Campbell McGrath – Comedy and Poetry from Aristophanes to Billy Collins (July 2001)

Aligned with Patrick Kavanagh’s view that “Tragedy, fully explored, becomes comedy,” Campbell McGrath offers a lively discussion of comedy in poetry from the Greeks to the present. McGrath charts a throughline from Aristophanes to contemporary “ironic humanists” such as David Berman and Mark Halliday, for whom irony, he says, is “not so much a poetic strategy as it is a way of attending to our hyperbolic cultural noise.”