Irish song and the idea of tradition

Defining ‘tradition’ as something passed on within a community that provides a matrix for its understanding of past events and present choices, this essay discusses the evolution of Irish poetry and song since 1200. It explores the connections between vernacular poetry and various learned (literary) traditions, including bardic poetry (syllabic verse) and the later ‘poetic courts’ and ‘schools of poetry’, in terms of themes, verse structure, social context, and sung performance. It demonstrates that while some practices were bound to specific social contexts, the strand that most people today identify as ‘the Irish song tradition’ still employs centuries-old themes including panegyric and the Anglo-Norman ‘courtly love’ rhetoric, and displays prosodic features evidenced in Middle Irish bardic sources. Finally, we consider the emergence of ‘tradition’ as a concept, the impact since 1850 of song collecting and technology on repertoire and performance, and the implications of ‘authenticity’ for today’s definition of ‘tradition’.

‘The best English-Irish poetry before Yeats’

‘[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.

Human Rights, Posthuman Ethics, and the Material Aesthetics of Flight in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This article examines a series of poems by Irish authors, and focuses on their engagement with human rights violations and conflicts through the metaphors and imagery of flight and the aerial view. It argues that these poems address the need for a shift away from the perspective of a defined, distinct human subject, and towards a posthumanist framework which emphasizes relational, situated, and embodied ethics and aesthetics in an interconnected world. Since the introduction of modern aviation, Irish poets have frequently employed the imagery of flying to consider poetry's role in relation to conflict and crisis. Here, the adoption of visual and material metaphors of flight and aerial travel in human rights contexts is discussed, particularly in poems by Seamus Heaney, Peter Sirr and Justin Quinn. Through a reimagined poetics of flight, these poets question established dichotomies between proximity and distance, and material embodiment and disembodied abstraction.

MODERN LITERATURE

This chapter has eight sections 1. General; 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post-1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry Pre-1950; 7. British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Shawna Ross; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; Section 2(b) will resume in 2022; section 2(c) is by Georgina Binnie; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Sophie Stringfellow; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Jack Quin.

By Way of Old Petersburg: Desmond O’Grady and Russian Poetry

The article takes on a direction which has great potential for further studies of contemporary Irish poetry: studying the work of Irish poets through their relation to Russian literature. It focuses on the reception and reimagining of Russian poetry in the work of Desmond O’Grady, one of the leading figures in Irish poetry, who started writing in mid-1950s. The article studies three poems by O’Grady which are addressed to his Russian counterparts: “Missing Andrei Voznesensky,” “Joseph Brodsky Visits Kinsale,” and “My City,” a translation from Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero.” None of these poems has yet been subject of thorough critical analysis. Each of the poems has become a signpost on O’Grady’s poetic map and an important element of his own “private mythology.” When analysed in the wider context of Irish poetry, they help form a clearer picture of the influence Russian literature has had on contemporary Irish poets.