The Great War in Irish Poetry : Oxford University Press : 9780199261383 : 0199261385 : 06 Feb 2003 : The Great War in Irish Poetry explores the impact of the First World War on the work of W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice in the period 1914-45, and on three contemporary Northern Irish poets, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley. Its concern is to place their work, and memory of the Great War, in the context of Irish culture and politics in the twentieth century. The historical background to Irish involvement in the Great War is explained, as are the ways in which some of the events of 1912-1920--the Home Rule crisis, the loss of the Titanic, the Battle of the Somme, the Easter Rising--still reverberate in the politics of remembrance in Northern Ireland. While the Great War is perceived as central to English culture, and its literature holds a privileged position in the English literary canon, the centrality of the Great War to Irish writing ha