Eighteenth Century
As Ireland entered the 18th century, it faced several challenges The country was dominated by the Protestant and English-speaking minority, which had triumphed over Roman Catholic Ireland at the Battles of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) after the Glorious Revolution; the Protestant population’s control over the country was later referred to as the Protestant Ascendancy. The legacy of the political settlement in Ireland that followed the defeat at Aughrim thus had a strongly sectarian and colonial cast that, when coupled with the grim Irish realities of conflict and poverty, would later trouble the writings of Edmund Burke. Whig writers such as Burke and Jonathan Swift, who considered the Glorious Revolution a triumph of liberty, also stumbled over the long-standing unequal relationship between the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain. Protestant patriots rejected the notion that Ireland was either a dependent kingdom or a colony, but the statute book, the economic and political restrictions placed on Ireland by the British government at London, and the planting of English placement in Irish jobs instructed them otherwise.
Swift demonstrated no interest in the “barbarous” Irish language and, unlike Burke, no sympathy for poor Irish Roman Catholics. Swift’s views were an expression of his own bifurcated vision of Irish writing. According to such a view, 18th-century Ireland produced two distinct literatures that never touched or intersected: one in English, the language of print, and another in Irish, mainly in manuscript. Thus conceptualized, the first—what is best called Anglo-Irish literature—can scarcely be separated from the wider English tradition. If, as English critic Samuel Johnson remarked, the noblest prospect that a Scotsman ever sees is the high road to England, for many an ambitious Anglo-Irish writer—including the Shakespeare scholar and editor Edmund Malone, one of Johnson’s friends in London—that prospect was the boat to Holyhead, the Welsh port that served as the chief entry point for travelers to the British mainland from Ireland. Burke, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and many others left Ireland and made their careers in England. After 1714 Swift wanted to leave Ireland but could not, given the political changes in England that had led to his Irish exile. He likened his condition in Dublin to that of a “poisoned rat in a hole.” London exerted an almost irresistible force as a literary and theatrical market. Anglo-Irish drama and novels were written mostly with an English audience in view; in terms of content, there is often nothing specifically Irish about, for example, the plays and novels of Henry Brooke or the essays and poetry of Goldsmith.
Yet Ireland was not absent from Anglo-Irish writing. Indeed, there is a good deal of Irish content in the drama and poetry. “Irish” plays were among the most popular and most often performed of the 18th century. They include Ireland Preserv’d; or, The Siege of Londonderry (1705) by John Mitchelburne (Michelborne); its companion piece, Robert Ashton’s The Battle of Aughrim (1728), of which as many as 25 editions were published between 1770 and 1840; and the better-known True-Born Irishman (1763) by Charles Macklin. The first two—vividly recorded by William Carleton as part of Ulster popular culture well into the 19th century—underlined the narrowly Protestant character of the post-Aughrim political settlement in Ireland, although The Battle of Aughrim appealed to Catholics as well for its portrayal of the Jacobite hero Patrick Sarsfield. More mundanely, the hero of Macklin’s play is a resident landlord, a personification of the sort of practical patriotism promoted by the Royal Dublin Society (founded 1731) and articulated by a substantial pamphlet literature stretching from Swift’s A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures (1720) to Samuel Madden’s Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (1738) and including Viscount Molesworth’s Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723), Thomas Prior’s best-selling A List of the Absentees of Ireland (1729), Arthur Dobbs’s An Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland (1729–31), and George Berkeley’s The Querist (1735–37).
A second Irish dimension in Anglo-Irish literature of the period may be detected in the cross-fertilizations of language. At their most basic level, these cross-fertilizations produced Hiberno-English—the “barbarous denominations” of the Irish brogue, as Swift had it, from which an Englishman expected nothing but “bulls, blunders, and follies.” Hiberno-English was usually deployed as a highly self-conscious comic device, and stage Irishmen, such as Sir Callaghan O’Brallaghan in Macklin’s Love à la Mode (1759) and Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), delighted 18th-century audiences, including Irish ones.
At a more subtle level, close scrutiny of Irish verse in English reveals that the languages did not so much coexist across a yawning divide as cohabit in an intimate, mutually enriching relationship. The impact of linguistic proximity is discernible not only in the conscription into poetry of “nonstandard” local vocabulary but in the infiltration of traditional Irish metrics as well. A third “language” in which verse was composed further complicates the binary opposition of English and Irish: the Ulster-Scots dialect. A regional variant of the Lowlands Scottish (Lallans) used by Scottish poet Robert Burns, Ulster-Scots invigorates the vernacular verse of the “weaver poets,” such as Samuel Thomson and James Orr, who were writing in the late 18th century.
The influences of and borrowings from the Irish language and, more broadly, from Gaelic culture were largely unselfconscious. The last three decades of the 18th century, however, did witness a self-aware Gaelic revival. This revival had its origins, at least in part, in Scotland and Wales. The Scottish poet James Macpherson’s “translations” from the Gaelic tradition, especially his Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), were in large part—as Samuel Johnson and as the Irish scholar, antiquarian, and activist Charles O’Conor charged—invented, but that did not retard their popularity. These Ossianic poems in fact may be seen as the foundational texts for a new movement to reclaim an ancient Celtic civilization. In Ireland this movement was represented by the antiquarian researches of O’Conor (a Catholic), Charles Vallancey (an English-born Protestant), and others, by Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), and by the influential Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) of Charlotte Brooke, the daughter of Henry Brooke. Her collections and translations from oral tradition mark both an emerging vogue for the “primitive” and a developing Irish Protestant engagement with “native” Irish heritage, which Swift could not have imagined, let alone foreseen. The year 1789 also saw the publication of Denis Woulfe’s translation into English of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an mheán oíche (The Midnight Court), the outstanding long poem of the 18th century in the Irish language.
A third way in which the Irishness of Anglo-Irish literature registers itself is at once the most difficult to pin down and the most important: style. Swift shared a common language with his English friends Alexander Pope and Viscount Bolingbroke, but, in the words of 20th-century Irish nationalist writer Daniel Corkery, “the Ascendancy mind is not the same thing as the English mind.” Nor was the Ascendancy experience the same thing as the English experience. English writers inhabited a world that—despite the bitter partisanship of the era, the succession controversy after Queen Anne’s death in 1714, and the persistent Jacobite threat—showed a degree of political security and continuity that was largely unfamiliar to Anglo-Irish writers. The Anglo-Irish were keenly aware of the precariousness of their position as a ruling elite and the anomalies and inequities of their relationship with the “mother country.” This last circumstance in particular gave rise to a condition that can be described as cultural dislocation. Just as the split personality embodied by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is sometimes read as symbolic of the Scottish predicament, it is in the predicament of the Anglo-Irish, caught uneasily between two civilizations and feeling out of place in both, that its characteristic voice—ironic, detached, nostalgic, often Gothic.
Nineteenth Century
In Belfast in 1792 there was an unprecedented gathering of Irish harpers, the aim of which, as it was described in a circular of the time, was to revive “the Ancient Music and Poetry of Ireland.” Musician and folk-song collector Edward Bunting transcribed the music played at the festival and published A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music in 1796, which was followed, in 1809 and 1840, by two expanded editions. Where Charlotte Brooke had made available to English-reading audiences the cadences of Irish poetry, Bunting’s collections of traditional Irish airs provided a musical accompaniment.
These hugely popular drawing-room songs (including “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old,” “Dear Harp of My Country,” and “Oft in the Stilly Night”) reinvented for audiences across Ireland and Great Britain a form of romantic Celticism that, though nationalist in flavour, was nonetheless politically superficial. Moore’s lyrics are sentimental and do not stand well when separated from the music to which they were written, but the cultural impact of the Irish Melodies was enormous.
This reflected the Gaelic Revival that developed in the early and mid nineteenth century. The interest in Irish language, literature, history, and folklore inspired by the growing Irish nationalism of the early 19th century. By that time Gaelic had died out as a spoken tongue except in isolated rural areas; English had become the official and literary language of Ireland. The discovery by philologists of how to read Old Irish (written prior to 900) and the subsequent translations of ancient Gaelic manuscripts (e.g., The Annals of the Four Masters) made possible the reading of Ireland’s ancient literature. Heroic tales caught the imagination of the educated classes. Anglo-Irish poets experimented with verse that was structured according to Gaelic patterns and rhythms and that echoed the passion and rich imagery of ancient bardic verse. In 1842 the patriotic organization known as Young Ireland founded The Nation, a paper that published the works of Thomas Osborne Davis, a master of prose and verse, and of such poets as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Richard D’Alton Williams, and Speranza (the pseudonym of Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde) and stirred pride in Irish literary achievements. The Dublin University Magazine (1833–80), another important literary publication, often included the work of James Clarence Mangan, who translated Gaelic poems into English and also wrote original verse in the Gaelic style.
Jeremiah John Callanan was the first to use the Gaelic refrain in English verse, and Sir Samuel Ferguson wrote epic-like poetry recalling Ireland’s heroic past. Thomas Moore, Charles Maturin, and Maria Edgeworth also incorporated Irish themes from earlier Gaelic works into their writings. The Gaelic revival was not a widespread, vigorous movement because political nationalism and the need for land reform overshadowed cultural nationalism. The revival did, however, lay the scholarly and nationalistic groundwork for the Irish literary renaissance, the great flowering of Irish literary talent at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
Irish Literary Renaissance reflected talent at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that was closely allied with political nationalism and a revival of interest in Gaelic literary heritage. The early leaders of the renaissance wrote rich and passionate verse, filled with the grandeur of Ireland’s past and the music and mysticism of Gaelic poetry. They were mainly members of the privileged class and were adept at English verse forms and familiar with lyric poetry that extolled the simple dignity of the Irish peasant and the natural beauty of Ireland.
In poetry, in addition to Yeats, the mystic George Russell composed works of enduring interest. Notable among their younger contemporaries were Padraic Colum, Austin Clarke, Seumas O’Sullivan (James Sullivan Starkey), F.R. Higgins, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. The Irish Republican movement had its poets in Patrick Henry Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett, all executed in 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising.
Twentieth Century
In 1878 Standish James O’Grady, considered by his contemporaries the “father” of this revival, published History of Ireland: The Heroic Period. More a fantasia than a history, it nonetheless introduced a new generation of nationalists to the myths and legends of early Irish history. This Gaelic past would ballast the rising nationalist movement, providing it with subject matter and inspiration. In 1893 Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League to preserve the Irish language and to revive it where it had ceased to be spoken. Hyde became a central figure in the revival, and his translations of poetry from the Irish inflected new poetry being written in English at the turn of the 20th century. In 1892 he gave the lecture “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” a call to embrace things authentically Irish. Hyde’s call gave rise to multiple organizations that pushed a nationalist agenda in the 1890s and early 1900s and, by 1905, had culminated in the foundation of the Sinn Féin movement. In literary terms, this period saw a renaissance in Irish drama and poetry in particular and a move away from realism.
Ireland's literary tradition was also tied to the traumatic political and cultural changes that Ireland sustained and to which writers responded. By 1923, Ireland had experienced rebellion (the Easter Rising), the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), a civil war (1922–23), and the partition of the country into two states. Of the 32 Irish counties, 26 were newly independent; 6, in northeast Ulster, became “Northern Ireland.” In the independent counties, a new political and cultural dispensation reigned in which the energies of revolutionary nationalism and the Irish literary renaissance gave way to the lethargies of a constrictive, censorious, and clericalist Roman Catholicism, a narrow and conservative nationalism, and a parochial, self-imposed isolation that would last until the 1960s. While the new independent establishment officially sanctified the Irish Revolution, it now tried to close off revolutionary ideas. Writers inevitably reacted to these new conditions, many of them negatively.
In the theatre, working-class Protestant Sean O’Casey, who had been involved in radical Dublin politics in the period before 1916, placed a new antinationalist and socialist agenda on the stage. His plays often explore the effect on ordinary Dubliners of events sparked by political unrest. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), for instance, explores one family’s experience of raids by Black and Tans (members of a British auxiliary police force) during the War of Independence. Juno and the Paycock (1924) takes the civil war as its backdrop, and The Plough and the Stars (1926) deals with the Easter Rising. All three plays were performed at the Abbey Theatre.
Irish fiction became largely concentrated in a newly embraced national genre after independence: the short story. Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, both from Cork, had been pupils of the nationalist writer Daniel Corkery, whose account of 18th-century Irish literary history, The Hidden Ireland (1925), was a key moment in the development of a native Irish literary criticism. O’Connor and O’Faolain, however, rejected their early affinities with republicanism and nationalism and began to produce stories that dealt squarely and realistically with the contemporary condition of their country. O’Faolain also founded a literary magazine, The Bell, in 1940, and it remained a crucial outlet for the best Irish writers, particularly during World War II, when Ireland’s neutrality isolated it even further from wider European literary currents. Work in the short story similar to that of O’Connor and O’Faolain was done by Liam O’Flaherty, Michael McLaverty, and Mary Lavin. McLaverty was for a time the lone Roman Catholic literary voice in Protestant and unionist-dominated Northern Ireland, while Lavin, born in the United States, made middle-class domestic life her subject. Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in Dublin but spent much of her adult life in London, began publishing volumes of short stories in the 1920s.
What might be called a “counterrevival” in response to the Irish literary renaissance continued also in the field of poetry. Patrick Kavanagh, an impoverished and largely self-educated farmer from County Monaghan, produced an extraordinary body of work in which he managed to represent the grim realities of Irish rural life in language that is also luminous with a simple Catholic spirituality. Landscape and the reality of place—as opposed to an ill-defined, misty version of the west of Ireland—dominate Kavanagh’s vision. His greatest work is his long poem The Great Hunger (1942), in which the celibate, lonely life of a farmer is laid out in a bleak, earthy lyricism. Kavanagh powerfully shaped the poetry of a later generation of writers, in particular that of Seamus Heaney.
The 1960s changed Irish culture, often painfully. In literary terms, the government censorship of the preceding 30 years began to be challenged in a more sustained fashion. In 1960 Edna O’Brien published The Country Girls, the first novel in a trilogy that helped open up discussion of the role of women and sex in Irish society and of Roman Catholicism’s oppressive force upon women. The novel was banned, and O’Brien left Ireland shortly thereafter. John McGahern too had his early work banned, but he continued to produce novels that subtly probed the changes rapidly transforming Ireland. Amongst Women (1990) is his most critically acclaimed and moving novel.
But the main cultural and political crisis in Ireland in the 1960s and beyond was the explosion of the “Troubles,” a term used to describe the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. This violence was accompanied by a necessarily urgent literary reaction—some 800 Troubles-related novels, for instance, had been published by the early 21st century—and there began in Northern Ireland an extraordinary poetic flowering. The American-born John Montague initiated this process with the long poem The Rough Field (1972), a milestone in contemporary Irish poetry, but his reputation was soon eclipsed by the arrival of Seamus Heaney, who in 1995 became Ireland’s fourth winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney’s lyrical, muscular, aural poetry, like Montague’s, delved into the Irish past and into what Heaney called the “word-hoard” of the Irish landscape. His frequent use of traditional forms.
In a number of novels published in the late 1980s and ’90s, it seemed that Irish writers for the first time were finally able to explore the political and cultural transformations their country had undergone in the previous 60 years. Among these, the work of Patrick McCabe, in particular The Butcher Boy (1992) and The Dead School (1995), stands out. So too does that of John Banville, among Ireland’s preeminent novelists at the end of the 20th century.
As Ireland entered the 18th century, it faced several challenges The country was dominated by the Protestant and English-speaking minority, which had triumphed over Roman Catholic Ireland at the Battles of the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) after the Glorious Revolution; the Protestant population’s control over the country was later referred to as the Protestant Ascendancy. The legacy of the political settlement in Ireland that followed the defeat at Aughrim thus had a strongly sectarian and colonial cast that, when coupled with the grim Irish realities of conflict and poverty, would later trouble the writings of Edmund Burke. Whig writers such as Burke and Jonathan Swift, who considered the Glorious Revolution a triumph of liberty, also stumbled over the long-standing unequal relationship between the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain. Protestant patriots rejected the notion that Ireland was either a dependent kingdom or a colony, but the statute book, the economic and political restrictions placed on Ireland by the British government at London, and the planting of English placement in Irish jobs instructed them otherwise.
Swift demonstrated no interest in the “barbarous” Irish language and, unlike Burke, no sympathy for poor Irish Roman Catholics. Swift’s views were an expression of his own bifurcated vision of Irish writing. According to such a view, 18th-century Ireland produced two distinct literatures that never touched or intersected: one in English, the language of print, and another in Irish, mainly in manuscript. Thus conceptualized, the first—what is best called Anglo-Irish literature—can scarcely be separated from the wider English tradition. If, as English critic Samuel Johnson remarked, the noblest prospect that a Scotsman ever sees is the high road to England, for many an ambitious Anglo-Irish writer—including the Shakespeare scholar and editor Edmund Malone, one of Johnson’s friends in London—that prospect was the boat to Holyhead, the Welsh port that served as the chief entry point for travelers to the British mainland from Ireland. Burke, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and many others left Ireland and made their careers in England. After 1714 Swift wanted to leave Ireland but could not, given the political changes in England that had led to his Irish exile. He likened his condition in Dublin to that of a “poisoned rat in a hole.” London exerted an almost irresistible force as a literary and theatrical market. Anglo-Irish drama and novels were written mostly with an English audience in view; in terms of content, there is often nothing specifically Irish about, for example, the plays and novels of Henry Brooke or the essays and poetry of Goldsmith.
Yet Ireland was not absent from Anglo-Irish writing. Indeed, there is a good deal of Irish content in the drama and poetry. “Irish” plays were among the most popular and most often performed of the 18th century. They include Ireland Preserv’d; or, The Siege of Londonderry (1705) by John Mitchelburne (Michelborne); its companion piece, Robert Ashton’s The Battle of Aughrim (1728), of which as many as 25 editions were published between 1770 and 1840; and the better-known True-Born Irishman (1763) by Charles Macklin. The first two—vividly recorded by William Carleton as part of Ulster popular culture well into the 19th century—underlined the narrowly Protestant character of the post-Aughrim political settlement in Ireland, although The Battle of Aughrim appealed to Catholics as well for its portrayal of the Jacobite hero Patrick Sarsfield. More mundanely, the hero of Macklin’s play is a resident landlord, a personification of the sort of practical patriotism promoted by the Royal Dublin Society (founded 1731) and articulated by a substantial pamphlet literature stretching from Swift’s A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures (1720) to Samuel Madden’s Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (1738) and including Viscount Molesworth’s Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723), Thomas Prior’s best-selling A List of the Absentees of Ireland (1729), Arthur Dobbs’s An Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland (1729–31), and George Berkeley’s The Querist (1735–37).
A second Irish dimension in Anglo-Irish literature of the period may be detected in the cross-fertilizations of language. At their most basic level, these cross-fertilizations produced Hiberno-English—the “barbarous denominations” of the Irish brogue, as Swift had it, from which an Englishman expected nothing but “bulls, blunders, and follies.” Hiberno-English was usually deployed as a highly self-conscious comic device, and stage Irishmen, such as Sir Callaghan O’Brallaghan in Macklin’s Love à la Mode (1759) and Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), delighted 18th-century audiences, including Irish ones.
At a more subtle level, close scrutiny of Irish verse in English reveals that the languages did not so much coexist across a yawning divide as cohabit in an intimate, mutually enriching relationship. The impact of linguistic proximity is discernible not only in the conscription into poetry of “nonstandard” local vocabulary but in the infiltration of traditional Irish metrics as well. A third “language” in which verse was composed further complicates the binary opposition of English and Irish: the Ulster-Scots dialect. A regional variant of the Lowlands Scottish (Lallans) used by Scottish poet Robert Burns, Ulster-Scots invigorates the vernacular verse of the “weaver poets,” such as Samuel Thomson and James Orr, who were writing in the late 18th century.
The influences of and borrowings from the Irish language and, more broadly, from Gaelic culture were largely unselfconscious. The last three decades of the 18th century, however, did witness a self-aware Gaelic revival. This revival had its origins, at least in part, in Scotland and Wales. The Scottish poet James Macpherson’s “translations” from the Gaelic tradition, especially his Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), were in large part—as Samuel Johnson and as the Irish scholar, antiquarian, and activist Charles O’Conor charged—invented, but that did not retard their popularity. These Ossianic poems in fact may be seen as the foundational texts for a new movement to reclaim an ancient Celtic civilization. In Ireland this movement was represented by the antiquarian researches of O’Conor (a Catholic), Charles Vallancey (an English-born Protestant), and others, by Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), and by the influential Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) of Charlotte Brooke, the daughter of Henry Brooke. Her collections and translations from oral tradition mark both an emerging vogue for the “primitive” and a developing Irish Protestant engagement with “native” Irish heritage, which Swift could not have imagined, let alone foreseen. The year 1789 also saw the publication of Denis Woulfe’s translation into English of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an mheán oíche (The Midnight Court), the outstanding long poem of the 18th century in the Irish language.
A third way in which the Irishness of Anglo-Irish literature registers itself is at once the most difficult to pin down and the most important: style. Swift shared a common language with his English friends Alexander Pope and Viscount Bolingbroke, but, in the words of 20th-century Irish nationalist writer Daniel Corkery, “the Ascendancy mind is not the same thing as the English mind.” Nor was the Ascendancy experience the same thing as the English experience. English writers inhabited a world that—despite the bitter partisanship of the era, the succession controversy after Queen Anne’s death in 1714, and the persistent Jacobite threat—showed a degree of political security and continuity that was largely unfamiliar to Anglo-Irish writers. The Anglo-Irish were keenly aware of the precariousness of their position as a ruling elite and the anomalies and inequities of their relationship with the “mother country.” This last circumstance in particular gave rise to a condition that can be described as cultural dislocation. Just as the split personality embodied by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is sometimes read as symbolic of the Scottish predicament, it is in the predicament of the Anglo-Irish, caught uneasily between two civilizations and feeling out of place in both, that its characteristic voice—ironic, detached, nostalgic, often Gothic.
Nineteenth Century
In Belfast in 1792 there was an unprecedented gathering of Irish harpers, the aim of which, as it was described in a circular of the time, was to revive “the Ancient Music and Poetry of Ireland.” Musician and folk-song collector Edward Bunting transcribed the music played at the festival and published A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music in 1796, which was followed, in 1809 and 1840, by two expanded editions. Where Charlotte Brooke had made available to English-reading audiences the cadences of Irish poetry, Bunting’s collections of traditional Irish airs provided a musical accompaniment.
These hugely popular drawing-room songs (including “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old,” “Dear Harp of My Country,” and “Oft in the Stilly Night”) reinvented for audiences across Ireland and Great Britain a form of romantic Celticism that, though nationalist in flavour, was nonetheless politically superficial. Moore’s lyrics are sentimental and do not stand well when separated from the music to which they were written, but the cultural impact of the Irish Melodies was enormous.
This reflected the Gaelic Revival that developed in the early and mid nineteenth century. The interest in Irish language, literature, history, and folklore inspired by the growing Irish nationalism of the early 19th century. By that time Gaelic had died out as a spoken tongue except in isolated rural areas; English had become the official and literary language of Ireland. The discovery by philologists of how to read Old Irish (written prior to 900) and the subsequent translations of ancient Gaelic manuscripts (e.g., The Annals of the Four Masters) made possible the reading of Ireland’s ancient literature. Heroic tales caught the imagination of the educated classes. Anglo-Irish poets experimented with verse that was structured according to Gaelic patterns and rhythms and that echoed the passion and rich imagery of ancient bardic verse. In 1842 the patriotic organization known as Young Ireland founded The Nation, a paper that published the works of Thomas Osborne Davis, a master of prose and verse, and of such poets as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Richard D’Alton Williams, and Speranza (the pseudonym of Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde) and stirred pride in Irish literary achievements. The Dublin University Magazine (1833–80), another important literary publication, often included the work of James Clarence Mangan, who translated Gaelic poems into English and also wrote original verse in the Gaelic style.
Jeremiah John Callanan was the first to use the Gaelic refrain in English verse, and Sir Samuel Ferguson wrote epic-like poetry recalling Ireland’s heroic past. Thomas Moore, Charles Maturin, and Maria Edgeworth also incorporated Irish themes from earlier Gaelic works into their writings. The Gaelic revival was not a widespread, vigorous movement because political nationalism and the need for land reform overshadowed cultural nationalism. The revival did, however, lay the scholarly and nationalistic groundwork for the Irish literary renaissance, the great flowering of Irish literary talent at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
Irish Literary Renaissance reflected talent at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that was closely allied with political nationalism and a revival of interest in Gaelic literary heritage. The early leaders of the renaissance wrote rich and passionate verse, filled with the grandeur of Ireland’s past and the music and mysticism of Gaelic poetry. They were mainly members of the privileged class and were adept at English verse forms and familiar with lyric poetry that extolled the simple dignity of the Irish peasant and the natural beauty of Ireland.
In poetry, in addition to Yeats, the mystic George Russell composed works of enduring interest. Notable among their younger contemporaries were Padraic Colum, Austin Clarke, Seumas O’Sullivan (James Sullivan Starkey), F.R. Higgins, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. The Irish Republican movement had its poets in Patrick Henry Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett, all executed in 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising.
Twentieth Century
In 1878 Standish James O’Grady, considered by his contemporaries the “father” of this revival, published History of Ireland: The Heroic Period. More a fantasia than a history, it nonetheless introduced a new generation of nationalists to the myths and legends of early Irish history. This Gaelic past would ballast the rising nationalist movement, providing it with subject matter and inspiration. In 1893 Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League to preserve the Irish language and to revive it where it had ceased to be spoken. Hyde became a central figure in the revival, and his translations of poetry from the Irish inflected new poetry being written in English at the turn of the 20th century. In 1892 he gave the lecture “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” a call to embrace things authentically Irish. Hyde’s call gave rise to multiple organizations that pushed a nationalist agenda in the 1890s and early 1900s and, by 1905, had culminated in the foundation of the Sinn Féin movement. In literary terms, this period saw a renaissance in Irish drama and poetry in particular and a move away from realism.
Ireland's literary tradition was also tied to the traumatic political and cultural changes that Ireland sustained and to which writers responded. By 1923, Ireland had experienced rebellion (the Easter Rising), the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), a civil war (1922–23), and the partition of the country into two states. Of the 32 Irish counties, 26 were newly independent; 6, in northeast Ulster, became “Northern Ireland.” In the independent counties, a new political and cultural dispensation reigned in which the energies of revolutionary nationalism and the Irish literary renaissance gave way to the lethargies of a constrictive, censorious, and clericalist Roman Catholicism, a narrow and conservative nationalism, and a parochial, self-imposed isolation that would last until the 1960s. While the new independent establishment officially sanctified the Irish Revolution, it now tried to close off revolutionary ideas. Writers inevitably reacted to these new conditions, many of them negatively.
In the theatre, working-class Protestant Sean O’Casey, who had been involved in radical Dublin politics in the period before 1916, placed a new antinationalist and socialist agenda on the stage. His plays often explore the effect on ordinary Dubliners of events sparked by political unrest. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), for instance, explores one family’s experience of raids by Black and Tans (members of a British auxiliary police force) during the War of Independence. Juno and the Paycock (1924) takes the civil war as its backdrop, and The Plough and the Stars (1926) deals with the Easter Rising. All three plays were performed at the Abbey Theatre.
Irish fiction became largely concentrated in a newly embraced national genre after independence: the short story. Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, both from Cork, had been pupils of the nationalist writer Daniel Corkery, whose account of 18th-century Irish literary history, The Hidden Ireland (1925), was a key moment in the development of a native Irish literary criticism. O’Connor and O’Faolain, however, rejected their early affinities with republicanism and nationalism and began to produce stories that dealt squarely and realistically with the contemporary condition of their country. O’Faolain also founded a literary magazine, The Bell, in 1940, and it remained a crucial outlet for the best Irish writers, particularly during World War II, when Ireland’s neutrality isolated it even further from wider European literary currents. Work in the short story similar to that of O’Connor and O’Faolain was done by Liam O’Flaherty, Michael McLaverty, and Mary Lavin. McLaverty was for a time the lone Roman Catholic literary voice in Protestant and unionist-dominated Northern Ireland, while Lavin, born in the United States, made middle-class domestic life her subject. Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in Dublin but spent much of her adult life in London, began publishing volumes of short stories in the 1920s.
What might be called a “counterrevival” in response to the Irish literary renaissance continued also in the field of poetry. Patrick Kavanagh, an impoverished and largely self-educated farmer from County Monaghan, produced an extraordinary body of work in which he managed to represent the grim realities of Irish rural life in language that is also luminous with a simple Catholic spirituality. Landscape and the reality of place—as opposed to an ill-defined, misty version of the west of Ireland—dominate Kavanagh’s vision. His greatest work is his long poem The Great Hunger (1942), in which the celibate, lonely life of a farmer is laid out in a bleak, earthy lyricism. Kavanagh powerfully shaped the poetry of a later generation of writers, in particular that of Seamus Heaney.
The 1960s changed Irish culture, often painfully. In literary terms, the government censorship of the preceding 30 years began to be challenged in a more sustained fashion. In 1960 Edna O’Brien published The Country Girls, the first novel in a trilogy that helped open up discussion of the role of women and sex in Irish society and of Roman Catholicism’s oppressive force upon women. The novel was banned, and O’Brien left Ireland shortly thereafter. John McGahern too had his early work banned, but he continued to produce novels that subtly probed the changes rapidly transforming Ireland. Amongst Women (1990) is his most critically acclaimed and moving novel.
But the main cultural and political crisis in Ireland in the 1960s and beyond was the explosion of the “Troubles,” a term used to describe the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. This violence was accompanied by a necessarily urgent literary reaction—some 800 Troubles-related novels, for instance, had been published by the early 21st century—and there began in Northern Ireland an extraordinary poetic flowering. The American-born John Montague initiated this process with the long poem The Rough Field (1972), a milestone in contemporary Irish poetry, but his reputation was soon eclipsed by the arrival of Seamus Heaney, who in 1995 became Ireland’s fourth winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney’s lyrical, muscular, aural poetry, like Montague’s, delved into the Irish past and into what Heaney called the “word-hoard” of the Irish landscape. His frequent use of traditional forms.
In a number of novels published in the late 1980s and ’90s, it seemed that Irish writers for the first time were finally able to explore the political and cultural transformations their country had undergone in the previous 60 years. Among these, the work of Patrick McCabe, in particular The Butcher Boy (1992) and The Dead School (1995), stands out. So too does that of John Banville, among Ireland’s preeminent novelists at the end of the 20th century.