“Beyond the Lines of Poetry”: Ethnic Traditions and Imaginative Interventions in Irish-American Poetics'

This article aims to provide a brief recent history of Irish-American literary studies, before focusing the discussion to show how “Irish-American Poetics” might be employed as an evaluative critical lens through which to regard Irish, American and transnational exchange. In so doing it discusses whether “Irish-American Poetics” can be used as a critical framework for reading poetry that might not traditionally be termed “Irish-American”, at least in terms of more obvious ethnic claims or cultural affiliations. This in turn might allow us to ask larger questions about how, when and why we assess and describe transnational cultural encounters, and what this might tell us about the ways in which we, as critics, readers, and writers, respond to our imaginative resources.