Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon

“The editors have admirably carried out their self-imposed tasks ... The somewhat complicated arrangement is amply justified if one considers the work as a classroom tool, aimed primarily at giving a student audience food for thought, Helen Goethals.”  (Cercles, 2012)

"Michael O'Neill has assembled some truly memorable contributions to the criticism of twentieth-century poetry, all of them illuminating, some of them hard to come by in recent years, acquiring here the freshness of a renewed encounter after long absence. Some belong to the same period as the poems and shed light on a shared context."
—Edward Larrissy, Queen's University Belfast

"This authoritative yet accessible book carries the reader deep into the rewards of modern poetry. O'Neill and Callaghan combine their own subtly informed accounts of the work of leading poets with judiciously chosen extracts from classic critical studies. Broad in scope, deep in insight, clear in historical exposition, and always attentive to the verbal make-up of particular poems and imaginative worlds, /Twentieth-Century British Poetry/ is at once an introduction and a revisitable archive, full of sustaining guidance."
—John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge

"Both formally attuned and contextually alert, the author-editors have here selected passages from the best recent critics and interwoven them with their own informed and illuminating commentary, revealing both the innovation of modern poetry and its implication within a diverse range of literary traditions. Altogether, the book provides an invaluable companion to one of the great ages of poetry in English."
—Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford