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Irish poetry is poetry written by poets from
Ireland
Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...
. It is mainly written in
Irish
Irish may refer to:
Common meanings
* Someone or something of, from, or related to:
** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe
***Éire, Irish language name for the isle
** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
and English, though some is in
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...
and some in
Hiberno-Latin
Hiberno-Latin, also called Hisperic Latin, was a learned style of literary Latin first used and subsequently spread by Irish monks during the period from the sixth century to the tenth century.
Vocabulary and influence
Hiberno-Latin was notab ...
. The complex interplay between the two main traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English and
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...
, has produced a body of work that is both rich in variety and difficult to categorise.
The earliest surviving poems in Irish date back to the 6th century, while the first known poems in English from Ireland date to the 14th century. Although there has always been some cross-fertilization between the two language traditions, an English-language poetry that had absorbed themes and models from Irish did not finally emerge until the 19th century. This culminated in the work of the poets of the
Irish Literary Revival
The Irish Literary Revival (also called the Irish Literary Renaissance, nicknamed the Celtic Twilight) was a flowering of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century. It includes works of poetry, music, art, and literature.
O ...
in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Towards the last quarter of the 20th century, modern Irish poetry tended to a wide range of diversity, from the poets of the Northern school to writers influenced by the
modernist
Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, an ...
tradition and those facing questions posed by an increasingly urban and cosmopolitan society.
Early Irish poetry
Literacy reached Ireland with Christianity in the fifth century. Monasteries were established, which by the seventh century were large, self-governing institutions and centres of scholarship. This was to have a profound effect on Irish-language literature, poetry included.
[Dillon, Myles, & Chadwick, Nora, ''The Celtic Realms''. Cardinal, London, 1973: pp. 219-291.]
The earliest Irish poetry was unrhymed, and has been described as follows: “It is alliterative syllabic verse, lyric in form and heroic in content, in praise of famous men, or in lament for the death of a hero”.
It survived as epic interludes in Irish sagas in the early Modern Period.
The monastic poets borrowed from both native and Latin traditions to create elaborate syllabic verse forms, and used them for religious and nature poetry. The typical combination of end-rhyme, internal rhyme and alliteration came originally from the example of late Latin hymns, as elaborated by Irish monks. The new metres are the vehicle for monastic lyric poems inspired by love of Nature, love of solitude and love of the Divine which have been described as the finest Irish poetry of their age, and which could be extended to cover more personal concerns.
[Dillon, Myles, & Chadwick, Nora, ''The Celtic Realms''. Cardinal, London, 1973: pp. 185-190.] An example is a long poem which is put into the mouth of Marbán the hermit, brother of Guaire, king of Connacht, and of which the following is an excerpt:
The professional secular poets continued to praise and lament famous men, but adopted the new verse forms, which in time would be codified in classical form under the name ''
Dán Díreach
Dán Díreach (; Irish for "direct verse") is a style of poetry developed in Ireland from the 12th century until the destruction of Gaelic society in the mid 17th century. It was a complex form of recitative designed to be chanted to the accompanim ...
''.
Medieval/early modern
Irish bards formed a professional hereditary
caste
Caste is a form of social stratification characterised by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a style of life which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultura ...
of highly trained, learned poets. The bards were steeped in the history and traditions of
clan
A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship
and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, clans may claim descent from founding member or apical ancestor. Clans, in indigenous societies, tend to be endogamous, meaning ...
and country, as well as in the technical requirements of a verse technique that was
syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
and used
assonance
Assonance is a resemblance in the sounds of words/syllables either between their vowels (e.g., ''meat, bean'') or between their consonants (e.g., ''keep, cape''). However, assonance between consonants is generally called ''consonance'' in America ...
,
half rhyme Perfect rhyme—also called full rhyme, exact rhyme, or true rhyme—is a form of rhyme between two words or phrases, satisfying the following conditions:
*The stressed vowel sound in both words must be identical, as well as any subsequent s ...
and
alliteration
Alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of initial consonant sounds of nearby words in a phrase, often used as a literary device. A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliteration is used poetically in various ...
known as
Dán Díreach
Dán Díreach (; Irish for "direct verse") is a style of poetry developed in Ireland from the 12th century until the destruction of Gaelic society in the mid 17th century. It was a complex form of recitative designed to be chanted to the accompanim ...
.
As officials of the court of king or chieftain, they performed a number of official roles. They were
chronicle
A chronicle ( la, chronica, from Greek ''chroniká'', from , ''chrónos'' – "time") is a historical account of events arranged in chronological order, as in a timeline. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and lo ...
rs and
satirists whose job it was to praise their employers and damn those who crossed them. It was believed that a well-aimed bardic satire, ''glam dicin'', could raise boils on the face of its target. However, much of their work would not strike the modern reader as being poetry at all, consisting as it does of extended genealogies and almost journalistic accounts of the deeds of their lords and ancestors.
The
Metrical Dindshenchas
''Dindsenchas'' or ''Dindshenchas'' (modern spellings: ''Dinnseanchas'' or ''Dinnsheanchas'' or ''Dınnṡeanċas''), meaning "lore of places" (the modern Irish word ''dinnseanchas'' means "topography"), is a class of onomastic text in early Irish ...
, or Lore of Places, is probably the major surviving monument of Irish bardic verse. It is a great
onomastic
Onomastics (or, in older texts, onomatology) is the study of the etymology, history, and use of proper names. An ''orthonym'' is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onomastic study.
Onomastics can be helpful in data mining, w ...
anthology of naming legends of significant places in the Irish landscape and comprises about 176 poems in total. The earliest of these date from the 11th century, and were probably originally compiled on a provincial basis. As a national compilation, the Metrical Dindshenchas has come down to us in two different recensions. Knowledge of the real or putative history of local places formed an important part of the education of the elite in ancient Ireland, so the Dindshenchas was probably a kind of textbook in origin.
Verse tales of Fionn and the Fianna, sometimes known as
Ossian
Ossian (; Irish Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic: ''Oisean'') is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as ''Fingal'' (1761) and ''Temora'' (1763), and later combined under t ...
ic poetry, were extremely common in Ireland and Scotland throughout this period. Originally sung in verse and exactly on par with heroic epics from other cultures, they were written down and significantly altered by James Macpherson in the 18th century. Macpherson's treatment of them was said to have ushured in the
Romance
Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to:
Common meanings
* Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings
* Romance languages, ...
tradition as opposed to the epic nature of the sagas. The Fionn poems form one of the three key sagas of Celtic culture: The Ulster saga, Fionn mac Cumhaill saga, and those of the
Arthurian legends
The Matter of Britain is the body of medieval literature and legendary material associated with Great Britain and Brittany and the legendary kings and heroes associated with it, particularly King Arthur. It was one of the three great Western ...
.
British Library Manuscript, Harley 913, is a group of poems written in Ireland in the early 14th century. They are usually called the
Kildare Poems because of their association with that county. Both poems and manuscript have strong
Franciscan
The Franciscans are a group of related Mendicant orders, mendicant Christianity, Christian Catholic religious order, religious orders within the Catholic Church. Founded in 1209 by Italian Catholic friar Francis of Assisi, these orders include t ...
associations and are full of ideas from the wider Western European Christian tradition. They also represent the early stages of the second tradition of Irish poetry, that of poetry in the English language, as they were written in
Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
.
During the
Elizabethan reconquest, two of the most significant English poets of the time saw service in the Irish colonies. Sir
Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh (; – 29 October 1618) was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion ...
had little impact on the course of Irish literature, but the time spent in
Munster
Munster ( gle, an Mhumhain or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, in the south of Ireland. In early Ireland, the Kingdom of Munster was one of the kingdoms of Gaelic Ireland ruled by a "king of over-kings" ( ga, rí ruirech). Following the ...
by
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser (; 1552/1553 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for ''The Faerie Queene'', an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of ...
was to have serious consequences both for his own writings and for the future course of cultural development in Ireland. Spenser's relationship with Ireland was somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, an idealised Munster landscape forms the backdrop for much of the action for his masterpiece, ''
The Faerie Queene
''The Faerie Queene'' is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Books IIII were first published in 1590, then republished in 1596 together with books IVVI. ''The Faerie Queene'' is notable for its form: at over 36,000 lines and over 4,000 sta ...
''. On the other, he condemned Ireland and everything Irish as barbaric in his prose polemic ''
A View of the Present State of Ireland''.
In ''A View'', he describes the Irish bards as being:
Given that the bards depended on aristocratic support to survive, and that the balance of power was shifting towards the new
Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish people () denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the establis ...
landlords, Spenser's condemnation of the Bards' preference for outlawed
Clan Chiefs over the new elite may well have contributed to their demise as a caste.
Gaelic poetry in the 17th century
The
Battle of Kinsale
The siege of Kinsale, or Battle of Kinsale ( ga, Léigear/Cath Chionn tSáile), was the ultimate battle in England's conquest of Gaelic Ireland, commencing in October 1601, near the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and at the climax of t ...
in 1601 saw the defeat of
Aodh Mór Ó Néill
Hugh O'Neill (Irish: ''Aodh Mór Ó Néill''; literally ''Hugh The Great O'Neill''; – 20 July 1616), was an Irish Gaelic lord, Earl of Tyrone (known as the Great Earl) and was later created ''The Ó Néill Mór'', Chief of the Name. O'Nei ...
, despite his alliance with the Spanish, and the ultimate victory in the
Elizabethan conquest of Ireland came with his surrender to crown authority in 1603. In consequence, the system of education and patronage that underpinned the professional bardic schools came under pressure, and the hereditary poets eventually engaged in a spat - the
Contention of the bards
The contention of the bards ( Irish: ''Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh'') was a literary controversy of early 17th century Gaelic Ireland, lasting from 1616 to 1624, probably peaking in 1617. The principal bardic poets of the country wrote polemical v ...
- that marked the end of their ancient influence. During the early 17th century a new Gaelic poetry took root, one that sought inspiration in the margins of a dispossessed Irish-speaking society. The language of this poetry is today called
Early Modern Irish
Early Modern Irish ( ga, Gaeilge Chlasaiceach, , Classical Irish) represented a transition between Middle Irish and Modern Irish. Its literary form, Classical Gaelic, was used in Ireland and Scotland from the 13th to the 18th century.
External ...
. Although some 17th-century poets continued to enjoy a degree of patronage, many, if not most, of them were part-time writers who also worked on the land, as teachers, and anywhere that they could earn their keep. Their poetry also changed, with a move away from the
syllabic verse
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syl ...
of the schools to
accentual metres, reflecting the oral poetry of the bardic period. A good deal of the poetry of this period deals with political and historical themes that reflect the poets' sense of a world lost.
The poets adapted to the new English dominated order in several ways. Some of them continued to find patronage among the Gaelic Irish and
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
aristocracy. Some of the English landowners settled in Ireland after the
Plantations of Ireland
Plantations in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland involved the confiscation of Irish-owned land by the English Crown and the colonisation of this land with settlers from Great Britain. The Crown saw the plantations as a means of controlling, angl ...
also patronised Irish poets, for instance
George Carew and
Roger Boyle. Other members of hereditary bardic families sent their sons to the new
Irish College
Irish Colleges is the collective name used for approximately 34 centres of education for Irish Catholic clergy and lay people opened on continental Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
History
The Colleges were set up to educate Roma ...
s that had been set up in Catholic Europe for the education of Irish Catholics, who were not permitted to found schools or universities at home. Much of the Irish poetry of the 17th century was therefore composed by Catholic clerics and Irish society fell increasingly under
Counter-Reformation
The Counter-Reformation (), also called the Catholic Reformation () or the Catholic Revival, was the period of Catholic resurgence that was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation. It began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) a ...
influences. By mid-century, the subordination of the native Catholic upper classes in Ireland boiled over in the
Irish Rebellion of 1641
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 ( ga, Éirí Amach 1641) was an uprising by Irish Catholics in the Kingdom of Ireland, who wanted an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, greater Irish self-governance, and to partially or fully reverse the plantatio ...
. Many Irish language poets wrote highly politicised poetry in support of the Irish Catholics organised in
Confederate Ireland
Confederate Ireland, also referred to as the Irish Catholic Confederation, was a period of Irish Catholic self-government between 1642 and 1649, during the Eleven Years' War. Formed by Catholic aristocrats, landed gentry, clergy and military ...
. For instance, the cleric poet Pádraigín Haicéad wrote, ''Éirigh mo Dhúiche le Dia'' ("Arise my Country with God") in support of the rebellion, which advised that
Another of Haicéad's poems ''Muscail do mhisneach a Banbha'' ('Gather your courage oh Ireland') in 1647 encouraged the Irish Catholic war effort in the
Irish Confederate Wars
The Irish Confederate Wars, also called the Eleven Years' War (from ga, Cogadh na hAon-déag mBliana), took place in Ireland between 1641 and 1653. It was the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a series of civil wars in the kin ...
. It expressed the opinion that Catholics should not tolerate
Protestantism
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...
in Ireland,
Following the defeat of the Irish Catholics in the
Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland or Cromwellian war in Ireland (1649–1653) was the re-conquest of Ireland by the forces of the English Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Cromwell invaded Ireland wi ...
(1649–53), and the destruction of the old Irish landed classes, many poets wrote mourning the fallen order or lamenting the destruction and repression of the Cromwellian conquest. The anonymous poem ''an Siogai Romanach'' went,
Another poem by Éamonn an Dúna is a strange mixture of Irish, French and English,
After this period, the poets lost most of their patrons and protectors. In the subsequent
Williamite War in Ireland
The Williamite War in Ireland (1688–1691; ga, Cogadh an Dá Rí, "war of the two kings"), was a conflict between Jacobite supporters of deposed monarch James II and Williamite supporters of his successor, William III. It is also called th ...
Catholic
Jacobites
Jacobite means follower of Jacob or James. Jacobite may refer to:
Religion
* Jacobites, followers of Saint Jacob Baradaeus (died 578). Churches in the Jacobite tradition and sometimes called Jacobite include:
** Syriac Orthodox Church, sometime ...
tried to recover their position by supporting James II. Dáibhi Ó Bruadair wrote many poems in praise of the Jacobite war effort and in particular of his hero,
Patrick Sarsfield
Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan, ga, Pádraig Sáirseál, circa 1655 to 21 August 1693, was an Irish soldier, and leading figure in the Jacobite army during the 1689 to 1691 Williamite War in Ireland.
Born into a wealthy Catholic famil ...
. The poets viewed the war as revenge against the Protestant settlers who had come to dominate Ireland, as the following poem extract makes clear,
The Jacobites' defeat in the War, and in particular
James II's ignominious flight after the
Battle of the Boyne
The Battle of the Boyne ( ga, Cath na Bóinne ) was a battle in 1690 between the forces of the deposed King James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland, and those of King William III who, with his wife Queen Mary II (his cousin and ...
, gave rise to the following derisive verse,
The main poets of this period include
Dáibhí Ó Bruadair
Dáibhí Ó Bruadair (1625 – January 1698) was one of the most significant Irish language poets of the 17th century. He lived through a momentous time in Irish history and his work serves as testimony to the death of the old Irish cultural an ...
(1625?–1698),
Piaras Feiritéar
Piaras Feiritéar (; 1600? – 1653), or Pierce Ferriter, was an Irish clan Chief of the Name, Chief, and Irish poetry, poet. Although best known for his many works of Bardic poetry in the Irish language, Feiritéar is also a widely revered folk ...
(1600?–1653) and
Aogán Ó Rathaille
Aodhagán Ó RathailleVariant Irish spellings of his name include ''Aogán'' and ''Ua Rathaille'' or Egan O'Rahilly (c.1670–1726), was an Irish language poet. He is credited with creating the first fully developed Aisling.
Early life
It is tho ...
(1675–1729). Ó Rathaille belongs as much to the 18th as the 17th century and his work, including the introduction of the ''
aisling'' genre, marks something of a transition to a post-
Battle of the Boyne
The Battle of the Boyne ( ga, Cath na Bóinne ) was a battle in 1690 between the forces of the deposed King James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland, and those of King William III who, with his wife Queen Mary II (his cousin and ...
Ireland.
Female poets
The first part of the seventeenth century saw three notable female poets (all born in the previous century).
Brighid Nic Gearailt
Brighid Nic Gearailt (c.1589–between 1661 and 1682) was an Irish poet and noblewoman.
Biography
Brighid Nic Gearailt, also known as Brighid Chill Dara (''Brighid of Kildare''), was the daughter of the 12th Earl of Kildare Henry FitzGerald a ...
(Brighid Chill Dara) (c. 1589-1682) was the wife of Rudhraighe Ó Domhnaill, one of the
O'Donnell dynasty
The O'Donnell dynasty ( ga, Ó Dónaill or ''Ó Domhnaill,'' ''Ó Doṁnaill'' ''or Ua Domaill;'' meaning "descendant of Dónal") were the dominant Irish clan of the kingdom of Tyrconnell, Ulster, in medieval Ireland. Naming conventions
Or ...
who left Ireland as part of the
Flight of the Earls
The Flight of the Earls ( ir, Imeacht na nIarlaí)In Irish, the neutral term ''Imeacht'' is usually used i.e. the ''Departure of the Earls''. The term 'Flight' is translated 'Teitheadh na nIarlaí' and is sometimes seen. took place in Sep ...
. Her sole surviving work is ''A Mhacaoimh Dhealbhas an Dán'', a witty and elegant reply in classical metre to a verse letter sent to her on behalf of Cú Chonnacht Óg Mág Uidhir by
Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa, a notable poet of the time.
[Bourke, Angela (ed.). ''The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing'', Volume 4. NYU Press, 2002: pp. 395-405.]
Fionnghuala Ní Bhriain (Inghean Dhomhnaill Uí Bhriain) (c. 1557-1657), a member of the
O'Brien dynasty
The O'Brien dynasty ( ga, label=Classical Irish, Ua Briain; ga, label=Modern Irish, Ó Briain ; genitive ''Uí Bhriain'' ) is a nobility, noble house of Munster, founded in the 10th century by Brian Boru of the Dál gCais (Dalcassians). After ...
, who had been
Chiefs of the Name
The Chief of the Name, or in older English usage Captain of his Nation, is the recognised head of a family or clan (''fine'' in Irish and Scottish Gaelic). The term has sometimes been used as a title in Ireland and Scotland.
In Ireland
In Eliz ...
and
Earls of Thomond, wrote a lament (her only surviving poem) for her husband, Uaithne Ó Lochlainn,
Chief of the Name
The Chief of the Name, or in older English usage Captain of his Nation, is the recognised head of a family or clan (''fine'' in Irish and Scottish Gaelic). The term has sometimes been used as a title in Ireland and Scotland.
In Ireland
In Eliza ...
and Lord of
Burren in
County Clare
County Clare ( ga, Contae an Chláir) is a county in Ireland, in the Southern Region and the province of Munster, bordered on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Clare County Council is the local authority. The county had a population of 118,817 ...
.
Caitilín Dubh (fl. 1624), whose patrons were also the O’Brien dynasty, wrote for them a series of laments in the new accentual metres.
The 18th century
The eighteenth century saw the flourishing of highly literate, technically adept poets in the Irish language. This period saw the triumph of popular accentual metres, as opposed to the elaborate
syllabic metres which had prevailed until then. These accentual metres, however, still featured a complex system of internal rhymes, and it is likely that they had been in use for some centuries previously. The poets themselves seldom had patrons to support them and supported themselves with such occupations as farming or teaching.
A salient figure at this time is
Aogán Ó Rathaille
Aodhagán Ó RathailleVariant Irish spellings of his name include ''Aogán'' and ''Ua Rathaille'' or Egan O'Rahilly (c.1670–1726), was an Irish language poet. He is credited with creating the first fully developed Aisling.
Early life
It is tho ...
(1670-1726), a bridge between the old world in which he was educated and the new one in which the professional poet had no place. He wrote in the new metres but preserved the attitudes of a previous age.
[Williams, J.E. Caerwyn, & Ní Mhuiríosa, Máirín, ''Traidisiún Liteartha na nGael''. An Clóchomhar Tta, 1979: pp. 273-304]
Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...
was a centre of Irish-language poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century, due to the presence there of
Seán Ó Neachtain, his son
Tadhg
Tadhg (, ), (pronunciations given for the name ''Tadgh'' separately from those for the slang/pejorative ''Teague''.) commonly misspelled "Taig" or "Teague", is an Irish and Scottish Gaelic masculine name that was very common when the Goidelic l ...
and the circle of writers they gathered around them. Seán wrote both in Irish and English, but Irish was his primary language and he wrote poems in it of many kinds –
Fenian poems, love poems, drinking songs, satires and religious poems.
In 1728 Tadhg wrote a poem in which there is a description of the members of the Ó Neachtain literary circle: twenty six people are mentioned, mostly from
Leinster
Leinster ( ; ga, Laighin or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, situated in the southeast and east of Ireland. The province comprises the ancient Kingdoms of Meath, Leinster and Osraige. Following the 12th-century Norman invasion of Ir ...
but with others from every province.
Outside Dublin, it was in the province of
Munster
Munster ( gle, an Mhumhain or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, in the south of Ireland. In early Ireland, the Kingdom of Munster was one of the kingdoms of Gaelic Ireland ruled by a "king of over-kings" ( ga, rí ruirech). Following the ...
that the status and craft of Irish-language poetry were best maintained. Sometimes a local
clan chief
The Scottish Gaelic word means children. In early times, and possibly even today, Scottish clan members believed themselves to descend from a common ancestor, the founder of the clan, after whom the clan is named. The clan chief (''ceannard c ...
or
Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish people () denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the establis ...
landlord acted as their patron, but in other places responsibility lay with ''cúirteanna filíochta'' – “courts of poetry” or local gatherings for the purpose of contests between poets, similar to the
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
Eisteddfod
In Welsh culture, an ''eisteddfod'' is an institution and festival with several ranked competitions, including in poetry and music.
The term ''eisteddfod'', which is formed from the Welsh morphemes: , meaning 'sit', and , meaning 'be', means, a ...
. These could be seen as offshoots of the
bardic academies which trained professional poets down to the seventeenth century.
The best-known members of this network of poets included
Seán Ó Tuama (c. 1706-1775),
Aindrias Mac Craith (died c. 1795),
Liam Ruadh Mac Coitir and
Seamus McMurphy
Seamus McMurphy (Irish: ) was an Irish poet and rapparee, 1720-1750.
Early life
He was born at Carnally, Creggan parish, near Crossmaglen, in County Armagh, modern-day Northern Ireland, about 1720. His father's name is unknown although his moth ...
(
Seán na Ráithíneach). Their poetry illuminates daily life and personalities of the period – landlord and tenant, the priest and the teacher, the poet and the craftsman, the marketplace, marriage and burial, music and folklore.
The craft of poetry was also cultivated in south
Ulster
Ulster (; ga, Ulaidh or ''Cúige Uladh'' ; sco, label= Ulster Scots, Ulstèr or ''Ulster'') is one of the four traditional Irish provinces. It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland (a part of the United King ...
, where poets would similarly come together to compete for primacy. They included a handful of women, including Máire (or Mailligh) Nic a Liondain and
Peig Ní Chuarta.
Among the most prominent names in
Munster
Munster ( gle, an Mhumhain or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, in the south of Ireland. In early Ireland, the Kingdom of Munster was one of the kingdoms of Gaelic Ireland ruled by a "king of over-kings" ( ga, rí ruirech). Following the ...
is
Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin
Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (174829 June 1784), anglicized as Owen Roe O'Sullivan ("Red Owen"), was an Irish poet. He is known as one of the last great Gaelic poets. A recent anthology of Irish-language poetry speaks of his "extremely musical" p ...
, schoolmaster, sailor, soldier, and a
rake by reputation. His verse was highly finished and intensely musical, and he was best known for his
vision poems. This genre, and the Munster tradition of the ''cúirteanna filíochta'' – “courts of poetry”, were parodied by
Brian Merriman
Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre (c. 1747 – 27 July 1805) was an Irish language bard, farmer, and hedge school teacher from rural County Clare. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Dream vision poem ( ...
in his lengthy comic poem ''
Cúirt An Mheán Oíche''. In the poem, the women of Ireland sue the men for refusing to marry and father children, before the judgement seat of
Aoibheall, a member of the
Tuatha De Danaan who, since
Saint Patrick
Saint Patrick ( la, Patricius; ga, Pádraig ; cy, Padrig) was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Known as the "Apostle of Ireland", he is the primary patron saint of Ireland, the other patron saints be ...
, has been demoted from goddess to being the local fairy queen.
Alongside the work of the literate poets there flourished a traditional
oral literature
Oral literature, orature or folk literature is a genre of literature that is spoken or sung as opposed to that which is written, though much oral literature has been transcribed. There is no standard definition, as anthropologists have used vary ...
. One of its products was the ''caoineadh'' or traditional lament, a genre dominated by women and typically characterised by improvisation and passion. Countless numbers were composed; one of the few to have survived is ''
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire or the ''Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire'' is an Irish keen composed in the main by his wife Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a member of the Gaelic gentry of County Kerry in the 18th century. It has been described as the gr ...
''. This was mostly composed by a noblewoman from the Roman Catholic
O'Connell family
The O'Connell family, principally of Derrynane, are a Gaelic Irish noble family of County Kerry in Munster. The principal seat of the senior line of the family was Derrynane House, now an Irish National Monument.
Ancestry and extraction
Accordin ...
of
Derrynane House
Derrynane House () was the home of Irish politician and statesman, Daniel O'Connell. It is now an National Monument and part of a 320-acre (1.3 km²) national historic park. The house is located on the Iveragh peninsula on the Ring of Kerry ...
, who continued to rule over their tenants in
County Kerry
County Kerry ( gle, Contae Chiarraí) is a county in Ireland. It is located in the South-West Region and forms part of the province of Munster. It is named after the Ciarraige who lived in part of the present county. The population of the co ...
like the
Chiefs of an
Irish clan
Irish clans are traditional kinship groups sharing a common surname and heritage and existing in a lineage-based society, originating prior to the 17th century. A clan (or ''fine'' in Irish) included the chief and his patrilineal relatives; howe ...
. The poetess was
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill (also known as Eileen O'Connell, ) was a member of the Irish gentry and a poet. She was the main composer of ''Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire'', a traditional lament in Irish described (in its written form) as the greate ...
(an aunt of
Daniel O’Connell
Daniel O'Connell (I) ( ga, Dónall Ó Conaill; 6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847), hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilizat ...
), after her husband,
Art O'Leary, was
outlawed
An outlaw, in its original and legal meaning, is a person declared as outside the protection of the law. In pre-modern societies, all legal protection was withdrawn from the criminal, so that anyone was legally empowered to persecute or kill them ...
for refusing to sell his pedigreed
stallion
A stallion is a male horse that has not been gelded (castrated).
Stallions follow the conformation and phenotype of their breed, but within that standard, the presence of hormones such as testosterone may give stallions a thicker, "cresty" nec ...
to a local
Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish people () denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the establis ...
judge, hunted down, and shot dead by a
posse
Posse is a shortened form of posse comitatus, a group of people summoned to assist law enforcement. The term is also used colloquially to mean a group of friends or associates.
Posse may also refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''Posse'' (1975 ...
of
redcoats acting under the judge's personal command. It is considered to be an outstanding example of the type.
Swift and Goldsmith
In
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poe ...
(1667–1745), Irish literature in English found its first notable writer. Although best known for prose works like ''
Gulliver's Travels
''Gulliver's Travels'', or ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'' is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan ...
'' and ''
A Tale of a Tub
''A Tale of a Tub'' was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, composed between 1694 and 1697 and published in 1704. It is arguably his most difficult satire, and perhaps his best. The ''Tale'' is a prose parody divided into sections o ...
'', Swift was a poet of considerable talent. Technically close to his English contemporaries
Pope
The pope ( la, papa, from el, πάππας, translit=pappas, 'father'), also known as supreme pontiff ( or ), Roman pontiff () or sovereign pontiff, is the bishop of Rome (or historically the patriarch of Rome), head of the worldwide Cathol ...
and
Dryden
''
John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate.
He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the peri ...
, Swift's poetry evinces the same tone of savage satire, and horror of the human body and its functions that characterises much of his prose. Swift also published translations of poems from the Irish.
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright, dramatist and poet, who is best known for his novel ''The Vicar of Wakefield'' (1766), his pastoral poem ''The Deserted Village'' (1770), and his pl ...
(1730?–1774) started his literary career as a
hack writer
''Hack writer'' is a pejorative term for a writer who is paid to write low-quality, rushed articles or books "to order", often with a short deadline. In fiction writing, a hack writer is paid to quickly write sensational, "pulp" fiction such as " ...
in London, writing on any subject that would pay enough to keep his creditors at bay. He came to belong to the circle of
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...
,
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (; 12 January NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS">New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS/nowiki>_1729_–_9_July_1797)_was_an_ NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style"> ...
and Sir
Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depend ...
. His reputation depends mainly on a novel, ''
The Vicar of Wakefield
''The Vicar of Wakefield'', subtitled ''A Tale, Supposed to be written by Himself'', is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774). It was written from 1761 to 1762 and published in 1766. It was one of the most popular and wid ...
'', a play, ''
She Stoops to Conquer
''She Stoops to Conquer'' is a comedy by Oliver Goldsmith, first performed in London in 1773. The play is a favourite for study by English literature and theatre classes in the English-speaking world. It is one of the few plays from the 18th ...
'', and two long poems, ''
The Traveller'' and ''The Deserted Village''. The last of these may be the first and best poem by an Irish poet in the English
pastoral
A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music (pastorale) that depicts ...
tradition. It has been variously interpreted as a lament for the death of Irish village life under British rule and a protest at the effects of agricultural reform on the English rural landscape.
Weaver Poets and vernacular writing
Local cultural differences in areas such as north and east Ulster produced minor, and often only loosely associated, vernacular movements that do not readily fit into the categories of Irish or English literature. For example, the Ulster
Weaver Poets
Weaver Poets, Rhyming Weaver Poets and Ulster Weaver Poets were a collective group of poets belonging to an artistic movement who were both influenced by and contemporaries of Robert Burns and the Romantic movement.
Origins
In the late eighteenth ...
wrote in an
Ulster Scots dialect.
Working-class or popular in nature, remaining examples are mostly limited to publication in self-published privately subscribed limited print runs, newspapers, journals of the time.
The promotion of standard English in education gradually reduced the visibility and influence of such movements. In addition, the polarising effects of the politics of the use of English and Irish language traditions also limited academic and public interest until the studies of
John Hewitt from the 1950s onwards. Further impetus was given by more generalised exploration of non-"Irish" and non-"English" cultural identities in the latter decades of the 20th century.
The 19th century
During the course of the 19th century, political and economic factors resulted in the decline of the Irish language and the concurrent rise of English as the main language of Ireland. This fact is reflected in the poetry of the period.
The folk tradition of poetry in Irish (usually expressed in song) retained its vigour in the 19th century, often combing assonance and alliteration to considerable effect. Songs of all sorts were common in Irish-speaking areas before Ireland's
Great Famine of the 1840s - love songs such as ''Dónall Óg'' and ''Úna Bhán'', songs about the ancient heroes of the
Fianna
''Fianna'' ( , ; singular ''Fian''; gd, Fèinne ) were small warrior-hunter bands in Gaelic Ireland during the Iron Age and early Middle Ages. A ''fian'' was made up of freeborn young males, often aristocrats, "who had left fosterage but had n ...
, working songs, religious songs, laments, humorous and satirical songs, lullabies and children's songs. Songs of the supernatural (changelings, revenants, spirits) were also popular. Patriotic songs were rare.
[Gearoid Ó hAllmhuráin, “The Great Famine: A Catalyst in Irish Traditional Music Making” in Gribben, Arthur (ed.). ''The Great Famine and the Diaspora''. University of Massachusetts Press, 1999: pp. 104-127. . https://drgearoid.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-great-famine-a-catalyst-in-irish-traditional-music-making.pdf] The poetic quality of the love songs in particular has been described as unusually high:
The Great Famine, with its material and sociological consequences, had a considerable effect on Irish music. The number of Irish speakers declined because of death or emigration. There was a radical shift in land use, with tillage giving way to pasture, which was less labour-intensive. Songs to do with ploughing, reaping and sowing could no longer be sustained. There were, however, contemporary songs in Irish about the Famine itself, such as ''An Drochshaol'' (from
West Cork
West Cork ( ga, Iarthar Chorcaí) is a tourist region and municipal district in County Cork, Ireland. As a municipal district, West Cork falls within the administrative area of Cork County Council, and includes the towns of Bantry, Castletownbe ...
), ''Amhrán na bPrátaí Dubha'' (from
County Waterford
County Waterford ( ga, Contae Phort Láirge) is a Counties of Ireland, county in Republic of Ireland, Ireland. It is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Munster and is part of the South-East Region, Ireland, South-East Region. It is named ...
), and ''Johnny Seoighe'' (from
Conamara
Connemara (; )( ga, Conamara ) is a region on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast of western County Galway, in the west of Ireland. The area has a strong association with traditional Irish culture and contains much of the Connacht Irish-speak ...
).
There was already an Irish tradition of songs in English. This included English songs, Lowland Scottish songs and ballads which were printed in England and sold in Ireland, such as ''Lord Baker'', ''Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship'' and ''Barbara Allen'', together with political ballads of Irish origin. After the Famine and with the loss of Irish speakers, such songs became dominant.
The interactive relationship between Irish and English is evident in the songs composed in English by Irish-speaking
hedge school
Hedge schools ( Irish names include '' scoil chois claí'', ''scoil ghairid'' and ''scoil scairte'') were small informal secret and illegal schools, particularly in 18th- and 19th-century Ireland, designed to secretly provide the rudiments of ...
masters from the late 18th century on. These songs (some of which were parodies) often had a Latinate vocabulary. It has been said that they had a style "which, while capable of descending to the ridiculous, could also rise to the sublime”.
[Julie Henigan, “For Want of Education: The origins of the Hedge Schoolmaster songs,” ''Ulster Folklife'', No 40 (1994): pp 27-38: https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/hedg_sch.htm] These songs and others often reproduced the metre and internal rhymes of songs in Irish:
Antoine Ó Raifteiri
Antoine Ó Raifteirí (also Antoine Ó Reachtabhra, ''Anthony Raftery'') (30 March 1779 – 25 December 1835) was an Irish language poet who is often called the last of the wandering bards.
Biography
Antoine Ó Raifteirí was born in Killedan, n ...
(Anthony Raftery) (1784–1835) is a recognized Irish-language folk poet of the pre-Famine period. But the tradition of literate composition persisted. The Kerry poet Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1785-1848) was a schoolmaster and dancing master; the Cork poet Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin (1766-1837) was a well-known copier of manuscripts.
Paradoxically, as soon as English became the dominant language of Irish poetry, the poets began to mine the Irish-language heritage as a source of themes and techniques. J. J. Callanan (1795–1829) was born in Cork and died at a young age in Lisbon. Unlike many other more visibly nationalist poets who would follow later, he knew Irish well, and several of his poems are loose versions of Irish originals. Although extremely close to Irish materials, he was also profoundly influenced by Byron and his peers; possibly his finest poem, the title work of ''The Recluse of Inchidony and Other Poems'' (1829), was written in Spenserian stanzas that were clearly inspired by ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage''.
The best-known Irish poet to draw upon Irish themes in the first half of the 19th century was probably
Thomas Moore
Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his ''Irish Melodies''. Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish ...
(1779–1852), although he had no knowledge of, and little respect for, the Irish language. He attended Trinity College Dublin at the same time as the revolutionary
Robert Emmet
Robert Emmet (4 March 177820 September 1803) was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protes ...
, who was executed in 1803. Moore's most enduring work, ''Irish Melodies'', was popular with English readers. They contain stereotyped images but helped in the development of a distinctive English-language poetic tradition in Ireland.
In 1842,
Charles Gavan Duffy
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, KCMG, PC (12 April 1816 – 9 February 1903), was an Irish poet and journalist (editor of ''The Nation''), Young Irelander and tenant-rights activist. After emigrating to Australia in 1856 he entered the politics of ...
(1816–1903),
Thomas Davis, (1814–1845), and
John Blake Dillon
John Blake Dillon (5 May 1814 – 15 September 1866) was an Irish writer and politician who was one of the founding members of the Young Ireland movement.
John Blake Dillon was born in the town of Ballaghaderreen, on the border of counties May ...
(1816–1866) founded ''
The Nation
''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper tha ...
'' to agitate for reform of British rule. The group of politicians and writers associated with ''The Nation'' came to be known as the
Young Irelanders
Young Ireland ( ga, Éire Óg, ) was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all-Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform. Grouped around the Dublin weekly ''The Nation'', it took issue with the compromise ...
. The magazine published verse, including work by Duffy and Davis, whose ''A Nation Once Again'' is still popular among Irish Nationalists. However, the most significant poet associated with ''The Nation'' was undoubtedly
James Clarence Mangan
James Clarence Mangan, born James Mangan ( ga, Séamus Ó Mangáin; 1 May 1803, Dublin – 20 June 1849), was an Irish poet.
He freely translated works from German, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Irish, with his translations of Goethe gaining sp ...
(1803–1849). Mangan was a true ''
poète maudit
A ''poète maudit'' (, "accursed poet") is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death, are typical elements of the bio ...
'', who threw himself into the role of bard, and even included translations of bardic poems in his publications.
Another poet who supported the Young Irelanders, although not directly connected with them, was
Samuel Ferguson
Sir Samuel Ferguson (10 March 1810 – 9 August 1886) was an Irish poet, barrister, antiquarian, artist and public servant. He was an acclaimed 19th-century Irish poet, and his interest in Irish mythology and early Irish history can be seen ...
(1810–1886). Ferguson once wrote that his ambition was "to raise the native elements of Irish history to a dignified level." To this end, he wrote many verse retellings of the Old Irish sagas. He also wrote a moving elegy to Thomas Davis. Ferguson, who believed that Ireland's political fate ultimately lay within the Union, brought a new scholarly exactitude to the study and translation of Irish texts.
William Allingham
William Allingham (19 March 1824 – 18 November 1889) was an Irish poet, diarist and editor. He wrote several volumes of lyric verse, and his poem "The Faeries" was much anthologised. But he is better known for his posthumously published ''Dia ...
(1824–1889) was another important Unionist figure in Irish poetry. Born and bred in
Ballyshannon
Ballyshannon () is a town in County Donegal, Ireland. It is located at the southern end of the county where the N3 from Dublin ends and the N15 crosses the River Erne. Incorporated in 1613, it is one of the oldest towns in Ireland.
Location
B ...
,
Donegal Donegal may refer to:
County Donegal, Ireland
* County Donegal, a county in the Republic of Ireland, part of the province of Ulster
* Donegal (town), a town in County Donegal in Ulster, Ireland
* Donegal Bay, an inlet in the northwest of Ireland b ...
, he spent most of his working life in England and was associated with the
Pre-Raphaelite
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James ...
movement, and a close friend of Tennyson. His ''Day and Night Songs'' was illustrated by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhoo ...
and
John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, ( , ; 8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest ...
. His most important work is the long poem, ''Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland'' (1864), a realist narrative which wittily and movingly deals with the land agitation in Ireland during the period. He was also known for his work as a collector of folk ballads in both Ireland and England.
Ferguson's research opened the way for many of the achievements of the Celtic Revival, especially those of
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
(1865–1939) and
Douglas Hyde
Douglas Ross Hyde ( ga, Dubhghlas de hÍde; 17 January 1860 – 12 July 1949), known as (), was an Irish academic, linguist, scholar of the Irish language, politician and diplomat who served as the first President of Ireland from June 1938 t ...
(1860–1949), but this narrative of Irish poetry which leads to the Revival as culmination can also be deceptive and occlude important poetry, such as the work of
James Henry James Henry may refer to:
In government and military
*James Henry (Continental Congress) (1731–1804), American lawyer, Continental Congressman for Virginia
*James Buchanan Henry (1833–1915), lawyer, writer, secretary to the President, nephew an ...
(1798–1876), medical doctor, Virgil scholar and poet. His large body of work was completely overlooked until Christopher Ricks included him in two anthologies, and eventually edited a selection of his poetry.
The Celtic revival
Probably the most significant poetic movement of the second half of the 19th century was French
Symbolism
Symbolism or symbolist may refer to:
Arts
* Symbolism (arts), a 19th-century movement rejecting Realism
** Symbolist movement in Romania, symbolist literature and visual arts in Romania during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
** Russian sy ...
. This movement inevitably influenced Irish writers, not least
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...
(1845–1900). Although Wilde is best known for his plays, fiction, and ''
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
''The Ballad of Reading Gaol'' is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol () on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other m ...
'', he also wrote poetry in a symbolist vein and was the first Irish writer to experiment with
prose poetry
Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects.
Characteristics
Prose poetry is written as prose, without the line breaks associ ...
. However, the overtly cosmopolitan Wilde was not to have much influence on the future course of Irish writing. W. B. Yeats was much more influential in the long run. Yeats, too, was influenced by his French contemporaries but consciously focused on an identifiably Irish content.
As such, he was partly responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the
Celtic Revival
The Celtic Revival (also referred to as the Celtic Twilight) is a variety of movements and trends in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries that see a renewed interest in aspects of Celtic culture. Artists and writers drew on the traditions of Gael ...
. He won the
Nobel Prize in Literature
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, caption =
, awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature
, presenter = Swedish Academy
, holder = Annie Ernaux (2022)
, location = Stockholm, Sweden
, year = 1901
, ...
in 1923.
Apart from Yeats, much of the impetus for the Celtic Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was
Douglas Hyde
Douglas Ross Hyde ( ga, Dubhghlas de hÍde; 17 January 1860 – 12 July 1949), known as (), was an Irish academic, linguist, scholar of the Irish language, politician and diplomat who served as the first President of Ireland from June 1938 t ...
, later the first
President of Ireland
The president of Ireland ( ga, Uachtarán na hÉireann) is the head of state of Republic of Ireland, Ireland and the supreme commander of the Defence Forces (Ireland), Irish Defence Forces.
The president holds office for seven years, and can ...
, whose ''
Love Songs of Connacht'' was widely admired.
The 20th century
Yeats and modernism
In the 1910s, Yeats became acquainted with the work of
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
, and worked closely with
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
, who served as his personal secretary for a time. Through Pound, Yeats also became familiar with the work of a range of prominent
modernist
Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, an ...
poets. From his 1916 book ''
Responsibilities and Other Poems
''Responsibilities and Other Poems'' is a work written by William Butler Yeats.
Publication history
''Responsibilities and a Play'' was printed and published by Yeats's sister, Elizabeth Yeats, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, at the Cuala Press in 1914. ...
'' onwards his work, while not entirely meriting the label modernist, became much more hard-edged than it had been.
Modernism, with its emphasis on technical and intellectual innovation, was to influence early 20th-century Irish poets writing both in English and Irish. Among them were those associated with the
Easter Rising
The Easter Rising ( ga, Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the a ...
of 1916. Three of the Republican leadership,
Pádraig Pearse
Patrick Henry Pearse (also known as Pádraig or Pádraic Pearse; ga, Pádraig Anraí Mac Piarais; 10 November 1879 – 3 May 1916) was an Irish teacher, barrister, poet, writer, nationalist, republican political activist and revolutionary who w ...
(1879–1916) (who wrote in Irish),
Joseph Mary Plunkett
Joseph Mary Plunkett (Irish: ''Seosamh Máire Pluincéid''; 21 November 1887 – 4 May 1916) was an Irish nationalist, republican, poet, journalist, revolutionary and a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. Joseph Mary Plunkett married Grace Giffo ...
(1879–1916) and
Thomas MacDonagh
Thomas Stanislaus MacDonagh ( ga, Tomás Anéislis Mac Donnchadha; 1 February 1878 – 3 May 1916) was an Irish political activist, poet, playwright, educationalist and revolutionary leader. He was one of the seven leaders of the Easter Rising o ...
(1878–1916), were noted poets. Much of their verse is
Catholic
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
and
Nationalist
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...
ic in outlook, but their work is of considerable historical interest.
Individual from these groups is the
Boyne Valley
The River Boyne ( ga, An Bhóinn or ''Abhainn na Bóinne'') is a river in Leinster, Ireland, the course of which is about long. It rises at Trinity Well, Newberry Hall, near Carbury, County Kildare, and flows towards the Northeast through C ...
"peasant poet"
Francis Ledwidge
Francis Edward Ledwidge (19 August 188731 July 1917) was a 20th-century Irish poet. From Slane, County Meath, and sometimes known as the "poet of the blackbirds", he was later also known as a First World War war poet. He befriended the establish ...
, who was pressured by the
Irish Volunteers
The Irish Volunteers ( ga, Óglaigh na hÉireann), sometimes called the Irish Volunteer Force or Irish Volunteer Army, was a military organisation established in 1913 by Irish nationalists and republicans. It was ostensibly formed in respons ...
into enlisting in the
British Army
The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of the British Armed Forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. , the British Army comprises 79,380 regular full-time personnel, 4,090 Gurk ...
during
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. After years of fighting as he believed for the rights of small nations like his own, Ledwidge was "blown to bits" by a German
artillery shell
A shell, in a military context, is a projectile whose payload contains an explosive, incendiary, or other chemical filling. Originally it was called a bombshell, but "shell" has come to be unambiguous in a military context. Modern usage ...
during the
Battle of Passchendaele
The Third Battle of Ypres (german: link=no, Dritte Flandernschlacht; french: link=no, Troisième Bataille des Flandres; nl, Derde Slag om Ieper), also known as the Battle of Passchendaele (), was a campaign of the First World War, fought by t ...
in 1917.
However, it was to be Yeats' earlier Celtic mode that was to be most influential. Amongst the most prominent followers of the early Yeats were
Pádraic Colum
Padraic Colum (8 December 1881 – 11 January 1972) was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer, playwright, children's author and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival.
Early life
Col ...
(1881–1972),
F. R. Higgins (1896–1941), and
Austin Clarke (1896–1974). In the 1950s, Clarke, returning to poetry after a long absence, turned to a much more personal style and wrote many satires on Irish society and religious practices. Irish poetic Modernism took its lead not from Yeats but from Joyce. The 1930s saw the emergence of a generation of writers who engaged in experimental writing as a matter of course. The best-known of these is
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...
(1906–1989), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Beckett's poetry, while not inconsiderable, is not what he is best known for. The most significant of the second generation of Modernist Irish poets who first published in the 1920s and 1930s include
Brian Coffey
Brian Coffey (8 June 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an Irish poet and publisher. His work was informed by his Catholicism, his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to French surrealism. He was close to an intellectual Europea ...
(1905–1995),
Denis Devlin
Denis Devlin (15 April 1908 – 21 August 1959) was, along with Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a career diplomat.
Early life and ...
(1908–1959),
Thomas MacGreevy
Thomas MacGreevy (born Thomas McGreevy; 26 October 1893 – 16 March 1967) was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the f ...
(1893–1967),
Blanaid Salkeld
Blánaid Salkeld (born Florence Ffrench Mullen; 1880 – 1959) was an Irish poet, dramatist, actor, and publisher, whose well-known literary salon was attended by, among others, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien.
Early life and family
Salkeld ...
(1880–1959), and
Mary Devenport O'Neill
Mary Devenport O'Neill (3 August 1879 – 1967) was an Irish poet and dramatist and a friend and colleague of W. B. Yeats, George Russell, and Austin Clarke.
Early life and education
Mary Devenport O'Neill was born Mary Devenport on 3 August ...
(1879–1967). Coffey's two late long poems ''Advent'' (1975) and ''Death of Hektor'' (1982) are perhaps his most important works; the latter deals with the theme of nuclear apocalypse through motifs from Greek mythology.
It has been remarked that the work of Beckett, Devlin and MacGreevy displays the prime characteristics of the avant-garde: the problem of a disintegrating subjectivity; a lack of unity between the self and the society; and self-conscious literary pastiche.
[Francis Hutton-Williams, “Against Irish Modernism: Towards an Analysis of Experimental Irish Poetry,” ''Irish University Review'' 46.1 (2016): 20–37: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/iur.2016.0198]
It has been said that the notion of an “Irish modernism” is challenged by the number of Irish writers who did not fully engage with modernist experiments, an apathy noted by Irish, continental and Anglo-American critics. There were still key experimental writers in Ireland during the 1930s (
Kate O’Brien,
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen CBE (; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.
Life
E ...
and others) whose work was marked by aesthetic self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness, but it could also be argued that much Irish writing was part of an international reaction against modernism.
While Yeats and his followers wrote about an essentially aristocratic Gaelic Ireland, the reality was that the actual Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s was a society of small farmers and shopkeepers. From this environment emerged poets who rebelled against the example of Yeats, but who were not Modernist by inclination.
Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel '' Tarry Flynn'', and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for his accounts of Irish life t ...
(1904–1967), who came from a small farm, wrote about the narrowness and frustrations of rural life.
John Hewitt (1907–1987), whom many consider to be the founding father of poetry in
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...
also came from a rural background but lived in Belfast and was amongst the first Irish poets to write of the sense of alienation that many at this time felt from both their original rural and new urban homes.
Louis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely a ...
(1907–1963), another poet from Northern Ireland, was associated with the left-wing politics of
Michael Roberts's anthology ''
New Signatures'' but was much less political a poet than
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
or
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the ...
, for example. MacNeice's poetry was informed by his immediate interests and surroundings and is more social than political.
In the Republic of Ireland, a post-modernist generation of poets and writers emerged from the late 1950s onwards. Prominent among these writers were the poets Antony Cronin, Pearse Hutchinson, John Jordan,
Thomas Kinsella
Thomas Kinsella (4 May 192822 December 2021) was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s ...
and John Montague, most of whom were based in Dublin in the 1960s and 1970s. In Dublin a number of new literary magazines were founded in the 1960s: ''
Poetry Ireland Poetry Ireland ( ga, Éigse Éireann) is an organisation for poets and poetry, in both Irish and English, in the island of Ireland. It is a private nonprofit organisation that receives support from The Arts Council of Ireland and The Arts Council of ...
'', ''Arena'', ''The Lace Curtain'', and in the 1970s, ''Cyphers''.
The Northern School
With large Protestant minority and enduring political links to
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
, some believe that the culture of Northern Ireland differs form that on the rest of the island and this has had an effect on its literature.
In addition to John Hewitt, mentioned above, other important poets from Northern Ireland include
Robert Greacen
Robert Greacen (1920–2008) was an Irish poet and member of Aosdána. Born in Derry, Ireland, on 24 October 1920, he was educated at Methodist College Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. He died on 13 April 2008 in Dublin, Ireland.
Greacen's ...
(1920–2008) who, with
Valentin Iremonger
Valentin Iremonger (14 February 1918 – 22 May 1991) was an Irish diplomat and poet.
He was born on Valentine's Day in Sandymount, Dublin and joined the diplomatic service. He served as Irish Ambassador to Sweden, Norway, Finland, India, Luxem ...
, edited an important anthology, ''Contemporary Irish Poetry'' in 1949. Greacen was born in Derry, lived in Belfast in his youth and then in London during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He won the Irish Times Prize for Poetry in 1995 for his ''Collected Poems'', after he returned to live in Dublin when he was elected a member of ''Aosdana''. Other poets of note from this time include
Roy McFadden
Roy McFadden (14 November 1921 – 15 September 1999) was a Northern Irish poet, editor, and lawyer.
McFadden's first poem was published before he was thirteen. His earliest influences were from magazines and journals that his Father brought home, ...
(1921–1999), a friend for many years of Greacen.
Padraic Fiacc
Padraic Fiacc (born Patrick Joseph O'Connor; 15 April 1924 – 21 January 2019) was an Irish poet, and member of Aosdána, the exclusive Irish Arts Academy.
Biographical information
Born Patrick Joseph O'Connor in Belfast to Bernard and Annie ( ...
(born 1924), was born in Belfast, but lived in America during his youth. In the 1960s, and coincident with the rise of
the Troubles
The Troubles ( ga, Na Trioblóidí) were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it is sometimes described as an "i ...
in the province, a number of
Ulster
Ulster (; ga, Ulaidh or ''Cúige Uladh'' ; sco, label= Ulster Scots, Ulstèr or ''Ulster'') is one of the four traditional Irish provinces. It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland (a part of the United King ...
poets began to receive critical and public notice. Prominent amongst these were
John Montague (born 1929),
Michael Longley
Michael Longley, (born 27 July 1939, Belfast, Northern Ireland), is an Anglo-Irish poet.
Life and career
One of twin boys, Michael Longley was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to English parents, Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast A ...
(born 1939),
Derek Mahon
Derek Mahon (23 November 1941 – 1 October 2020) was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, lite ...
(born 1941),
Séamus Heaney (1939-2013) and
Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon (born 20 June 1951) is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. At Princeton University he is currently both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Pr ...
(born 1951).
Heaney was probably the best-known of these poets. He won the
Nobel Prize in Literature
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, caption =
, awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature
, presenter = Swedish Academy
, holder = Annie Ernaux (2022)
, location = Stockholm, Sweden
, year = 1901
, ...
in 1995, and served as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and Emerson Poet in Residence at
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, and as Professor of Poetry at
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
.
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast and worked as a journalist, editor, and screenwriter while publishing his first books. He published comparatively little.
Muldoon is Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
. In 1999 he was also elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
Experiment
In the late 1960s, two young Irish poets,
Michael Smith (born 1942) and
Trevor Joyce
Trevor Joyce (born 26 October 1947) is an Irish poet, born in Dublin.
He co-founded New Writers' Press (NWP) in Dublin in 1967 and was a founding editor of NWP's '' The Lace Curtain; A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism'' in 1968.
Joyce was the ...
(born 1947) founded in Dublin the
New Writers Press publishing house and a journal called ''
The Lace Curtain
''The Lace Curtain'' was an occasional literary magazine founded and edited by Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce under their New Writers Press imprint. Both press and journal were dedicated to expanding the horizons of Irish poetry by rediscoverin ...
''. Initially this was to publish their own work and that of some like-minded friends (including Paul Durcan, Michael Hartnett and Gerry Smyth), and later to promote the work of neglected Irish modernists like
Brian Coffey
Brian Coffey (8 June 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an Irish poet and publisher. His work was informed by his Catholicism, his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to French surrealism. He was close to an intellectual Europea ...
and
Denis Devlin
Denis Devlin (15 April 1908 – 21 August 1959) was, along with Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a career diplomat.
Early life and ...
. Both Joyce and Smith have published considerable bodies of poetry in their own right.
Among the other poets published by the New Writers Press were
Geoffrey Squires
Geoffrey Squires (born 16 November 1942, in Derry, Northern Ireland) is an Irish poet who works in what might loosely be termed the modernist tradition.
Early life
While born in Derry, he grew up in County Donegal, Republic of Ireland. He read ...
(born 1942), whose early work was influenced by
Charles Olson
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modern American poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York ...
, and
Augustus Young
Augustus Young (born 1943 in Cork, Ireland) is an Irish poet.
Biography
Young worked in London as an epidemiologist and adviser to health authorities, and now lives in France. His first collections of poems, ''Survival'' (1969) and ''On Loani ...
(born 1943), who admired Pound and who has translated older Irish poetry, as well as work from Latin America and poems by
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...
. Younger poets who write what might be called experimental poetry include
Maurice Scully
Maurice Scully (1952 – 5 March 2023) was an Irish poet who worked in the modernist tradition. Scully was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College. He was a member of Aosdana.
Life
After some years living in Italy, Africa and the wes ...
(born 1952), and
Randolph Healy (born 1956). Many of these poets, along with younger experimentalists, have performed their work at the annual
SoundEye Festival in Cork.
Some of the Irish poets develop the
Surrealist
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...
trend in Irish poetry, notably
Ciaran O'Driscoll (born 1943) and younger poets including
John W. Sexton (born 1958) and
Tony Bailie. Their style has been described as "tangential
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...
".
Outsiders
In addition to these two loose groupings, a number of prominent Irish poets of the second half of the 20th century could be described as outsiders, although these poets could also be considered leaders of a mainstream tradition in the Republic. These include
Thomas Kinsella
Thomas Kinsella (4 May 192822 December 2021) was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s ...
(born 1928), whose early work was influenced by Auden. Kinsella's later work exhibits the influence of Pound in its looser metrical structure and use of
image
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...
ry but is deeply personal in manner and matter.
John Jordan (1930–1988) was an Irish poet born in Dublin on 8 April 1930. He was a celebrated literary critic from the late 1950s until his death in June 1988 in Cardiff, Wales, where he had participated in the Merriman Summer School. Jordan was also a short-story writer, literary editor, poet and broadcaster. His poetry collections include "Patrician Stations", "A Raft from Flotsam", "With Whom Did I Share the Crystal", "Collected Poems", and "Selected Poems".
Basil Payne (1923) was born in Dublin on June 23, 1923. His published work amounts to three slim volumes, and numerous inclusions in anthologies of Irish poetry.
Hugh McFadden (1942–) worked for many years as a newspaper journalist and book reviewer. His own collections of poems include ''Cities of Mirrors'', ''Pieces of Time'', ''Elegies & Epiphanies'', and ''Empire of Shadows''.
Women poets (in English)
The second half of the century also saw the emergence of a number of women poets including
Eavan Boland
Eavan Aisling Boland (24 September 1944 – 27 April 2020) was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of w ...
(born 1944),
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (; born 1942) is an Irish poet and academic. She was the Ireland Professor of Poetry (2016–19).
Biography
Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1942. She is the daughter of Eilís Dillon and Professor Cormac Ó Cuil ...
(born 1942),
Vona Groarke,
Kerry Hardie,
Kate Newmann,
Medbh McGuckian
Medbh McGuckian (born as Maeve McCaughan on 12 August 1950) is a poet from Northern Ireland.
Biography
She was born the third of six children as Maeve McCaughan to Hugh and Margaret McCaughan in North Belfast. Her father was a school headmaster ...
,
Paula Meehan
Paula Meehan (born 1955) is an Irish poet and playwright.
Life and work
Paula Meehan was born in Dublin in 1955, the eldest of six children. She subsequently moved to London with her parents where she attended St. Elizabeth's Primary School ...
, and
Rita Ann Higgins
Rita Ann Higgins (born 1955) is an Irish poet and playwright.
Early life
A native of Ballybrit, Galway, Higgins was one of thirteen children in a working-class household. She went to Briarhill National School, and Sisters of Mercy Convent, Galw ...
. Boland has written widely on specifically feminist themes and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world. Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry shows her interest variously in explorations of the sacred, women's experience, and Reformation history. She has also translated poetry from a number of languages. Higgins is an unconventional poet whose work confronts social injustices.
Contemporary poetry in Irish
During the
Gaelic revival
The Gaelic revival ( ga, Athbheochan na Gaeilge) was the late-nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, national revival of interest in the Irish language (also known as Gaelic) and Irish Gaelic culture (including Irish folklore, folklore, Iri ...
, a regular Irish-language column titled ''Ón dhomhan diar'', generally about the hardships faced by immigrants to the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
, was contributed to
Patrick Pearse
Patrick Henry Pearse (also known as Pádraig or Pádraic Pearse; ga, Pádraig Anraí Mac Piarais; 10 November 1879 – 3 May 1916) was an Irish teacher, barrister, poet, writer, nationalist, republican political activist and revolutionary who ...
's ''
An Claidheamh Soluis
''An Claidheamh Soluis'' () was an Irish nationalist newspaper published in the early 20th century by ''Conradh na Gaeilge'' (the Gaelic League). It was named for the " Sword of Light" (in modern spelling ''Claíomh Solais'') of Gaelic myth.
...
'' by
Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh
Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh (1871–1936) was an Irish poet.
Life
Early life
A native of Uíbh Ráthach, County Kerry, Ó hÉigeartaigh emigrated with his father, Patrick, a laborer, and his mother, Mary Lynch, to the United States when he was ...
(1871-1936). Ó hÉigeartaigh, an immigrant from
Uíbh Ráthach
The Iveragh Peninsula () is located in County Kerry in Ireland. It is the largest peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A mountain range, the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, lies in the centre of the peninsula. Carrauntoohil, its highest mountain, is a ...
,
County Kerry
County Kerry ( gle, Contae Chiarraí) is a county in Ireland. It is located in the South-West Region and forms part of the province of Munster. It is named after the Ciarraige who lived in part of the present county. The population of the co ...
, worked in the clothing business and lived with his family in
Springfield, Massachusetts
Springfield is a city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, and the seat of Hampden County. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers: the western Westfield River, the ...
. Ó hÉigeartaigh also wrote poetry for the same publication in
Munster Irish
Munster Irish () is the dialect of the Irish language spoken in the province of Munster. Gaeltacht regions in Munster are found in the Gaeltachtaí of the Dingle Peninsula in west County Kerry, in the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, in Cape ...
. His poem ''Ochón! a Dhonncha'' ("My Sorrow, Dhonncha!"), a lament for the drowning of his six-year old son on 22 August 1905, appeared in Pearse's magazine in 1906. Although the early authors of the
Gaelic revival
The Gaelic revival ( ga, Athbheochan na Gaeilge) was the late-nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, national revival of interest in the Irish language (also known as Gaelic) and Irish Gaelic culture (including Irish folklore, folklore, Iri ...
preferred the
literary language
A literary language is the form (register) of a language used in written literature, which can be either a nonstandard dialect or a standardized variety of the language. Literary language sometimes is noticeably different from the spoken langu ...
once common to the Bards of both Ireland and Scotland and felt only scorn for the
oral poetry
Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain.
Background
Oral poetry is ...
of the surviving
Gaeltacht
( , , ) are the districts of Ireland, individually or collectively, where the Irish government recognises that the Irish language is the predominant vernacular, or language of the home.
The ''Gaeltacht'' districts were first officially recog ...
aí, Ó hÉigeartaigh drew upon that very tradition to express his grief and proved that it could still be used effectively by a 20th-century poet. Ó hÉigeartaigh's lament for his son has a permanent place in the
literary canon
The term canon derives from the Greek (), meaning "rule", and thence via Latin (language), Latin and Old French into English. The concept in English usage is very broad: in a general sense it refers to being one (adjectival) or a group (noun) of ...
of Irish poetry in the
Irish language
Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...
and has been translated into English by both
Patrick Pearse
Patrick Henry Pearse (also known as Pádraig or Pádraic Pearse; ga, Pádraig Anraí Mac Piarais; 10 November 1879 – 3 May 1916) was an Irish teacher, barrister, poet, writer, nationalist, republican political activist and revolutionary who ...
and
Thomas Kinsella
Thomas Kinsella (4 May 192822 December 2021) was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s ...
.
Louis De Paor has alleged that the execution of
Patrick Pearse
Patrick Henry Pearse (also known as Pádraig or Pádraic Pearse; ga, Pádraig Anraí Mac Piarais; 10 November 1879 – 3 May 1916) was an Irish teacher, barrister, poet, writer, nationalist, republican political activist and revolutionary who ...
by a
British Army
The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of the British Armed Forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. , the British Army comprises 79,380 regular full-time personnel, 4,090 Gurk ...
firing squad
Execution by firing squad, in the past sometimes called fusillading (from the French ''fusil'', rifle), is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war. Some reasons for its use are that firearms are us ...
following the defeat of the
Easter Rising
The Easter Rising ( ga, Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the a ...
of 1916, was a catastrophe for
Irish literature
Irish literature comprises writings in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots ( Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin an ...
in the
Irish language
Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...
. This is because Pearce's surviving poetry was radically innovative and shows the influences of
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among t ...
,
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases ...
, and of the French
Symbolist
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...
s. It wouldn't be, according to De Paor, until the 1940s that Irish language poetry began to recover from the loss of Patrick Pearse.
One of the most talented 20th-century Irish-language poets and folklore collectors in the
Irish diaspora
The Irish diaspora ( ga, Diaspóra na nGael) refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland.
The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages,Flechner and Meeder, The ...
was
Seán Ó Súilleabháin
Seán Ó Súilleabháin (30 November 1903 – 13 December 1996) was a teacher and folklorist with the Irish Folklore Commission. He was a native Irish speaker from County Kerry.
Educated at St. Brendan's, College, Killarney, he trained from 1 ...
(Sean "Irish" O'Sullivan) (1882-1957). Ó Súilleabháin, whom literary scholar Ciara Ryan has dubbed "Butte's Irish Bard", was born into a family of Irish-speaking fishermen upon
Inishfarnard, a now-uninhabited island off the
Beara Peninsula
Beara ( ga, Béarra) or the Beara Peninsula is a peninsula on the south-west coast of Ireland, bounded between the Kenmare "river" (actually a bay) to the north side and Bantry Bay to the south. It contains two mountain ranges running down it ...
of
County Cork
County Cork ( ga, Contae Chorcaí) is the largest and the southernmost county of Ireland, named after the city of Cork, the state's second-largest city. It is in the province of Munster and the Southern Region. Its largest market towns are ...
. In 1905, Ó Súilleabháin sailed aboard the ocean liner ''Lucania'' from
Queenstown to
Ellis Island
Ellis Island is a federally owned island in New York Harbor, situated within the U.S. states of New York and New Jersey, that was the busiest immigrant inspection and processing station in the United States. From 1892 to 1954, nearly 12 mi ...
and settled in the heavily
Irish-American
, image = Irish ancestry in the USA 2018; Where Irish eyes are Smiling.png
, image_caption = Irish Americans, % of population by state
, caption = Notable Irish Americans
, population =
36,115,472 (10.9%) alone ...
mining community of
Butte, Montana
Butte ( ) is a consolidated city-county and the county seat of Silver Bow County, Montana, United States. In 1977, the city and county governments consolidated to form the sole entity of Butte-Silver Bow. The city covers , and, according to the ...
. Following his arrival, Ó Súilleabháin never returned to Ireland. In
Montana
Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbi ...
, however, he learned for the first time to read and write in his native language, married, and raised a family. Ó Súilleabháin remained a very influential figure in Butte's
Irish-American
, image = Irish ancestry in the USA 2018; Where Irish eyes are Smiling.png
, image_caption = Irish Americans, % of population by state
, caption = Notable Irish Americans
, population =
36,115,472 (10.9%) alone ...
literary, cultural, and
Irish republican
Irish republicanism ( ga, poblachtánachas Éireannach) is the political movement for the unity and independence of Ireland under a republic. Irish republicans view British rule in any part of Ireland as inherently illegitimate.
The develop ...
circles for the rest of his life.
In the O'Sullivan Collection in the Butte-Silver Bow Archives, Ó Súilleabháin is also revealed to have been a highly talented poet who drew inspiration from poets such as Diarmuid Ó Sé, Máire Bhuidhe Ní Laoghaire, and
Pádraig Phiarais Cúndún
Pádraig Phiarais Cúndún (1777–1856) was an Irish people, Irish immigrant to the United States, where he continued composing Irish poetry, poetry in Munster Irish and contributed to literature in the Irish language outside Ireland.
Life
Cún ...
, who adapted the
Jacobite tradition of
Aisling poetry to more recent political struggles. For this reason, Ó Súilleabháin's surviving Aisling poems are inspired by the events of the
Easter Rising
The Easter Rising ( ga, Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the a ...
and the
Irish War of Independence
The Irish War of Independence () or Anglo-Irish War was a guerrilla war fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army (IRA, the army of the Irish Republic) and British forces: the British Army, along with the quasi-mil ...
; such as ''Cois na Tuinne'', ''Bánta Mín Éirinn Glas Óg'', and the highly popular 1919 poem ''Dáil Éireann''. According to the poet's son, Fr. John Patrick Sarsfield O'Sullivan ("Fr. Sars"), his father recited ''Dáil Éireann'' aloud during
Éamon de Valera
Éamon de Valera (, ; first registered as George de Valero; changed some time before 1901 to Edward de Valera; 14 October 1882 – 29 August 1975) was a prominent Irish statesman and political leader. He served several terms as head of governm ...
's 1919 visit to Butte. The future
Taoiseach
The Taoiseach is the head of government, or prime minister, of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. The office is appointed by the president of Ireland upon the nomination of Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland's national legisl ...
of the
Irish Republic
The Irish Republic ( ga, Poblacht na hÉireann or ) was an unrecognised revolutionary state that declared its independence from the United Kingdom in January 1919. The Republic claimed jurisdiction over the whole island of Ireland, but by ...
was reportedly so impressed that he urged Ó Súilleabháin to submit the poem to ''Féile Craobh Uí Gramnaigh'' ("O'Growney's Irish Language Competition") in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
. Ó Súilleabháin took de Valera's advice and won both first prize and the Gold Medal for the poem.
Seán Ó Súilleabháin's papers also include transcriptions of the verse of other local Irish-language poets. One prominent example is the poem ''Amhrán na Mianach'' ("The Song of the Mining"), which, "lays bare the hardships of a miner's life", was composed in Butte by Séamus Feiritéar (1897-1919), his brother Mícheál, and their childhood friend Seán Ruiséal. Other song transcribed in Ó Súilleabháin's papers was composed in 1910 by Séamus Ó Muircheartaigh, a Butte mine worker from
Corca Dhuibhne
The Dingle Peninsula ( ga, Corca Dhuibhne; anglicised as Corkaguiny, the name of the corresponding barony) is the northernmost of the major peninsulas in County Kerry. It ends beyond the town of Dingle at Dunmore Head, the westernmost point o ...
,
County Kerry
County Kerry ( gle, Contae Chiarraí) is a county in Ireland. It is located in the South-West Region and forms part of the province of Munster. It is named after the Ciarraige who lived in part of the present county. The population of the co ...
, who was nicknamed ''An Spailpín'' ("The Farmhand"). The poem, which has eight stanzas and is titled, ''Beir mo Bheannacht leat, a Nellie'' ("Bring My Blessings with You, Nellie") was composed while Ó Muircheartaigh's wife, Nellie, and their son, Oisín, were on an extended visit to Ireland.
With the foundation of the
Irish Free State
The Irish Free State ( ga, Saorstát Éireann, , ; 6 December 192229 December 1937) was a state established in December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The treaty ended the three-year Irish War of Independence between th ...
in 1923, it became official government policy to promote and protect the Irish language. Despite its failures, this policy did further the
revival in Irish-language literature which had started around 1900. In particular, the establishment in 1925 of ''
An Gúm
An Gúm (, "The Scheme") was an Irish state company tasked with the publication of Irish literature, especially educational materials.
The agency is now part of Foras na Gaeilge. '' ("The Project"), a Government-sponsored publisher, created an outlet both for original works in Irish and for translations into the language.
The most important poet of the era between the death of Pearse and the literary revolution of the late 1940s was
Liam Gógan (1891-1979). Gógan, a Dublin-born poet,
lexicographer
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
* Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.
* Theoreti ...
, and member of the
Irish civil service
The Civil Service ( ga, An Státseirbhís) of Ireland is the collective term for the permanent staff of the departments of state and certain state agencies who advise and work for the Government of Ireland. It consists of two broad components, t ...
, had, according to
Louis De Paor, "a prodigious knowledge of all the spoken dialects of Irish and the Gaelic literary tradition."
After refusing to take an
oath of allegiance
An oath of allegiance is an oath whereby a subject or citizen acknowledges a duty of allegiance and swears loyalty to a monarch or a country. In modern republics, oaths are sworn to the country in general, or to the country's constitution. For ...
to
King George V
George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936.
Born during the reign of his grandmother Que ...
following the
Easter Rising
The Easter Rising ( ga, Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the a ...
of 1916, Gógan had been dismissed from his post in the
National Museum of Ireland
The National Museum of Ireland ( ga, Ard-Mhúsaem na hÉireann) is Ireland's leading museum institution, with a strong emphasis on national and some international archaeology, Irish history, Irish art, culture, and natural history. It has thre ...
and imprisoned at
Frongoch internment camp
Frongoch internment camp at Frongoch in Merionethshire, Wales was a makeshift place of imprisonment during the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising.
History
1916 the camp housed German prisoners of war in a yellow distillery and cru ...
in
Wales
Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...
. Gógan had, according to De Paor, an encyclopedic knowledge of the
Western canon
The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and ...
, which found its way into his poetry. Gógan was also the first poet to write
sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, ...
s in the Irish language.
[''Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession'', ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books). Page 40.]
Unlike most other Irish language poets, who choose to compose in particular regional dialects, Gógan believed that a standard
literary language
A literary language is the form (register) of a language used in written literature, which can be either a nonstandard dialect or a standardized variety of the language. Literary language sometimes is noticeably different from the spoken langu ...
, similar to those found in other European countries, needed to be developed. Gógan believed that the basis for the new standard Irish should be in older forms of the language and particularly in
Old Irish
Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic ( sga, Goídelc, Ogham script: ᚌᚑᚔᚇᚓᚂᚉ; ga, Sean-Ghaeilge; gd, Seann-Ghàidhlig; gv, Shenn Yernish or ), is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive writt ...
and
Classical Gaelic
Classical Gaelic or Classical Irish () was a shared literary form of Gaelic that was in use by poets in Scotland and Ireland from the 13th century to the 18th century.
Although the first written signs of Scottish Gaelic having diverged from Iri ...
, the
literary language
A literary language is the form (register) of a language used in written literature, which can be either a nonstandard dialect or a standardized variety of the language. Literary language sometimes is noticeably different from the spoken langu ...
once taught in the Bardic schools of both Ireland and the Scottish
Highlands and Islands
The Highlands and Islands is an area of Scotland broadly covering the Scottish Highlands, plus Orkney, Shetland and Outer Hebrides (Western Isles).
The Highlands and Islands are sometimes defined as the area to which the Crofters' Act of 1886 ...
.
As no one else has since embraced Gógan's theories about creating a standard literary form of Irish,
David Wheatley has described Gógan's poetry, as "knotty", "undervalued", and sometimes extremely difficult to understand or to translate. While trying to translate Gógan into English, Wheatley has written that he often thought of
Myles na gCopaleen
Brian O'Nolan ( ga, Brian Ó Nualláin; 5 October 1911 – 1 April 1966), better known by his pen name Flann O'Brien, was an Irish civil service official, novelist, playwright and satirist, who is now considered a major figure in twentieth cen ...
's famous quip about the literary use of previously unknown Irish language terms, "I don't think those words are in ''
Séadhna''."
Colm Breathnach
Colm is a male given name of Irish origin. Colm can be pronounced "Collum" or "Kullum". It is not an Irish version of Colin, but like Callum and Malcolm derives from a Gaelic variation on ''columba'', the Latin word for 'dove'.
People
* Colm B ...
, who set out to re-popularize Gógan's poetry during the 2017 ''
Imram''
literary festival
A literary festival, also known as a book festival or writers' festival, is a regular gathering of writers and readers, typically on an annual basis in a particular city. A literary festival usually features a variety of presentations and readings ...
, has said of Gógan, "He was a moderniser, he was trying to develop the language. He employed old words and forms, he coined new words (particularly
compound word
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when ...
s) from the existing resources of the language and mixed various dialectical usages throughout his work. Readers often found it difficult to follow these experiments... Some of his work would resonate with people today, he has a lot of
love poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...
, other works would portray urban
angst
Angst is fear or anxiety (''anguish'' is its Romance languages, Latinate cognate, equivalent, and the words ''anxious'' and ''anxiety'' are of similar origin). The dictionary definition for angst is a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insec ...
, others are in a household setting."
Poetry in Irish saw a revolution beginning in the end of the 1940s with the poetry of
Máirtín Ó Direáin
Máirtín Ó Direáin (; 29 November 1910 – 19 March 1988) was an Irish poet from the Aran Islands Gaeltacht. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Ó Direáin was, in the words of Louis de Paor, "one of a trinity of poet ...
(1910-1988),
Seán Ó Ríordáin
Seán Pádraig Ó Ríordáin (3 December 1916 – 21 February 1977), sometimes referred to as an Ríordánach, was an Irish language poet and later a newspaper columnist. He is credited with introducing European themes to Irish poetry, and is wi ...
(1916-1977) and
Máire Mhac an tSaoi
Máire Mhac an tSaoi (4 April 1922 – 16 October 2021) was an Irish civil service official, writer of Modernist poetry in the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Munster Irish, a writer, and highly important figure within Modern literature in Irish. Alo ...
(1922-2021). Their poetry, though retaining a sense of the tradition, continued the legacy of Pearse by introducing
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases ...
into the Irish language.
According to
Louis De Paor, "Máire Mhac an tSaoi spent two years studying in post-war
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
(1945-47) before joining the Irish
diplomatic service
Diplomatic service is the body of diplomats and foreign policy officers maintained by the government of a country to communicate with the governments of other countries. Diplomatic personnel obtains diplomatic immunity when they are accredited to ...
, and was working at the Irish
embassy
A diplomatic mission or foreign mission is a group of people from a state or organization present in another state to represent the sending state or organization officially in the receiving or host state. In practice, the phrase usually deno ...
in
Madrid
Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...
, during
Franco's regime
Francoist Spain ( es, España franquista), or the Francoist dictatorship (), was the period of Spanish history between 1939 and 1975, when Francisco Franco ruled Spain after the Spanish Civil War with the title . After his death in 1975, Sp ...
, when she committed herself to writing poetry in Irish following her discovery of the works of
Federico Garcia Lorca Federico (; ) is a given name and surname. It is a form of Frederick, most commonly found in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
People with the given name Federico
Artists
* Federico Ágreda, Venezuelan composer and DJ.
* Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, ...
. The tension between religious beliefs, contemporary social mores, and the more transgressive elements of female desire is central to the best of her work from the 1940s and early 50s. Both her deference to traditional patterns of language and verse and her refusal of
traditional morality might be read as a reaction to the social, moral, and cultural upheaval of a world at war."
Also of that generation was
Eoghan Ó Tuairisc
Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (''Eugene Rutherford Watters'') (3 April 1919 – 24 August 1982) was an Irish poet and writer.
Life
Eugene Rutherford Watters was born at Dunlo Hill, Ballinasloe, County Galway, to Thomas Watters, a soldier, and his wife, Ma ...
(1919-1982), an
Irish-language
Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was th ...
poet and novelist from
Ballinasloe
Ballinasloe ( ; ) is a town in the easternmost part of County Galway in Connacht. Located at an ancient crossing point on the River Suck, evidence of ancient settlement in the area includes a number of Bronze Age sites. Built around a 12th-ce ...
,
County Galway
"Righteousness and Justice"
, anthem = ()
, image_map = Island of Ireland location map Galway.svg
, map_caption = Location in Ireland
, area_footnotes =
, area_total_km2 = ...
who had served as a commissioned officer in the
Irish Army
The Irish Army, known simply as the Army ( ga, an tArm), is the land component of the Defence Forces of Ireland.The Defence Forces are made up of the Permanent Defence Forces – the standing branches – and the Reserve Defence Forces. The Ar ...
during
The Emergency.
Like
Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin may refer to:
* Diarmaid O' Súilleabháin (bishop) (1924–1994), Roman Catholic Bishop of Kerry
* Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin (writer) (1932–1985), Irish language writer
* Diarmuid Ó Suilleabháin, Irish sean n ...
, Ó Tuairisc and other writers of their generation, "challenged the critical orthodoxy by openly proclaiming that their standards could not be those of the
Gaeltacht
( , , ) are the districts of Ireland, individually or collectively, where the Irish government recognises that the Irish language is the predominant vernacular, or language of the home.
The ''Gaeltacht'' districts were first officially recog ...
and by demanding a creative freedom that would acknowledge hybridity and reject the strictures of the linguistic purists."
In his
1964
Events January
* January 1 – The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved.
* January 5 - In the first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches since the fifteenth century, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch ...
poetry collection ''Lux aeterna'', Ó Tuairisc included a long poem inspired by the
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the onl ...
, entitled ''Aifreann na marbh'' ("Mass for the Dead"). The poem is an
imitation
Imitation (from Latin ''imitatio'', "a copying, imitation") is a behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's behavior. Imitation is also a form of that leads to the "development of traditions, and ultimately our culture. I ...
of the
Roman Catholic
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...
Requiem Mass
A Requiem or Requiem Mass, also known as Mass for the dead ( la, Missa pro defunctis) or Mass of the dead ( la, Missa defunctorum), is a Mass of the Catholic Church offered for the repose of the soul or souls of one or more deceased persons, ...
, "with the significant omission of '
Credo
In Christian liturgy, the credo (; Latin for "I believe") is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed – or its shorter version, the Apostles' Creed – in the Mass, either as a prayer, a spoken text, or sung as Gregorian chant or other musical setti ...
' and 'Gloria.'"
According to
Louis De Paor, "The poem also draws on early
Irish literature
Irish literature comprises writings in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots ( Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin an ...
to articulate Ó Tuairisc's idea that the poet has a responsibility to intercede in the eternal struggle between love and violence through the unifying, healing, power of creative imagination. While everyone is culpable in the annihilation of
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...
, the poet, the word-priest, bears a particular burden of responsibility."
Mac an Tsaoi, Ó Direáin, and Ó Tuairisc were the precursors of an even more radical group of poets, including
Liam Ó Muirthile
Liam Ó Muirthile (1950 – 18 May 2018) was a prominent Irish-language poet who also wrote plays and novels, he was also a journalist. Ó Muirthile originally came to the fore as a member of a group of poets from University College Cork who colla ...
(1950-2018),
Gabriel Rosenstock
Gabriel Rosenstock (born 29 September 1949) is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. A member of Aosdána, he is poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. Born in ...
and
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (; born 1952) is a leading Irish poet.
Biography
Born in Lancashire, England, of Irish parents, she moved to Ireland at the age of 5 and was brought up in the Dingle Gaeltacht and in Nenagh, County Tipperary. Her uncle, Mo ...
, whose poetry, first published in the 1970s and 1980s, reflected contemporary international influences. The poet and
sean-nós singer
Caitlín Maude
Caitlín Maude (22 May 1941 – 6 June 1982) was an Irish poet, activist, teacher, actress and traditional singer.
Early life
She was born in Casla, County Galway, and reared in the Irish language. Her mother, Máire Nic an Iomaire, was a ...
(1941-1982) also belonged to that group. Other younger poets of note were
Louis de Paor and
Cathal Ó Searcaigh
Cathal Ó Searcaigh (born 12 July 1956), is a modern Irish language poet. His work has been widely translated, anthologised and studied. "His confident internationalism", according to Theo Dorgan, has channeled "new modes, new possibilities, in ...
.
Other poets include
Derry O’Sullivan, who, though long resident in Paris, has continued to publish in Irish. This is also true of
Tomás Mac Síomóin, an Irish writer resident in
Spain
, image_flag = Bandera de España.svg
, image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg
, national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond")
, national_anthem = (English: "Royal March")
, i ...
. Another published poet is
Pádraig Mac Fhearghusa, for a long time the editor of
Feasta.
Modern Irish-language poetry is notable for the growing number of women poets. They include
Rita Kelly (widow of Eoghan Ó Tuairisc),
Biddy Jenkinson (a nom de plume),
Áine Ní Ghlinn and
Bríd Ní Mhóráin, and younger writers such as
Ciara Ní É,
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish poet and essayist who writes in both Irish and English.
Biography
Doireann Ní Ghríofa was born in Galway in 1981, but grew up in County Clare. She now lives in County Cork.
Ní Ghríofa has been published wi ...
and
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh.
It has been argued that, since the Irish language depends for its continued existence on government patronage and the efforts of cultural activists, all poetry in the language is political to a certain extent: “It is an assertion of pride, an appeal for identity, a staking out of cultural territory”.
Bilingualism has been a consistent feature of contemporary Irish poetic practice. Among the more notable examples was
Michael Hartnett
Michael Hartnett ( ga, Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide) (18 September 1941 – 13 October 1999) was an Irish poet who wrote in both English and Irish. He was one of the most significant voices in late 20th-century Irish writing and has been called " Mu ...
(1941–1999), who was fluent in both Irish and English. He won praise for his work in English, but in his 1975 book ''A Farewell to English'' he declared his intention to write only in Irish. A number of volumes in Irish followed but in 1989 he returned to English. Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, also bilingual, made no formal renunciation of either language but published in both in several genres.
In 2009, poet
Muiris Sionóid published a complete translation of
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
's 154
sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, ...
s into
Connacht Irish
Connacht Irish () is the dialect of the Irish language spoken in the province of Connacht. Gaeltacht regions in Connacht are found in Counties Mayo (notably Tourmakeady, Achill Island and Erris) and Galway (notably in parts of Connemara and on ...
under the title ''Rotha Mór an Ghrá'' ("The Great Wheel of Love").
[Shakespeare’s work has been translated into Irish - and it sounds amazing](_blank)
''The Irish Post
''The Irish Post'' is a national newspaper for the Irish community in Great Britain. It is published every Wednesday and is sold in shops in Britain and Ireland.
History
The first print edition of ''The Irish Post'' was published on Friday, ...
'' March 14, 2018.
In an article about his translations, Sionóid wrote that Irish poetic forms are completely different from those of other languages and that both the sonnet form and the
iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambi ...
line had long been considered "entirely unsuitable" for composing poetry in Irish. In his translations, Soinóid chose to closely reproduce Shakespeare's rhyme scheme and rhythms while rendering into Irish.
Aistriú na Soinéad go Gaeilge: Saothar Grá! Translating the Sonnets to Irish: A Labour of Love
by Muiris Sionóid.
In a copy that he gifted to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) is an independent registered educational charity based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, that came into existence in 1847 following the purchase of William Shakespeare's birthplace for preserva ...
in Stratford Upon Avon
Stratford-upon-Avon (), commonly known as just Stratford, is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It is situated on the River Avon, north-wes ...
, Sionóid wrote, "From Slaneyside to Avonside, from a land of bards to the greatest Bard of all; and long life and happiness to the guardians of the world’s most precious treasure."
In 2013
File:2013 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: Edward Snowden becomes internationally famous for leaking classified NSA wiretapping information; Typhoon Haiyan kills over 6,000 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia; The Dhaka garment fact ...
, Leabhar Breac
An Leabhar Breac ("The Speckled Book"; Middle Irish: An Lebar Brec), now less commonly Leabhar Mór Dúna Doighre (The Great Book of Dun Doighre") or possibly erroneously, Leabhar Breac Mic Aodhagáin ("The Speckled Book of the MacEgans"), is a ...
published Máire Mhac an tSaoi
Máire Mhac an tSaoi (4 April 1922 – 16 October 2021) was an Irish civil service official, writer of Modernist poetry in the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Munster Irish, a writer, and highly important figure within Modern literature in Irish. Alo ...
's literary translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...
s of Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
's ''Duino Elegies
The ''Duino Elegies'' (german: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He was then "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", and began ...
'' from the original German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
into the Munster Irish
Munster Irish () is the dialect of the Irish language spoken in the province of Munster. Gaeltacht regions in Munster are found in the Gaeltachtaí of the Dingle Peninsula in west County Kerry, in the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, in Cape ...
traditionally spoken in Dun Chaoin, County Kerry
County Kerry ( gle, Contae Chiarraí) is a county in Ireland. It is located in the South-West Region and forms part of the province of Munster. It is named after the Ciarraige who lived in part of the present county. The population of the co ...
.
Irish Poetry Reading Archive
The newly create
Irish Poetry Reading Archive
(IPRA) is building into a comprehensive web-based library of Irish poets. Hosted b
UCD’s Digital Library
a part of the university's James Joyce Library, it has an archive of contemporary Irish poets. These include established and emerging poets in both the English and Irish languages, experimental and emigrant poets, as well as performance poets. It contains videos of poets reading their work, as well hand-written copies of the recorded poems, signed copies of their collections, and a growing collection of poets' archives.
See also
*Irish literature
Irish literature comprises writings in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots ( Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin an ...
*Literature of Northern Ireland
That part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland was created in 1922, with the partition of the island of Ireland. The majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted to remain within the United Kingdom (see unionism and loyalism). ...
Notes
Sources
The Irish domain of poetryinternational.org
A selection of many of the better contemporary practitioners
Early poetry in Irish and English
ucc.i.e.
Swift
RPO.
showhouse.com.
Goldsmith poems
RPO.
theotherpages.org.
irishcultureandcustoms.com
Moore
RPO.
poetry-archive.com.
ucc.i.e.
Plunkett
josephmaryplunkett.com
SoundEye
soundeye.org.
* ttp://www.artscouncil.ie The Arts Council artscouncil.i.e.
Poetry Ireland
poetryireland.i.e.
irishwriters-online.com.
Further reading
*Nicholas Canny, ''Making Ireland British, 1580-1650'' New ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
*John Flood & Phil Flood, ''Kilcash:1190-1801'' (Dublin, Geography Publications 1999)
*Padraig Lenihan, ''Confederate Catholics at War'' (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000)
*Eamonn o Cairdha, ''Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766: A fatal attachment'' (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004)
*Keith Tuma, ''Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
*John Hewitt (ed), ''Rhyming Weavers: And Other Country Poets of Antrim and Down'' (Belfast: Blackstaff Press,2004)
External links
Irish Poetry Reading Archive
a comprehensive web-based library of Irish poets
Wake Forest University Press
premier publisher of Irish poetry in North America
Poetry Forum for Northern Ireland
SHOP contemporary poetry publishers
Then Go Beyond the Reach of Road: An Evening with Poet Peter Fallon
Poetry reading at Boston University, video, March 30, 2009
* http://bill.celt.dias.ie/vol4/browseatsources.php?letter=A#ATS7714
* http://www.podcasts.ie/featured-writers
Windharp - a failed anthology
critical review of ''Windharp, Poems of Ireland since 1916'', a 2016 Irish poetry anthology
Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Collection of Irish Poetry: O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award Winners
- Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Interview with Irish Poet John F. Deane
by Patrick O'Donnell. John Deane was Founder of the National Poetry Society of Ireland and the 1998 Winner of the annual O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Interview with Irish Poet Peter Sirr
by Patrick O'Donnell. Peter Sirr was the 1999 Winner of the annual O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Interview with Irish Poet Louis de Paor
by Patrick O'Donnell. Louis de Paor was the 2000 Winner of the annual O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Interview with Irish Poet Moya Canon
by Patrick O'Donnell. Moya Canon was the 2001 Winner of the annual O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Irish Poetry
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
Poetry by country