RIP Seamus Deane (1940-2021).

1245 pages seems like a lot unless and until you recognise that you don't have to read them all.

For the most part, the reading of Literature seems to have given way to the study of Literature, so, how works were intended and received in their day (time of publication) and how works are received today reveal two different reading constituencies, that suppose two (at least) different reading strategies.

Literary criticism suggests ways of seeing or reading and it possesses various methods or approaches to reading that can help to inform the reader. Written and Read originally for one purpose, reading has become repurposed and as disciplines like history and sociology find in works of literature original sources of information that tell us something about their creation or their reception, the many approaches find in literature a quarry which they mine to suit their purposes.

Unlike many anthologies whose editors often offer little guidance and who often abandon the reader at the first opportunity, leaving them to their own devices to sort through the seeming (viewed from the air) endless patchwork, and typically held together by little more than a chronological string; you won't find any of that here.

It helps of course if the reader or visitor knows what he or she is looking at (or for). Here, we see the value of a series of helpful prefaces or guides to the various sections of Irish literature mainly in English, as Bearla. As literature is read increasingly for what it says about the period in which it was written or when it first appeared, that's if it did appear at all, the work of the guide is indispensable. Good editing, added value, helps train the Reader's eye, to learn to know what to look for, or to recognise what is or may be significant, and why.

Lacking formal or institutional representation before Independence in 1921-2, Irish literary culture became the means by which the national struggle was interpreted, so perhaps explaining the large number of Irish writers of each period. Different interests contributed to a conversation which is ongoing and here among the selections by no means one sided or intentionally partisan.

"London was his capital, not Dublin, although he wanted to be recognised as an Irish poet" (6)

"he had all the qualifications necessary for failure" (5)

"a gifted writer who faded for want of a governing theme, - a casualty of 19thCentury Romanticism" (5)

"questions the very basis of Irish cultural nationalism which after all assumes the translatability of Irish spirit into English words" (6)

"as a result, poetry as popular song became an important weapon in the long war against colonialism" (4)

"anonymity or pseudonymity as a mode of identification" (7).

"I had as soon be ranked among the piping bullfinches" (6)

"It is the only poem of sustained quality to treat this central theme of 19th Century Irish life" (7)

"He was trapped in a prison house of language in which two languages, English and Irish, were his warders. Despite this he managed to liberate part of his experience into poetry" (7)

"Perchance a truant from his desk,
Some lover of the picturesque,
Whose soul is far above his shop,
Hints to his charmer where to stop" (11)