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Poetry by poets from Ireland

Irish poetry is poetry written by poets from Ireland, politically the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today. It is mainly written in Irish, though some is in English, Scottish Gaelic and others in Hiberno Latin. The complex interplay between the two main traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English and Scottish Gaelic, 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 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 tradition and those facing questions posed by an increasingly urban and cosmopolitan society.

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 (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 imagery 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.

The second half of the century also saw the emergence of a number of women poets including Eavan Boland (born 1944), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (born 1942), Vona Groarke, Kerry Hardie, Kate Newmann, Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, and Rita Ann Higgins. 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.

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). Ó hÉigeartaigh, an immigrant from Uíbh Ráthach, County Kerry, worked in the clothing business and lived with his family in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ó hÉigeartaigh also wrote poetry for the same publication in Munster Irish. 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 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 hÉigeartaigh's lament for his son has a permanent place in the literary canon of Irish poetry in the Irish language and has been translated into English by both Patrick Pearse and Thomas Kinsella. Louis De Paor has alleged that the execution of Patrick Pearse by a British Army firing squad following the defeat of the Easter Rising of 1916, was a catastrophe for Irish literature in the Irish language. This is because Pearce's surviving poetry was radically innovative and shows the influences of Walt Whitman, Modernist poetry, and of the French Symbolists. 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 was Seán Ó Súilleabháin (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 of County Cork. In 1905, Ó Súilleabháin sailed aboard the ocean liner Lucania from Queenstown to Ellis Island and settled in the heavily Irish American mining community of Butte, Montana. Following his arrival, Ó Súilleabháin never returned to Ireland. In Montana, 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 literary, cultural, and Irish republican 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, 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 and the Irish War of Independence; 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's 1919 visit to Butte. The future Taoiseach of the Irish Republic 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. 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, County Kerry, 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 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 ("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, and member of the Irish civil service, 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 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. Gógan had, according to De Paor, an encyclopedic knowledge of the Western canon, which found its way into his poetry. Gógan was also the first poet to write sonnets in the Irish language. Unlike most other Irish language poets, who choose to compose in particular regional dialects, Gógan believed that a standard literary language, 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 and Classical Gaelic, the literary language once taught in the Bardic schools of both Ireland and the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Colm Breathnach, who set out to re popularize Gógan's poetry during the 2017 Imram literary festival, 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 words) 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, other works would portray urban angst, 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 (1910 1988), Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916 1977) and Máire Mhac an tSaoi (1922 2021). Their poetry, though retaining a sense of the tradition, continued the legacy of Pearse by introducing Modernist poetry into the Irish language. According to Louis De Paor, "Máire Mhac an tSaoi spent two years studying in post war Paris (1945 47) before joining the Irish diplomatic service, and was working at the Irish embassy in Madrid, during Franco's regime, when she committed herself to writing poetry in Irish following her discovery of the works of Federico Garcia Lorca. 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 (1919 1982), an Irish language poet and novelist from Ballinasloe, County Galway who had served as a commissioned officer in the Irish Army during The Emergency. Like Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, 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 and by demanding a creative freedom that would acknowledge hybridity and reject the strictures of the linguistic purists." 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"). The poem is an imitation of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, "with the significant omission of 'Credo' and 'Gloria.'" 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. While everyone is culpable in the annihilation of Hiroshima, 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 (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. 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". 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. 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"). 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 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. In a copy that he gifted to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford Upon Avon, 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, 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.

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.