This article builds upon previous scholarship attuned to Ireland's complex position as a neutral state during the Second World War ("The Emergency"), and which points out Louis MacNeice's hostility towards the Irish government's official stance. It does so by looking at "The Closing Album" as a political lyric critiquing Irish neutrality's isolation0 ist and damaging effects and shows how the poem-in the act of critiquing neutrality-asserts the modern poet's position as an emotionally invested political spokesman. I argue that the nation's political goals were irreconcilable with postcolonial artistic aims: Irish writers were intent on constructing an image of Irishness that was not dictated by British coloring and was exportable through the medium of their art, while the government aimed at becoming a self-sufficient, sovereign nation. This split between politician and artist during The Emergency ushers in a modern Irish poetry that is at once political and aesthetic.

This essay argues that the textual specter—a non-present presence, a dual being and non-being—precisely symbolizes, for James Joyce, the overlap between Irish myth and Irish history. It contends that Joyce’s corpus, central to Irish literary tradition, celebrates this impurity and offers readers insight into contemporary Irish novelists’ motivations for and methods of reinvention. In Finnegans Wake , Joyce establishes the specter, that figure of uncontrollable and uncanny repetition, as a narrative device for (re)inventing a more nuanced version of Irish history and, therefore, a more complex definition of twenty-first-century Irishness.

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