Language, Landscape, and Legacy: A Comparative Study of Irish and English Poets

Abstract

This paper investigates the dynamic interplay between language, landscape, and cultural memory within the poetic traditions of Ireland and England. Focusing on six key poets—W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and Eavan Boland from Ireland, and T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin from England—it examines how each writer transforms language into a medium for engaging with history, place, and identity. For the Irish poets, landscape becomes a site of reclamation and resistance, a repository of collective memory shaped by colonial history and the quest for cultural autonomy. In contrast, English poets reinterpret landscape as a moral and existential terrain, where questions of continuity, faith, and selfhood unfold in the aftermath of industrial and imperial change. The study also considers the lyric as a moral form—an intersection of voice, tradition, and imagination that bridges personal consciousness and national legacy. Ultimately, it argues that Irish and English poetry, while rooted in distinct historical experiences, converge in their pursuit of meaning and belonging through the transformative power of language.