The elder statesmen of Northern Irish poetry (Robert Greacen, Padraic
Fiacc and John Montague, all born in the 1920s) cite T.S.Eliot as an influence.
In the first of these, he considers Ulster poetry through Barthes's notion of myth and through its imbrication with notions of the political, in a critical spread from Michael Longley's 1969 essay 'Strife and the Ulster Poet' to writers such as Michael Foley and Padraic
Fiacc. The importance of coterie formation is examined as a means of intervention in a troubled historical and national consciousness.
Seamus MacMathuna's |Paganism and Society in Early Ireland' powerfully sets out those themes, beginning with a brief analysis of
Fiacc's Hymn (c.800 A.D.), and ends with a splendid translation of that most characteristic poem on the ebb and flow of life, |The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare'.