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Preface There can be little doubt that it is not the internal development of literature or of linguistic environment that explains why Ulster, of the four historic provinces of Ireland (in fact only six of its nine counties) is by critical consent considered to have a distinct poetry. Northern Irish poetry as a literary category is relatively new and, of course, rather malleable. The influence of historical and political events is obvious. But is it not a testament to the power of words that poetry has been able to provide such a powerful response to a long-standing problem? Was it not precisely because the situation seemed insoluble that poetry was able to provide such a responsible and epoch-making response? Ulster had been early on exposed to English conquest because of its geographical proximity, and from the 17th century, when King James I colonised Ireland, the population of the province changed dramatically. In a small area, an unusual linguistic diversity emerged: by the 19th century, Ulster English, a distinctive dialect, became dominant, while Gaeltacht remained quite high in relation to English and to the whole of Ireland. The language of the Scottish immigrants, Ulster Scots, is still present today. The linguistic stratification, however, is an imprint of Irish-English ethnic, Catholic-Protestant religious, and social class divide that from time to time erupted into a violent conflict and after Partition and then in the 1970s took the form of a civil war. The area of just 14,000 square kilometres has been encumbered by too many historical and social tensions. Of the countless similar places in the world, Northern Ireland certainly stands out in that its cultural tradition has consistently articulated these problems at an exceptionally high level. In the once stifling neighbourhood of one of the world’s leading powers, but, as a consequence of being brutally deprived of native Irish, in the language that came to dominate the world after the Second World War, the voice of these poets, most influentially of Seamus Heaney’s, sounded loud and far. It goes without saying that the new generation could rely on predecessors. Belfast-born poet John Hewitt (1907-1987), who is not included in these essays since he belongs to an earlier generation than the authors under discussion, thought that the right answer to the Northern Irish situation lay in the idea of regionalism. Everyone is born somewhere, everyone lives somewhere, everyone has a higher and deeper attachment to a place than that dictated by ethnicity or religious doctrine or ideology. There are many borders, and although they can be closed both physically and spiritually, the blockade is never permanent. Regionalism is Europeanism itself, because it recognises
