Irish poetry

[citation needed] 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 tradition and those facing questions posed by an increasingly urban and cosmopolitan society.

[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".

[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.

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.

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 the balance of power was shifting towards the new Anglo-Irish 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.

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.

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' A tory, hack him, hang him, a rebel, a rogue, a thief a priest, a papist Transport transplant, is what I remember of English... After this period, the poets lost most of their patrons and protectors.

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 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).

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.

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.

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, has been demoted from goddess to being the local fairy queen.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

The most significant of the second generation of Modernist Irish poets who first published in the 1920s and 1930s include Brian Coffey (1905–1995), Denis Devlin (1908–1959), Thomas MacGreevy (1893–1967), Blanaid Salkeld (1880–1959), and Mary Devenport O'Neill (1879–1967).

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.

There were still key experimental writers in Ireland during the 1930s (Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen 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.

With large Protestant minority and enduring political links to Great Britain, 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.

During the Gaelic revival, a regular Irish-language column titled Ón dhomhan diar, generally about the hardships faced by immigrants to the United States, was contributed to Patrick Pearse's An Claidheamh Soluis by Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh (1871-1936).

Although the early authors of the Gaelic revival preferred the literary language once common to the Bards of both Ireland and Scotland and felt only scorn for the oral poetry of the surviving Gaeltachtaí, 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 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 of County Cork.

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.

"[19] After refusing to take an oath of allegiance to King George V following the Easter Rising of 1916, Gógan had been dismissed from his post in the National Museum of Ireland and imprisoned at Frongoch internment camp in Wales.

While trying to translate Gógan into English, Wheatley has written that he often thought of Myles na gCopaleen's famous quip about the literary use of previously unknown Irish language terms, "I don't think those words are in Séadhna.

"[24] In his 1964 poetry collection Lux aeterna, Ó Tuairisc included a long poem inspired by the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, entitled Aifreann na marbh ("Mass for the Dead").

'"[25] According to Louis De Paor, "The poem also draws on early Irish literature 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.

In 2009, poet Muiris Sionóid published a complete translation of William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets into Connacht Irish under the title Rotha Mór an Ghrá ("The Great Wheel of Love").

"[30] In 2013, Leabhar Breac published Máire Mhac an tSaoi's literary translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies from the original German into the Munster Irish traditionally spoken in Dun Chaoin, County Kerry.