Search results for "Louis MacNeice"

'[I]t wasn’t in the picture and is not': Blind Spots and Vanishing Points in Irish Poetical Self-Portraits

2016

International audience; Pictoriality and a propensity for self-examination and self-representation are characteristic of the poetry of Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. In many a poem, these four contemporary Irish poets try to capture their own portraits in words and images, through highly visual poems often inspired by paintings. This paper first examines how these poets use images and invest paintings, how verbal and iconic texts interact in their creations and to what extent self-exegesis is made possible and more successful through ekphrasis. With reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay on self-portraiture—Memoirs of the Blind: Self-Portraits and Other Ruins—thi…