Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Serious Poetry provocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.

1. Rather than Words: The End of Authority? ; 2. Yeats and Remorse ; 3. Yeats's Poetic Structures ; 4. Three Critics: Eliot, Heaney, Hill ; 5. One of Us: Eliot, Auden, and Four Quartets ; 6. Yeats, Form, and Northern Irish Poetry ; 7. MacNeice's Posterity ; 8. The Pitch of Dissent: Geoffrey Hill ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX

`Review from other book by this author lucid, careful and diplomatic study of poetry and Northern Ireland ... there is much to applaud in McDonald's explication of the theme of 'identity' and the assertions which pepper his own narrative should find critical consent. ... Mercifully Peter McDonald is concerned with the real thing and has the scholarly and intellectual commitment to engage with poetry and its ideological vortex without disappearing through the looking-glass of theory in extremis. Mistaken Identities rightly lives protectively among the poems of those the critic admires while keeping a close eye on the politics of those he finds loitering with intent. This is an important book to read.' Fortnight, no.364, September 1997 `Review from other book by this author McDonald's criticism is informed by an active engagement with Northern Ireland and with poetry.' The Times Higher Education Supplement `Review from other book by this author interesting, wide-ranging and tetchy study ... Certainly this book, though it fans an important debate about the politics of 'identity', finds its major strengths in the little decentred details of style and cultural nuance which its author, an always astute and at his best a super-sensitive reader of poetry, succeeds in teasing out.' Stan Smith, Irish Studies Review, Vol 7 No 3 1999