Abstract This essay explores Yeats’s relationship to the growing ‘air-mindedness’ of Ireland and the increasing prevalence of flight in the aftermath of the First World War. It investigates Gogarty’s improbable claim to have taken Yeats up in a plane in the 1920s, in the context of Ireland’s increasing emphasis on the perceived political, economic and physical benefits of flight. The essay traces Yeats’s Romantic inheritance, notably the Romantic conception of aerial vision and ascent, and his resistance to the ‘machine age’, as it informs his own aesthetics of ascent in the early decades of the 20th century. As one of the earliest authors of a ‘flight’ poem, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1918), written without experience of flying, Yeats’s influence on the aviation poetry that became more prevalent after World War I is also delineated, alongside the extent to which he captured in his work some of the essence of how the ‘Knights of the Air’ were perceived.

This article proposes that W. B. Yeats's ‘Easter 1916’, intertextually linked to ‘September 1913’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, is also a subtle response to the political and sectarian quarrels of 1912–1914 as manifest in Rudyard Kipling's poems ‘Ulster (1912)’ and ‘The Covenant’. It examines the ways in which Kipling, and those in Ireland who reacted negatively to him, drew on the Easter sacrificial rhetoric later to be associated with the 1916 Rising, and illustrates how Yeats's poetry during and after the Rising may be read as implicitly engaged in a quarrel with Kipling's aesthetic. It reorientates perceptions of how and where the idea of sacrifice is deployed in Ireland (by Kipling and Yeats, but also by Tom Kettle and Padraic Pearse) and argues for the emergence of Yeats during the First World War as the figure who eclipses Kipling in terms of influence on, and significance to, the modernist generation.

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"There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing." This is the original version of Robert Graves' intense memoir of the First World War, restoring this raw, emotionally truthful, darkly comic work to the way it was first written, by a young man still reeling from the trenches. "We see the dark heart of the book even more clearly, and hear it beating even more loudly, in this original edition than we do in the comparatively careful and considered terms of the later one." (Andrew Motion). "One of the most candid self-portraits, warts and all, ever painted." (TLS).

Cet article se propose d’explorer les lignes de faille qui traversent la poésie de guerre irlandaise et conditionnent son écriture, ces fractures affaiblissent la vocation réconciliatrice de l’Elégie. La poésie de Heaney tend vers une célébration sans partage des souffrances endurées par tous les soldats qui ont péri durant la première guerre mondiale, dans un effort pour vaincre un même ennemi. Mais la tentative de trouver un terrain d’entente est compromise par la persistance de la problématique de l’identité nationale et des responsabilités collectives en Irlande. Des intérêts contradictoires préviennent l’accomplissement d’une œuvre unifiée. Cependant, ils contribuent à l’élaboration d’un idiome poétique original.

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This chapter explores form in contemporary Irish poetry, focusing on the work of three poets from Ireland – David Wheatley, Caitríona O'Reilly, and Justin Quinn – who have also been loosely (if not always accurately) associated with formal conservatism, even with a new formalism. Quinn's first poetry collection, The O'o'a'a' Bird, was published in 1995, Wheatley's Thirst in 1997, and O'Reilly's The Nowhere Birds in 2001. Wheatley's Misery Hill (2000) is dominated by set forms, with the villanelle entitled ‘Poem’ finding memorable repeating lines. In ‘The Irish Efflorescence’, Quinn argues in relation to a new generation of poets from Ireland (including Wheatley, O'Reilly, Conor O'Callaghan, Vona Groarke, and Sinéad Morrissey) that while ‘Northern Irish poetry, in both the first and second waves, is preoccupied with the binary opposition of Ireland and England...[t]he youngest Irish poets...are not bounded in the same way by this opposition’.

Throughout his writing life, Robert Graves was consistently and often publicly hostile to the work of W.B. Yeats, whilst still also owing a considerable debt to the older poet (who he never met). This essay explores Graves's complex responses to Yeats, arguing that his antagonism may be understood in the light of his own Anglo-Irish background, and as implicated in his relations with his father, Alfred Perceval Graves, as well as his experience of the First World War. Probing the suggestiveness of Graves's claim in 1959 that his poems 'remain true to the Anglo-Irish poetic tradition into which I was born', it traces the relation between Yeats and Graves through correspondence, critical writings, and through a comparative reading of Yeats's A Vision and Graves's The White Goddess, and reveals underlying similarities in their critical and mythological thinking in spite of Graves's public disavowal of the Yeatsian aesthetic.