Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry - From Burns to Heaney (Hardcover)

In a series of illuminating close readings, Fiona Stafford explores the use of earlier poems as starting points for new work. Each chapter discusses a Scottish, English, or Irish poem that begins with a line from one of the other national literatures of the British Isles, considering whether issues of originality, influence, and inheritance are essentially political as well as literary.