Defining the Field: Irish Women Poets Within and Without the Literary Tradition
Defining the Field: Irish Women Poets Within and Without the Literary Tradition

Summary/Abstract: The creation of an anthology of literature inevitably involves a process of selection and rejection of texts which is always open to questioning and criticism. The three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (published in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1991) is a conspicuous example. In his introduction the general editor Seamus Deane claims that it is both a “meta-narrative” of Irish writings over 1,500 years and an “act of definition” of Irish identity/identities (Deane 1991: xix). The scale of the enterprise was unprecedented: it spans a wider time period than any previous anthology of Irish literature and aims to cover writing in a broad sense that extends to political speeches, pamphlets and analyses. All the more surprising then that it should contain so few women writers – only 39 in 4,000 pages – that its publication was greeted with as much outrage as admiration. The outcry at this glaring omission threatened to overshadow its rich and eclectic array of writers and writings. In order to redress the balance a new Field Day project was launched to compile a volume devoted solely to women’s writing. At Deane’s invitation a team of women editors undertook the task, which resulted in the publication, eleven years later, of not one but two volumes under the title The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (published in Cork, Ireland, in 2002). This is a lengthy title and a hefty work, running to 3,200 pages of writing by over 900 women and a smattering of men. What I examine here is how these two “works” (volumes I–III and volumes IV–V respectively) can be viewed as engaging one another in a debate on conceptions of Ireland and Irish writing, and how this is reflected in the representation of contemporary women poets in the anthology andtheir place in the Irish poetic tradition.

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