Thomas Davis’ “The Sack of Baltimore”: A Literary-Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article is an attempt to read Thomas Davis’ poem “The Sack of Baltimore” (1845) from a literary-historical perspective. It explores Davis’ representation of the sack of Baltimore village, West Cork, Ireland as a historical event depicted from a literary angle. A typical nineteenth-century historical Irish ballad, “The Sack of Baltimore” has not only remained at the margins of literary studies, but even where it has received attention, it has mainly been treated as a historical source material on an Algerian piratical raid that has come to be called “the sack of Baltimore”. This paper proposes that we need to reread the Irish poet’s narrative poem with a stronger interest both in its literary composition and historical contexts. Only in this way would it be possible to do justice and draw more sustained attention to this hitherto understudied lyrical narrative poem.