MA in Poetry Studies

Course details

Innovative and exciting work in Poetry Studies takes place at MDI, with its Irish Centre for Poetry Studies and electronic journal POST: A Poetry Studies Review. The MA in Poetry Studies is a pioneering Poetry course that provides students, teachers and practitioners of poetry with specialised skills in the appreciation of the art-form. Through this programme, we are reaching out to various communities, both professional and non-professional, with an interest in expanding their understanding of poetry through lifelong learning. MDI has strong links with Portugal’s University of Coimbra, the only other European institution currently offering a comparable MA in Poetry Studies. Possibilities exist for student exchanges, or for MDI students to visit Coimbra and experience their internationally-celebrated Meeting of Poets, which takes place biennially.

MA in Poetry Studies Taster Day

Are you interested in our MA in Poetry Studies programme? If so, you may find it useful to attend one of our Taster Days. Our Taster Days normally take place in the afternoon/evening and involve you sitting in on some of our lectures. You will also meet with some current postgraduate students and lecturers from various departments.

Programme Content

Participants who wish to obtain a Master's Award take six taught modules on this Poetry course. To view reading lists and other details about the following modules, visit Course Modules

Single Author Module

Elizabeth Bishop

In this module, the students are taught through intensive tutorials every fortnight rather than in weekly seminars, and in it they will follow the work of a single poet. Notions of development and biography will obviously play a part, and we will query whether we can ever say if we have read any poet's work "completely", but there is also an opportunity here to explore the metonymic significance of one person's achievement in wider contexts, whether national or international, historical or sociological. In this academic year, for example, students follow an intensive course of reading on the complete work of Elizabeth Bishop.

Contemporary Poetries

Poetry from 2000 to present

This module explores a range of poetry published in the last ten years, and will focus on how poetry acts as a cultural barometer, manifesting the social, political and metaphysical anxieties and pressures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each seminar will focus on a significant collection, sequence or long poem which provides an entry point to the work of an important poet and the debates surrounding his or her work. The list of writers currently being studied shows an apt balance between poetry from Ireland, America and other cultures: Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, Kathleen Jamie, Anne Carson, Louise Gluck, Charles Bernstein, Geoffrey Hill and Eileann ni Chuilleanain.

Lyric: Sacred and Profane

Poetry as Song from Sappho to ACDC

This module will trace the evolution of lyric poetry from its apparent origins in Antiquity to the Present Day. A particular emphasis will be paid to the idea of poetry as song, and also the crisis in lyric that took place in lyric poetry around romanticism. The module will also feature studies of modern songwriters (questioning the standard distinction between poets and songwriters) and their ancient DNA.

Content Sketch:

The Sapphic Genes of Lyric (Sappho, Catullus and Horace), The Psalms, Troubador Poetry, Medieval, Renaissance Lyric: Donne's Holy Sonnets, Shakespeare's Songs, Romanticism and the Birth of the Meta-Lyric, Twentieth Century Lyric: Cole Porter or T.S.Eliot?, Blues and hip-hop, Modern Troubadors: Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey, Motown and Modern Hit Factories.

Cross Programme Seminar: Reading Culture

Postgraduate students require and demand a precise knowledge of the interpretative strategies and vocabularies that have evolved over the past few decades in the field of critical and cultural theory. This seminar will give students a confident sense of these approaches, exploring approaches to reading culture from perspectives informed by such theories as Feminism, Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism.

Poethics: Poetry, Politics, and the Civic Space

Philosophical, Political and Cultural Contexts

Beginning from the premise that writing, reading and listening are not ethically or politically neutral activities, this module explores a variety of philosophical, theoretical and poetic texts to investigate the relationship between poets, audiences and civic spaces. Areas that might be covered include: the representation of violence and cruelty in poetry, poetry related to the Holocaust; the relationship between poetic experiment and ethic; philosophical approaches to ethical production of and engagement with poetry; ethical responses to ideology and propaganda; ethics surrounding the study of gender and sexuality; poetic censorship from Ovid's banishment to terrace chants.

Seminar and Workshop

Analytical and Close Reading Skills

Over the courses of 12 2-hour workshops, students will engage with every aspect of poetic form, gaining a thorough grounding in the techniques used to produce poems and the scholarly discourse which respond to them. Over the course of the academic year, students will be expected to attend 4 John Devitt Memorial Seminars (2per semester) and to participate in a conference related to poetry studies.

Verse Drama

From Ancient Greece to Modernity

This proposes to introduce students to representative examples of verse drama drawn from a wide historical perspective. Students will be made aware of the changing nature of verse drama across the centuries in Europe and factors that influenced these changes, including social, historical, political and literary contexts.

Imaginaries: Poetic Geographies

Imagining Italy

This module looks at the attachment of poetry to particular geographies, and how well those "real" geographies are altered and radicalized through poeticization. The proposed focus will be on the poetic mapping of Italy from antiquity to the present.

Holocaust and Modern Culture

Interdisciplinary Module.

To meet the requirements of the Masters in Poetry Studies, the students must take six modules in all, as well as a Research Module (within which they will take the Reading Culture seminar).

Entry Requirements

The general criteria for entry to this taught postgraduate programme is a good honours primary degree or equivalent.

Students who do not meet the normal criteria may be considered for a place on the programme on the basis of their work experience and other relevant educational achievements.

Applicants seeking Accreditation of Prior (Certified) Learning (APL) for the purposes of entry, module exemptions, or advanced entry, or applicants seeking Accreditation of Prior Experiental Learning (APEL) for the purposes of entry or module exemptions will also be considered.