Paper Details

Name: Karmjit Kaur Virdi
Country: India

Year: 2014
Volume: Volume-1, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 12-17

Living in the entrenched and complex system of colonization, the writers of Ireland had to face one big truth: that they couldn‟t tell anything outright as they had to face the communist censorship. So the “[p]oems had to work implicitly: not spell things out but slide under the censor‟s eye, „say the unsaid‟ to readers desperate to hear their truth, while pretending it hadn‟t been said.”1 The blood-soaked and pain-drenched history of the nation impelled its poets to make use of symbols, motifs and images to verbalize those ideas and feelings which were not allowed to be expressed directly through statements. Thus, responding to the political, religious and social conflict that persists even today, particularly in the Protestant controlled North, the writers endeavour hard to fulfill their poetic responsibility by deploying “strategies of silence, secrecy, private reference, and tribal shibboleth rather than „blabb[ing] out.
Following the legacy of Samuel Ferguson, Clarence Mangan and W.B. Yeats, poets such as Seamus
Deane, James Simmons, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon have continued to weigh and
scrutinize the relationship between art and life, and art and politics. Realising and recognizing their
artistic responsibility, they use their work to convey their experiences and refer to classical paintings,
bog lands, historical backgrounds and Irish legends to depict and illuminate the contemporary