Professor Peter McDonald
Poetry in English, from the Romantics to the end of the twentieth century
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish poetry
W.B. Yeats
Translations of Homer and other ancient Greek poetry.
My research work centres on poets from roughly the beginning of the nineteenth century until the close of the twentieth century. I have published several books of literary criticism, including Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002), and Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997), all of which have had significant influence internationally on the direction of literary discussion. I have extensive experience of Irish poetry as an area of research: my first book was a study of Louis MacNeice (Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (1991)), and I have written a large number of essays over the past three decades on such Irish poets as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Muldoon. Poets from outside Ireland on whom I have written include Geoffrey Hill (my co-edited volume, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Later Work appeared in 2012), and I have published extensively also on W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. I am committed to criticism as a comparative and evaluative medium, and am especially interested in the understanding of poetry through poetic form and close attention to style. At present, I am completing a volume to be entitled Mirror on Mirror: Poetry's Regard, which will include material on poets from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to W.B. Yeats and his artistic legacy.
I have produced the major modern edition of the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (2007), and continue to study MacNeice and his place in poetic history. However, the main aspect of my ongoing research is the editing of W.B. Yeats's Complete Poems for the Longman Annotated Poets series. This will provide new texts, along with detailed textual and contextual notes, for every extant piece of verse written by Yeats. The first volume (taking Yeats to c.1899) should appear in 2021.
As part of my own poetic work, I have developed an interest in verse translation from Greek, and intend to write more on this critically in coming years. My own practical contribution came with my translation of The Homeric Hymns (2016), a series of verse translations into different English forms, along with detailed notes on the ancient Greek poems themselves. It is my hope that I may be in a position to undertake another large Greek translation project in the future.
I have published six original volumes of poetry since 1989, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016), and my Collected Poems were published in 2012. I do not undertake teaching or research work in 'creative writing' as such; in my role as the Christopher Tower Student (i.e. Fellow) in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, I work to promote the art of writing poetry by way of encouraging and deepening the understanding of poetry across different historical periods.
Poetry in English from the Romantics to the end of the twentieth century; W.B. Yeats; classical reception in English poetry.
Current projects include a major multi-volume edition of the poetry of W.B. Yeats.
Website: www.towerpoetry.org.uk
Publications
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The Poems of W. B. Yeats Volume Two: 1890-1898
August 2020|Scholarly editionIn this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. -
Yeats's Early Lake Isles
January 2019|Journal article|Review of English StudiesW. B. Yeats’s successful early poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, reflects a general imaginative preoccupation with lakes in his writings as a young man. The poem shows evidence of the poet’s reading in both the local history of W. G. Wood-Martin’s History of Sligo (1882) and Irish mythological studies. Besides these sources, it draws (like other early material) on a symbolic geography of lakes, rivers, and seas which comes to Yeats from P. B. Shelley’s ‘Alastor’ and Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. This geography is to be seen in Yeats’s very early work, such as ‘The Island of Statues’ (1884), and it influences longer-running projects such as the poetic drama The Shadowy Waters through the 1890s. Other early poems, ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’, and ‘To an Isle in the Water’ help to clarify the symbolic uses of lakes, and show also how far Yeats was indebted both to Romantic predecessors and to contemporaries such as Katharine Tynan. With ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ Yeats makes decisive use of both images and metrical motifs (which may derive ultimately from Keats) in rendering a specific location as a symbolic locus for his own early anxieties and ambitions. -
Editing Yeats: The Widening Gyre
October 2018|Journal article|Essays in Criticism -
Paul Muldoon 1951
November 2017|Chapter|The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets