IRISH POETRY 1930-1960 by Jessica Lynn Pannell BA in English
“TEEMING DELIGHT:” IRISH POETRY 1930-1960 by Jessica Lynn Pannell B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1999 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Department of English of the School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2011 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jessica Lynn Pannell It was defended on April 20, 2011 and approved by Colin MacCabe, Distinguished University Professor, Department of English Troy Boone, Associate Professor, Department of English Barbara McCloskey, Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture Dissertation Director: James F. Knapp, Senior Associate Dean, School of Art and Sciences and Professor, Department of English ii “TEEMING DELIGHT:” IRISH POETRY 1930-1960 Jessica Lynn Pannell, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2011 The dissertation provides a survey of poetry in largely critically neglected decades of Irish literature, arguing that the poetry of Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Blanaid Salkeld represents a crucial phase in the development of Irish poetry. In the first three chapters I argue that Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and Samuel Beckett develop a uniquely Irish form of modernism that sits uneasily with both Irish and Continental traditions, examines the horrors of modern war, and in the case of Beckett, proposes a form of humanism based on the physiology of the body that radically departs from Enlightenment models. The Kavanagh chapter examines his reclamation and reformation of the Irish bardic tradition of pastoral dystopianism and Kavanagh’s attempts at a new poetic based in anti-Pauline, post-institutionalized Christianity.
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