Profile
Biography
Matthew Campbell writes mainly about poetry. His work ranges across the study of modern and contemporary Irish poetry, Irish poetry of the nineteenth century and British poetry of the Victorian and modern periods. Matt has also written on twentieth-century Irish fiction and drama, as well as on Victorian culture. Authors on which he has published range from Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning to Yeats, Joyce and Heaney, with significant chapters and articles on writers such as Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dora Sigerson, James Joyce, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon.
Headline publications include The Oxford Handbook of Yeats, co-edited with Lauren Arrington (OUP, 2023), Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880 (CUP, 2020), Irish Poetry under the Union, 1801-1924 (CUP, 2013), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (CUP, 2003), Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (CUP, 1999), journal editorship and three further edited collections. At present, Matt is finishing a book tentatively titled Accident and Incoherence: The Irish Poem in History 1890-2020.
Research
Overview
After graduate work and a first book on British Victorian poetry, Matthew Campbell has recently been working almost exclusively on Irish poetry from the 1790s to the present day. His most recent publications have been Oxford Handbook of Yeats, co-edited with Lauren Arrington (OUP, 2023) and Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880 (CUP, 2020). At present Matt is working on Irish poetry in its long twentieth century from the revival to the contemporary Irish international scene. Accident and Incoherence: The Irish Poem in History 1890-1920 takes its title from Yeats and will offer readings of poems and the beliefs and careers of poets in often difficult historical, political and intellectual times.
Matt’s previous book, Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801-1924 was published in 2013 and was about Irish poetry written during the period between the Act of Union and Irish independence. It offered readings of the ‘synthetic forms’ of poetry from Thomas Moore to Yeats, via important writers like James Clarence Mangan and Yeats. But it also continued his work across the Victorian United Kingdom, featuring the work of English poets writing about and in Ireland, including Tennyson, Arnold and, most notably, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 2006 he contributed the chapter on poetry from 1830-1890 in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature, and chapters on ‘Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’ in the first volume of the Blackwell Companion to Irish Literature and ‘Poetry 1845-1891’ in A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature
An interest in Irish music and poetry is reflected in an essay on Moore in the co-edited volume The Voice of the People: the European Folk Revival, 1765-1914, a book with an international cast of contributors. As part of his then-research on a ‘four-nations’ British poetry inflected with Celticism, Matt gave the 2008 Warton Lecture on English Poetry to the British Academy, on ‘Wordsworth and the Druids’. ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’ appeared in the 2012 Oxford Handbook of Irish Poetry.
Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, a study of prosody and agency in Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy, was published in 1999, and Matt was the editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin from 1999 to 2004. Essays on Victorians poets have also appeared in Essays in Criticism, English, Victorian Literature and Culture and the European Journal of English Studies. A chapter on the Victorian sonnet was published in 2011 in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, and he wrote the chapter on ‘Rhyme’ in the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013).
Matthew also writes on modern and contemporary poetry, and an edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry was published in 2003. He has written articles and reviews on contemporary Irish poetry, most notably on Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson, but also on war poetry, the elegy, metaphor and rhyme in the modern Irish poem.
From 2013 to 2019 Matt was Director of the Yeats International Summer School (Sligo). He is still involved with the school, on its academic Board, and is a member of the Board of the Yeats International Society, for whom he organised the annual conference in 2021. Matt has lectured widely across the UK, Ireland and further afield, most recently in Sweden, the USA and Brazil.
Supervision
Matthew Campbell has supervised PhD projects on Victorian poetry, contemporary Irish and Indian women’s poetry, poetry and disability, contemporary Elegy, Irish women’s poetry, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, Yeats and Eliot, Yeats and Tagore, War writing, James Joyce, David Jones and Nick Cave. Current students are working on James Joyce, Amy Clampitt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He welcomes applications in the fields of Victorian poetry, Irish poetry and Irish literature and modern poetry more generally since 1800.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Matthew Campbell teaches across the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, from Romantic through Victorian to Modern literature. He contributes to options on Victorian and modern literature, and a third year module on ‘Modern Irish Poetry’.
Postgraduate
He has convened the 19th Century, Victorian and Poetry MAs and offers an MA module on ‘Four Nations of British Poetry: 1848 to 1939’ to the 19th Century and Modern and Contemporary MAs.
