Edward Larrissy

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Edward Larrissy FEA is a British literary scholar and poet. He has served as Professor of Poetry at Queen's University Belfast and as Research Director at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. His work focuses on Romanticism, modern and contemporary poetry, and Irish literature. He is a Fellow of the English Association and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Early life and education

Larrissy studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, and later completed a D.Phil. at St John's College, Oxford in 1980 with a thesis on William Blake.

Academic career

Larrissy held early academic posts at University College, Bangor and the Polytechnic of North London before joining the University of Warwick, where he served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer from 1980 to 1994. He later held senior positions at Keele University and was appointed Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds in 1999.

He subsequently joined Queen's University Belfast, where he became Professor of Poetry and Research Director at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.

Larrissy was elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2002. In 2011, he was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Research and scholarship

Larrissy's research is in Romanticism, modernism, and twentieth-century British, Irish, and American poetry. His work has focused particularly on William Blake and W. B. Yeats, as well as on questions of gender, myth, ideology, literary value, and the relationship between Romanticism, postmodernism, and literary theory.

His scholarship on Blake has considered the poet's literary, visual, and intellectual contexts, including Blake's engagement with Platonism, Orientalism, modern literature, and postmodern critical approaches. Larrissy has also written on Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Patrick Kavanagh, along with contemporary British and Irish poetry.

Books

• William Blake (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)
• Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry: The Language of Gender and Objects (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)
• Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994)
• (ed.) W. B. Yeats: The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
• W. B. Yeats (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998)
• (ed.) Romanticism and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
• (ed.) W. B. Yeats: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
• Blake and Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
• The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)

Poetry

• Three Poems, Sycamore Broadsheet 26 (Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1977)
• ‘The Other Side of You’ and ‘Still with Your Eyes’, Green River Review: British Poetry Special, 6:2–3 (1980), pp. 51–53
• ‘The Russians are Wearing Heavy Wooden Overcoats’, The Observer, 3 November 1985
• ‘Bethesda, North Wales’, in Speak to the Hills: An Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Mountain Poetry, ed. Hamish Brown and Martin Berry (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985), pp. 73–74
• ‘Galactic Diary of an Edwardian Lady’, in The Faber Book of Science, ed. John Carey (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995)
• “London, June 2016”, Poetry Ireland Review, no. 133 (April 2021), pp. 11–12.
• “The Ballad of the Fragment Cult; A Vision”, The Honest Ulsterman (online journal), February 2022

References