s joke still seems relevant: when asked about ‘the meaning of the Celtic movement we were said to belong to’, she ‘used to say it was a movement meant to persuade the Scotch to begin buying our books while we continued not to buy theirs’ (Our Irish Theatre, 1913).
The project’s institutional seed was the possibility of linking the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry with Phase 2 of the AHRC Centre at Aberdeen. The project's intellectual seed was the possibility of linking two academic fields: modern poetry and Irish-Scottish studies. The project is working towards a collection of
comparative essays, developed from a series of themed symposia in Belfast and
Aberdeen. A translation study conducted separately from the book will
be Hugh Magennis’s comparison of Edwin Morgan’s and Seamus Heaney’s
translations of Beowulf. Reflecting
the creative as well as critical objectives of the Heaney Centre, and the existence of the annual Word festival in Aberdeen, the project combined symposia with poetry readings and musical performances. There were four separate symposia: The Friendship of Poets, The Way it Had to be Said?, Crossing the Minch and other Odysseys and Re-Mapping the Irish / Scottish Poem. On the following pages, you can listen to all of the papers delivered at the symposia, and also to the poetry and music performed in the accompanying events.
For information about the project, please contact Dr. Peter Mackay on p.mackay@qub.ac.uk
