The Weekend of Dermot &amp; Grace: Dlouhá modernistická báseň Eugena R. Watterse

Světlík, Martin

The oeuvre of the Irish poet, novelist, playwright and essayist Eugene Rutherford Watters (later publishing under the name Eoghan Ó Tuairisc), who wrote both in English and Irish, has been mostly neglected by literary criticism. This thesis focuses on Watters' ambitious long modernist poem The Week-End of Dermot and Grace (1964), which has so far received only perfunctory critical treatment. Formally, The Week-End shows clear affinities with the works of high modernism (especially with the poetry of T.S. Eliot), especially in terms of poly- and multivocal qualities of Watters' overtly allusive language and the liberal employment of wide-ranging intertextual references. On the thematic level, the poem centres around Watters' preoccupation with the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945 by the American forces, a momentous event that impelled the poet to questions about faith, civilisation, technology, and collective guilt in the context of the Irish neutral stance during the Second World War. Reflections on Hiroshima also led him to contemplate the role of the poet and poetry in the modern "atomic age". Given the aforementioned qualities of the work, the method chosen for the analysis consists of a close reading of the poem in the light of the historical, literary, and...

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