The earliest surviving poems in Ireland can be traced back as far as the 6th century AD. Undoubtedly the poetic tradition predates these as a strong oral tradition that continues to the present day. Early Irish poets trained for 12 years by which time they were second in status only to the King. They were required to record the royal genealogy and history in verse as well as composing curses and satires of political enemies. Another tradition that continues!
With the settlement of English planters in the late 17th century, Irish poetry changed dramatically. Poets lost their high, professional status and were hired to write poems in English for the landed settlers. Traditional Irish speaking poets continued to write, lamenting the loss of Irish culture and heritage.
The 18th century saw the emergence of one of Ireland’s best known writers, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Swift was a novelist and poet writing in English and Irish, signalling the start of an era where serious Irish poets expressed the Irish tradition through English.
The Celtic revival in the late 19th century and early 20th century produced some of Ireland’s most famous poets. The work of Oscar Wilde and W.B Yeats influenced many poets in the years that followed and Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.
While Yeats and his contemporaries wrote about an aristocratic Gaelic Ireland, Post Civil War Ireland produced some outstanding modern poets with roots perhaps more representative of the nation of small farmers and shopkeepers. Names such as Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella will be familiar to those raised on poetry from the Leaving Cert textbook ‘Soundings’ but the 20th century also introduced among others, John Montague, Eavan Boland and Louis McNeice as well as Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s second Nobel prize winner.
There are modernists and post-modernists, outsiders and traditionalists, the Northern movement, poets writing in English and Irish and in the final decades of the twentieth century, not before time, many women poets have emerged and flourished in the vibrant Irish poetry scene.
Poetry in Ireland today:
And today sees another renaissance and a travelled and travelling generation, looking out of Ireland as well as inwards. More poetry is published than ever before, magazines and anthologies break new ground, online communities thrive and hundreds of people turn out to innovative festivals and spoken word events up and down the country.
