Michael Allen was a member of the famous ‘Belfast Group’ of Ulster poets in the 1960s, and was one of the most authoritative critical voices on poetry in the North of Ireland until his death in 2011. Intimately part of the North’s poetic movement, Allen taught at Queen’s University, where he was tutor to Paul Muldoon and a colleague of Seamus Heaney. His precision and subtlety as a poetry critic - and that he was the friend and mentor of poets in Belfast for nearly 50 years - made him a significant figure in the broader field of Irish literary criticism and a vital presence in the cultural and literary life of Northern Ireland. This important book collects Michael Allen’s critical writings - on Kavanagh, MacNeice, Heaney, Mahon, McGuckian, and Muldoon - and presents, for the first time, his final work, a ground-breaking study of the dynamics of Michael Longley’s extraordinary career.This fittingly completes the special, often surprising, perspective on modern Irish poetry that Allen’s collected essays constitute, and it will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the development of Irish poetry during the 20th century by the man Seamus Heaney called ‘the reader over my shoulder. ’ *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO [Subject: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Irish Studies]