‘The best English-Irish poetry before Yeats’

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Moulden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Traditional Songs ◽  
High Level

‘[T]he best Irish-English poetry before Yeats’: thus, in The Listener in 1970, John Holloway described a genre of exuberantly worded songs that employed complex patterns of rhyme deriving from Irish language poetry, many of which were among the nineteenth-century ballad sheet collections of Sir Frederic Madden, held in Cambridge University library. Items in this form seem to have surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, soon after the appearance of the earliest eight-page songbook to be printed in Ireland, and probably the first anywhere in the ‘British Isles’. This essay traces the development of this genre towards, perhaps its finest manifestation, the luxuriously florid bawdry of ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’, probably composed by the northern-born but Drogheda-based weaver poet John Sheil (c.1784–1872). Many commonly known and apparently innocuous traditional songs are found as bawdry in early collections and employ a range of sexual metaphors, well understood at that time among men but not (openly) among women or more recently. The combination of verbal flourish and double entendre together with a consummate control over the complexity of rhyme and rhythm forced John Holloway to recognize vernacular verse as, not a debased version of ‘educated’ poetry, but as a genre with its own standards, a parallel form that bears comparison at a high level.

Aspects of Irish-language song transmission in Munster, 1700–1850

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciarán Ó Gealbháin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Literary Transmission ◽  
Song Transmission

This chapter looks at aspects of Irish-language song transmission in Munster in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. As musical airs were ascribed to written poetry with greater and greater frequency in manuscript sources throughout the eighteenth century, the suggested airs to which this sung poetry circulated will be discussed, and reference made to the oeuvre of the most prominent of the eighteenth-century Munster poets, who often set their poetry to the popular tunes of their day. Aspects of oral and literary transmission of song will be given consideration, before focusing on two important collections of Irish song, taken from the field in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Complete Spectator

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-211
Author(s):  
Hazel Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Original Series ◽  
Scholarly Edition ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Spectator

The Spectator was one of the greatest publishing sensations of the eighteenth century. The first multivolume collected edition was in the press before the original series had been concluded, and it soon appeared in luxury illustrated volumes, pocket formats, and schoolroom editions. This chapter charts the first hundred years of the Spectator’s life in print, focusing on complete editions produced in the British Isles. The account begins with the Tonsons’ bookselling dynasty, and their dominance of the London Spectator market for the first half of the century, taking in the first illustrations of the papers and the first scholarly edition. In Scotland and Ireland a parallel market flourished, and Scottish writers were responsible for landmark scholarly editions at the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter is accompanied (in an Appendix) by a descriptive catalogue of complete editions of the Spectator from 1712 to 1812, accounting for 79 editions (over 600 volumes). The catalogue is a key resource for further study of The Spectator, its afterlives, and influence.

Free Verse

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Munro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Free verse is a technique of poetic composition that was employed and discussed by poets and critics during the modernist period. Exemplified by a disregard for regular metre and rhyme, free verse came into English poetry via two main routes: the work of the American poet Walt Whitman, and late nineteenth-century French Symbolist poetry. Although not precisely equivalent, the French term vers libre began to be used interchangeably with free verse in the early 1910s when members of the Imagist movement began to advocate its use to develop an aesthetic that shifted verse written in English away from the Victorian poetry they considered hackneyed and full of unnecessary words. The movement toward free verse had a tremendous influence on English-language poetry throughout the modernist period and beyond, even though, by the 1920s and 30s, some of the mode’s earliest advocates (including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot) were criticizing what they saw as a decline in the quality of poems written in free verse, and urging a return to the more formal features of rhyme and regular lineation.

scholarly journals Between Heterodox and Sunni Orthodox Islam: The Bektaşi Order in the Nineteenth Century and Its Opponents

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-218
Author(s):  
Butrus Abu-Manneh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sufi Order ◽  
The One ◽  
High Level

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century Ottoman society, especially in cities suffered from a dichotomy. On the one hand there existed for several centuries the Bektaşi which was heterodox order. But in the eighteenth century there started to expand from India a new sufi order: the Naqshbandi – Mujaddidi order known to have been a shari’a minded and highly orthodox order. The result was a dichotomy between religious trends the clash between which reached a high level in 1826. Following the destruction of the janissaries, the Bektaşi order lost its traditional protector and few weeks later was abolished. But a generation later it started to experience a beginning of a revival and by the mid 1860s it started to practice unhindered. But after the rise of Sultan Abdülhamid ii (in 1876) the Bektaşis were again forced to practice clandestinely. However, they supported Mustafa Kemal in the national struggle.

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