51³Ô¹Ï

Topic

Lyrical Agency as a New Symbiosis: Renegotiating Private and Public Worlds in Irish Poetry, 1965–2023

Department of English

Date & location

• Wednesday, June 18, 2025
• 10:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B007

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Magdalena Kay, Department of English, 51³Ô¹Ï (Supervisor)
• Dr. Sheila Rabillard, Department of English, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Tim Lilburn, Department of Writing, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Eric Falci, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Adam Murray, Department of Computer Science, UVic

Abstract

Drafted in 1922, W. B. Yeats’s “Meditations in Time of Civil War” represents the Ur-lyric of the modern civil conflict. This sequence towers above Irish poetry published in the following decades as a haunting monument of the unresolved tension between private vision and public-oriented ambition. This dissertation revisits the site of Yeats’s lyrical edifice and explores the possibilities of renegotiating the boundary between private and public worlds in the context of the civil war in the second half of the twentieth century—the Troubles. Inspired by Eavan Boland’s call for a new, “symbiotic negotiation” of the two spheres, this discussion is predicated upon the fact that even though the poets who started to publish in the late 1960s were reluctant to join their private experience with public narrative, the possibility of their individual expression hinged upon their ability to solve the mentioned dilemma in and through their work. This dissertation explores their individual coming to terms with the paradoxical truth of this historico-cultural position and with the attendant psycho-aesthetic challenges of this realization. The four body chapters focus on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, and Paula Meehan, and follow each poet’s journey from an inherited, collectively interpreted “we” to the individuated and lyrically distinct version of figuring in the socio-cultural morphology. This project is trajectorial, structure-based, and agency-oriented. Each chapter focuses on the growing personal and professional emancipation of each poet as they challenge and re-imagine their position vis-à-vis the mentioned boundary between private and public. At the same time, their individual achievement is celebrated as the outcome of not simply a thematic treatment of the binary but of an essentially structural re-appraisal of their particular positioning. Lyrical agency, as coined and applied in this project, challenges the more habitually understood personal agency outlined and narrated in political-social terms. It is established and celebrated as a set of strategies developed and applied by each poet in their conscious and aesthetically commanding response to their new perspective regarding the uneasy private/public binary. As such, this agency strikes a new symbiosis of the two worlds that was not accessible to Yeats one hundred years ago. Further, as it inspires each poet to assume a considerably more comprehensive identity than the initial “we,” lyrical agency highlights the distinct relevance of Irish poetry in a more universal, post-national, and pan-human context.