World Literature

With Karl and Groucho

Augustus Young’s imagined conversations between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, taking the form of a Socratic dialogue, range across the role of ideas in art,…

World Literature

A Necessary Restitution

The English poets of the 1940s, sandwiched between Auden, Spender, MacNeice and the main poets of the 1930s and the later development of ‘the Movement’,…

Irish Literature

A Bird Pipes Up

There is always some question around the best, or perhaps the least-worst, way of translating poetry. One view is that translating verse into prose leaves…

Irish Literature

A Different Furrow

Much twentieth century Irish poetry is seen as a reaction against or a coming to terms with the influence of Yeats. Brian Coffey, however, a…

World Literature

The Green Fuse

Dylan Thomas read and learned from Auden, as they both read and learned from Eliot. However, where Auden saw the neo-Augustan classicist in the older…