Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry

In this incisive and highly readable study, Rachel Buxton offers a much-needed assessment of Frost's significance for Northern Irish poetry of the past half-century. Drawing upon a diverse range of previously unpublished archival sources, including juvenilia, correspondence, and drafts of poems, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry takes as its particular focus the triangular dynamic of Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Buxton explores the differing strengthswhich each Irish poet finds in Frost's work: while Heaney is drawn primarily to the Frost persona and to the "sound of sense", it is the studied slyness and wryness of the American's poetry, the complicating undertow, which Muldoon values. This appraisal of Frost in a non-American context not onlyenables a fuller appreciation of Heaney's and Muldoon's poetry but also provides valuable insight into the nature of trans-national and trans-generational poetic influence. Engaging with the politics of Irish-American literary connections, while providing a subtle analysis of the intertextual relationships between these three key twentieth-century poets, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry is a pioneering work.

A fresh and remarkably inventive contribution to modern poetry studies.... This is one of the few critical books I have read in many years that had me eagerly taking notes, wanting to reread its pages. It has prompted me to rethink not only the poetry of Robert Frost but its impact in the wider world.