Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry : From Burns to Heaney

In a series of illuminating close readings, Fiona Stafford explores the use of earlier poems as starting points for new work. Each chapter discusses a Scottish, English, or Irish poem that begins with a line from one of the other national literatures of the British Isles, considering whether issues of originality, influence, and inheritance are essentially political as well as literary.

Why should a poem begin with a line from another poem? Is an eighteenth-century epigraph working in the same way as a post-modern quotation? And how are the dynamics of the new text and the source affected by issues of nationhood, language, history, and cultural tradition? Are literary ideas of originality and imitation, allusion and influence inherently political if the poems emerge from different sides of a border or of a colonial relationship?Taking as a framework the history of relations between Ireland, England, and Scotland since the 1707 Union, the book explores such questions through a series of close readings. Textual encounters singled out for detailed discussion include Burns''s use of Shakespeare, Coleridge''s reference to ''Sir Patrick Spens'', James Clarence Mangan''s adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ciaran Carson''s quotation from John Keats, Seamus Heaney''s meditation on Henry Vaughan, and the evolution of ''The Homes of England'' from Felicia Hemans to Noel Coward.