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.[1]

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”.[1] It survived as epic interludes in Irish sagas in the early Modern Period.[1]

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.[2] 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:

Fogur gaíthe

fri fid flescach,

forglas néol;

essa aba,

esnad ala,

álainn céol.[1]

Sound of the wind in a branching wood, grey cloud; river-falls, cry of a swan – beautiful music.

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.[2]

Irish bards formed a professional hereditary caste of highly trained, learned poets. The bards were steeped in the history and traditions of clan and country, as well as in the technical requirements of a verse technique that was syllabic and used assonance, half rhyme and alliteration known as Dán Díreach.

As officials of the court of king or chieftain, they performed a number of official roles. They were chroniclers 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, or Lore of Places, is probably the major surviving monument of Irish bardic verse. It is a great onomastic 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 Ossianic 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 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.

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 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.

During the Elizabethan reconquest, two of the most significant English poets of the time saw service in the Irish colonies. Sir Walter Raleigh had little impact on the course of Irish literature, but the time spent in Munster by Edmund Spenser 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. 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:

soe far from instructinge younge men in Morrall discipline, that they themselves doe more deserve to be sharplie decyplined; for they seldome use to chuse unto themselves the doinges of good men, for the ornamentes of theire poems, but whomesoever they finde to bee most lycentious of lief, most bolde and lawles in his doinges, most daungerous and desperate in all partes of disobedience and rebellious disposicon, him they sett up and glorifie in their rymes, him they prayse to the people, and to younge men make an example to followe.

Given that the bards depended on aristocratic support to survive, and that this power and patronage was shifting towards the new English rulers, this thorough condemnation of their moral values may well have contributed to their demise as a caste.

The Battle of Kinsale in 1601 saw the defeat of Aodh Mór Ó Néill, 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 - 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. 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 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 aristocracy. Some of the English landowners settled in Ireland after the Plantations of Ireland also patronised Irish poets, for instance George Carew and Roger Boyle. Other members of hereditary bardic families sent their sons to the new Irish Colleges 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 influences. By mid-century, the subordination of the native Catholic upper classes in Ireland boiled over in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Many Irish language poets wrote highly politicised poetry in support of the Irish Catholics organised in Confederate Ireland. 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

Caithfidh fir Éireann uile

o haicme go haonduine...

gliec na timcheall no tuitim

("All Irishmen from one person to all people must unite or fall")

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. It expressed the opinion that Catholics should not tolerate Protestantism in Ireland,

Creideamh Chríost le creideamh Lúiteir...

ladgadh gris i sneachta sud

(The religion of Christ with the religion of Luther is like ashes in the snow")

Following the defeat of the Irish Catholics in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (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,

Ag so an cogadh do chriochnaigh Éire

s do chuir na milte ag iarri dearca...

Do rith plaig is gorta in aonacht

("This was the war that finished Ireland and put thousands begging, plague and famine ran together")

Another poem by Éamonn an Dúna is a strange mixture of Irish, French and English,

Le execution bhíos súil an cheidir

costas buinte na chuine ag an ndeanach

(The first thing a man expects is execution, the last that costs be awarded against him [in court]")

Transport transplant, mo mheabhair ar Bhéarla

("Transport transplant, is what I remember of English")

A tory, hack him, hang him, a rebel,

a rogue, a thief a priest, a papist

After this period, the poets lost most of their patrons and protectors. In the subsequent Williamite War in Ireland Catholic Jacobites 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. The poets viewed the war as revenge against the Protestant settlers who had come to dominate Ireland, as the following poem extract makes clear,

"You Popish rogue", ni leomhaid a labhairt sinn

acht "Cromwellian dog" is focal faire againn

no " cia sud thall" go teann gan eagla

"Mise Tadhg" geadh teinn an t-agallamh

("You Popish rogue" is not spoken, but "Cromwellian dog" is our watchword, "Who goes there" does not provoke fear, "I am Tadhg" [an Irishman] is the answer given") From Diarmuid Mac Carthaigh, Céad buidhe re Dia ("A hundred victories with God").

The Jacobites' defeat in the War, and in particular James II's ignominious flight after the Battle of the Boyne, gave rise to the following derisive verse,

Séamus an chaca a chaill Éire,

lena leathbhróg ghallda is a leathbhróg Ghaelach

("James the shit who lost Ireland, with his one shoe English and one shoe Irish")

The main poets of this period include Dáibhí Ó Bruadair (1625?–1698), Piaras Feiritéar (1600?–1653) and Aogán Ó Rathaille (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 Ireland.

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 (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.[4]

Dublin 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 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.[4]

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 but with others from every province.[4]

Outside Dublin, it was in the province of Munster that the status and craft of Irish-language poetry were best maintained. Sometimes a member of the local gentry acted as a patron, but in other places responsibility lay with cúirteanna filíochta – “courts of poetry” or local gatherings of poets, most of whom were men. These could be seen as offshoots of the bardic academies which trained professional poets down to the seventeenth century.[4]

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 Seán Ó Murchadha (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.[4]

The craft of poetry was also cultivated in south Ulster, where poets would come together to compete for primacy. They included a handful of women, including Máire (or Mailligh) Nic a Liondain and Peig Ní Chuarta.[4]

Among the most prominent names in Munster is Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, 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 was parodied by Brian Merriman in his long comic poem Cúirt An Mheán Oíche, in which a young woman complains to Aoibheall, a fairy queen, about the men of Ireland.[5][4]

Alongside the work of the literate poets there flourished a traditional oral literature. 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. This was mostly composed by a member of the surviving Catholic gentry of Cork, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill (an aunt of Daniel O’Connell), for her husband Art, killed by a local British official. It is considered to be an outstanding example of the type.[6][4]

Swift and Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith

In Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Irish literature in English found its first notable writer. Although best known for prose works like Gulliver's Travels and A Tale of a Tub, Swift was a poet of considerable talent. Technically close to his English contemporaries Pope and Dryden, 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 (1730?–1774) started his literary career as a hack writer 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, Edmund Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds. His reputation depends mainly on a novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, a play, She Stoops to Conquer, 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 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.

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, 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.[8] The poetic quality of the love songs in particular has been described as unusually high:[9]

Ceo meala lá seaca ar choillte dubha daraí,

is grá gan cheilt atá agam dhuit, a bháinchnis na ngealchíoch,

do chom seang, do bhéal is do chúilín a bhí cas mín,

is a chéadsearc, ná tréig mé is gur mhéadaigh tú m'aicíd.[10]

(A mist of honey on a frosty day over the dark oak woods - I love you without concealment, fair-skinned girl of the bright breasts, your slender waist, your mouth, your soft and curly hair; my first love, don't leave me, since it's you who worsened the pain of love.)

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). Amhrán na bPrátaí Dubha (from County Waterford) and Johnny Seoighe (from Conamara).[8]

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.[8]

The interactive relationship between Irish and English is evident in the songs composed in English by Irish-speaking hedge school 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”.[9] These songs and others often reproduced the metre and internal rhymes of songs in Irish:

Now to end my lamentation we are all in consternation

For want of education, I now must end my song,

Since without hesitation we are charged with combination

And sent for transportation from the hills of Mullaghbawn.[9]

Antoine Ó Raifteiri (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 (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, 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 (1816–1903), Thomas Davis, (1814–1845), and John Blake Dillon (1816–1866) founded The Nation 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. 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 (1803–1849). Mangan was a true poète maudit, 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 (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 (1824–1889) was another important Unionist figure in Irish poetry. Born and bred in Ballyshannon, Donegal, he spent most of his working life in England and was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and a close friend of Tennyson. His Day and Night Songs was illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. 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 (1865–1939) and Douglas Hyde (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 (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.

With the foundation of the Irish Free State 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[15] of An Gúm ("The Project"), a Government sponsored publisher, created an outlet both for original works in Irish and for translations into the language.

Contemporary poetry in Irish saw a renewal from the end of the 1940s in the poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910-1988), Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916-1977) and Máire Mhac an tSaoi (1922-). Their poetry, though retaining a sense of tradition, introduced a modernist technique and sensibility. Also of that generation was the poet and novelist Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (1919-1982). This group were the precursors of a more radical group of poets, including Liam Ó Muirthile (1950-2018), Gabriel Rosenstock and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whose poetry, first published in the 1970s and 1980s, reflected contemporary international influences. The poet and sean-nós singer Caitlín Maude (1941-1982) also belonged to that group.[16][17] Other younger poets of note were Louis de Paor and Cathal Ó Searcaigh.

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. 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 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”.[18]

Bilingualism has been a consistent feature of contemporary Irish poetic practice. Among the more notable examples was Michael Hartnett (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.

IPRA

The newly created Irish Poetry Reading Archive (IPRA) is building into a comprehensive web-based library of Irish poets. Hosted by 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.

• 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.
• Cuirt an Mheán Oíche, showhouse.com.
• Goldsmith poems, RPO.
• More Goldsmith poems, theotherpages.org.
• Mangan, irishcultureandcustoms.com
• Moore, RPO.
• Ferguson, poetry-archive.com.
• Wilde, ucc.i.e.
• Plunkett, josephmaryplunkett.com
• SoundEye, soundeye.org.
• A checklist of New Writers' Press publications compiled by Trevor Joyce
• The Arts Council, artscouncil.i.e.
• Poetry Ireland, poetryireland.i.e.
• General biographical information, irishwriters-online.com.

• 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)
• William Wall, "Riding Against the Lizard - Towards a Poetics of Anger" (Three Monkeys Online)

• 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