Irish Verse Research Articles

The Harp and the Eagle: teaching Irish Poetry in Mexico

Ireland and Mexico share a long tradition of intercultural relationships. The Latin American nation has received significant influence from the mind-frames and oeuvre of Irish or Irish-descended thinkers, and authors. In the field of literature, the presence of Irish writers in Mexico has been equally relevant. A number of them are constantly referenced in middle- to higher-education institutions as paradigmatic examples of the Anglophone belles lettres. Nevertheless, and with the possible exception of Yeats, limited academic and pedagogic attention has been paid to Irish poetry, almost exclusively in English, until comparatively recent times. As of the mid-2000s, the School of Philosophy and Literature (FFyL) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has witnessed a surge in academic efforts to promote the verse production of Anglo-Irish poets in the country. With the publication in 2003 of the anthology Una lengua injertada [A Grafted Tongue] and, more recently, with the establishment of the Contemporary Anglo-Irish Literature Research Project, FFyL-UNAM have inaugurated a new era for the study of (Anglo-) Irish verse in Mexico and Spanish-speaking America. This article will explore the critical and pedagogical approaches with which FFyL-UNAM have tackled the teaching of (Anglo) Irish poetry over at least one decade.

On the use of the Urlann in Deibhidhe and S�adnadh metres in Classical Irish verse

On the use of the Urlann in Deibhidhe and S�adnadh metres in Classical Irish verse

Humour and the super-ego: A case study of Paul Muldoon’s poetry

This article focuses on the workings of ‘humour’, a phenomenon that is often neglected in Freudian readings of literature, and also (perhaps relatedly) in the analysis of work with patients. Challenging views that the details of humour are best left uninterpreted, it explores how they can provide a mode of access to what is important. In particular, it focuses on the idea of Galgenhumor (literally ‘gallows humour’) in Northern Irish verse. The Ulster poet Paul Muldoon provides a ‘case study’ of someone using considerable humour while facing political atrocities. I aim to show that Muldoon can be viewed as a useful chronicler of ‘the Troubles’ and that a Freudian view of his humour can help readers to appreciate his significance. The method of the article is to interpret some of Muldoon’s verse by applying Freudian theory, working on the basis that poetry can sometimes achieve its effects in ways that are obscured to both the reader and the poet. I have not set out to psychoanalyze Paul Muldoon through a reading of his poems, but rather to stage a discussion of ways that humour can work, making use of Freud’s theories about the unconscious, especially his writings on humour. I examine how humour can create an outlet for affect while simultaneously assisting its repression, and also how it can leave memorable traces of traumatic experience, making it easier for the experience to become available for retrospective examination and exploration.

An Interview with Thomas Kinsella

An Interview with Thomas Kinsella Adrienne Leavy At eighty-three years of age, Thomas Kinsella stands as something of an elder statesmen among Irish poets, and he is widely acknowledged as one of Ireland’s most important contemporary authors. Born in Dublin, Kinsella began his long and distinguished literary career in the 1950s, and has continued to this day to publish innovative and challenging poetry that reflects his lifelong preoccupation with both eliciting order, and imposing order, on the direct experience of life. Kinsella’s first major collection, Another September (1958), was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Subsequent collections garnered great critical acclaim in Ireland and England, and he received the Denis Devlin Memorial Award in 1967. In 1965 Kinsella abandoned a promising career in the Department of Finance and moved to the United States, where he was writer-in residence at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for three years. Kinsella accepted an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1970 to join the faculty as professor of English, a position he held for the next twenty years. Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968), which marked Kinsella’s departure from his early formalism, first introduced his work to a large American audience. In this volume, Kinsella’s evolving poetic view of life as an ordeal and the importance of an artistic response to this ordeal, surfaced clearly. In 1972 Kin-sella published Butcher’s Dozen, a response to the Widgery Report on the killing of thirteen civil rights demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday. The poem first appeared under Kinsella’s own imprint, the Peppercanister Press, which has continued to publish all his new work before he revises and reissues the material in trade editions. Butcher’s Dozen was followed by A Selected Life, Finistere, and Notes from the Land of the Dead that same year, and Vertical Man and The Good Fight in 1973. The second series of Peppercanister publications, appearing in the years 1974–1978, includes One, A Technical Supplement, and Song of the Night and Other Poems. Later Peppercanister work has included The Messenger, Songs of the Psyche, Her Vertical Smile, Out of Ireland, St. Catherine’s Clock, One Fond Embrace, Personal Places, Poems from Centre City, Madonna and Other Poems, Open Court, The Pen Shop, The Familiar, Godhead, Citizen of the World, [End Page 136] Littlebody, Marginal Economy, Man of War, and Belief and Unbelief. Two new Peppercanister publications are forthcoming. Kinsella has devoted a considerable portion of his career to translating Gaelic literature, most notably with his 1969 translation of the epic the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the anthology An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). Among his most influential critical interventions is his examination of the contemporary Irish writer’s relationship with the dual heritage of Gaelic and English literature, which he first considered in a 1966 address to the Modern Language Association, “The Irish Writer,” and subsequently developed in The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland (1995). Kinsella is also the editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986). I interviewed Kinsella on July 27, 2010, at his daughter’s home in Booter-stown, a suburb of Dublin, where he and his wife Eleanor were spending the summer. Prior to beginning our interview, Kinsella asked me about my own experience as an Irish person who had lived and worked in the United States and about my decision to leave my career as an attorney and return to university to study literature. TK: You’re reminding me of my own early indecisions. I began by wanting to be a physicist and studied science one term in University College Dublin, until I realized I couldn’t spend my life at science. Meanwhile I had succeeded at an entrance exam for the civil service, and began a ten-year period in the Department of Land, and later in the Department of Finance. I met some impressive people there, and the work was fascinating—but it was very demanding, especially in Finance. That presented a problem. My writing was increasingly demanding, and my project of translating The Tain had stopped. In 1965 I was given an offer from the...

Gematria in Irish Verse

Evidence is here presented of the practice of gematria, in an anonymous vernacular lyric written in Ireland, evidently in a monastic scriptorium, in the eleventh or twelfth century and preserved uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 615 (s. xiv/xv).

David McKee Wright, 1869–1928

David McKee Wright is one of New Zealand’s most popular balladists. From an unsettled childhood in Ireland and England, and early life as a farmhand in New Zealand, Wright forged a career in the Congregational Church, and wrote verse and short stories on rural, political, and moral themes. Upon emigrating to Australia, he became a successful journalist and literary critic. In Australia he is considered to be part of an important literary culture surrounding the Sydney Bulletin. While not particularly popular with critics, Wright was a very popular with the public, and by all accounts a successful writer. Perhaps best remembered in Australia for his Irish verse, Wright wrote in many forms and genres. Wright is one of the few turn-of-thecentury poets whose work still appears in New Zealand poetry anthologies.

The Shock of the Old: Translating Early Irish Poetry into Modern Irish

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD: TRANSLATING EARLY IRISH POETRY INTO MODERN IRISH KAARINA HOLLO twentieth-century readers of English without a knowledge of Old Irish (ca. 600–900 a.d.) or Middle Irish (ca. 900–1200 a.d.) were given reasonably good access to early medieval Irish poetry through the medium of the translation anthology. Through the efforts of Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, Gerard Murphy, Frank O’Connor, and others, a good amount of early Irish verse written between the seventh and twelfth centuries was made available to English-language audiences.1 But what of translation of this poetry into Modern Irish? Who undertook this task, for what reasons, and to what effect? From the very beginnings of the Gaelic Literary Revival, there had been calls for the translation of medieval Irish literature into Modern Irish. The ordinary reader of Modern Irish would not be able to make much sense of an early medieval Irish story or poem. Thus, at the time, in order to access a substantial portion of the medieval literary tradition, a Modern Irish speaker would generally turn to English translations provided in more or less scholarly editions or to the more literary reworkings provided, again in English, by the likes of Lady Gregory (1902, 1904) and Standish O’Grady (1878–80, 1894). Learning the earlier forms of the language was a daunting task, not one that the average reader of Irish with an interest in the earlier literature could be expected to undertake. This meant that the Irish reader’s experience of older Irish texts was essentially mediated by English. In 1900 the perceived need for translations directly from the ancestral language into Modern Irish was formally acknowledged by the OireachTRANSLATING EARLY IRISH POETRY INTO MODERN IRISH 54 1 See, for example, Meyer 1911; Flower 1926; Murphy 1956; Greene and O’Connor 1967. For a thorough discussion of the ideological and political dimensions of translation from Old and Middle Irish into English, see Tymoczko 1999. I wish to thank the joint editors of this volume for their thoughtful and constructive comments on several drafts of this paper. tas2 in the institution of a prize for “the best modernized version of a tale or episode from Old or Middle Irish” (O’Leary 1994:233). Philip O’Leary has identified three main rationales for such modernization: (1) an awareness of the linguistic, historical, and cultural value of the early literature; (2) ideological grounds; and (3) a view of medieval Irish literature as providing a model for modern writing in Irish (1994:268–70). It is hard to disentangle the three, and separating them risks reductionism: for example, there is certainly an ideological element to the belief that medieval Irish literature is intrinsically valuable and that it can provide a model for contemporary authors. Speaking of the period 1922–39, O’Leary writes that what Gaelic activists wanted was for native scholars to use their learning to enrich contemporary Irish reality by restoring to the nation an authentic and accessible sense of its own past. In practical terms one of the central features of this project would be the immediate provision of competent Modern Irish versions, translations, of the full range of earlier Irish literature. (1998:201) The translation efforts undertaken on this front were almost exclusively from the prose tradition. Until the mid-twentieth century, verse seems to have been more or less ignored. The great early Irish prose narratives such as Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge, modern “Cooley”) were seen as constitutive of and more essential to Irish national identity than were the religious, personal, and love poems from the same period. Therefore earlier translation efforts were centered on the prose, but by mid-century, with Irish political independence a reality, it was possible to turn to works that could not be so easily pressed into the mold of a heroic national ethos, such as lyric verse.3 We will focus here on the translations done by two men, both of them significant figures in the mid-twentieth-century Irish literary world. Tomás Ó Floinn published two collections of Modern Irish translations from Old and Middle Irish: Athbheo (Alive Again or...

Review: Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660: Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660

Review: Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660: Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660

Reviews

Peter Davidson, ed., Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625–1660, reviewed by Douglas Chambers David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660, reviewed by Douglas Chambers J.R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study, reviewed by Linda Munk Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott, reviweed by Karen R. Bloom Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual, reviewed by Michael Nowlin

Poetry and revolution: an anthology of British and Irish verse, 1625-1660

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Note on the Text and Annotation I. Friendship, Affection, and Love II. Song Texts and Poems about Music III. Spiritual Poems and Prophecies IV. Halcyon Dayes: Peace and the Good Life V. Poems of War and Revolution VI. The Restoration Appendix 1: Index of Classical and Biblical Names Appendix 2: Index of Contemporary Names Appendix 3: Biographical Notes on Author Appendix 4: Chronology 1625-1660 Appendix 5: Index of Authors Index of Titles and First Lines

The rhetoric of conflict and conflict by rhetoric: Ireland and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)

This article investigates the historical context of Irish involvement in the Anglo- Boer War, but focuses on the literary products - mainly popular ballads and partisan historiography - of this involvement. Irish soldiers participated on both sides of the war, not so much because of identification with South African issues as because it afforded them the opportunity of fighting Irish fights on a displaced battle-field. The war thus presages the explosion of Irish/British strife in 1916 and the subsequent Irish Civil War by more than a decade. As in most wars, the struggle was conducted by the pen and by the sword and the popular Irish verse of the time reveals the sentiments of fervent Irish imperialists, defending the causes of Empire, fervent Irish nationalists espousing the Boer cause, as well as movingly suggesting the dilemma of the majority of Irish combatants, fighting for England while sympathizing with the Boers.

Verse in English from eighteenth-century Ireland

This pioneering anthology introduces many previously neglected eighteenth-century writers to a general readership, and will lead to a re-examination of the entire canon of Irish verse in English.Between 1700 and 1800, Dublin was second only to London as a center for the printing of poetry in English. Many fine poets were active during this period. However, because Irish eighteenth-century verse in English has to a great extent escaped the scholar and the anthologist, it is hardly known at all.The most innovative aspect of this new anthology is the inclusion of many poetic voices entirely unknown to modern readers. Although the anthology contains the work of well-known figures such as John Toland, Thomas Parnell, Jonathan Swift, Patrick Delany, Laetitia Pilkington and Oliver Goldsmith, there are many verses by lesser known writers and nearly eighty anonymous poems which come from the broadsheets, manuscripts and chapbooks of the time. What emerges is an entirely new perspective on life in eighteenth-century Ireland. We hear the voice of a hard working farmer s wife from county Derry, of a rambling weaver from county Antrim, and that of a woman dying from drink. We learn about whale-fishing in county Donegal, about farming in county Kerry and bull-baiting in Dublin. In fact, almost every aspect of life in eighteenth-century Ireland is described vividly, energetically, with humor and feeling in the verse of this anthology.Among the most moving poems are those by Irish-speaking poets who use amhran or song meter and internal assonance, both borrowed from Irish, in their English verse. Equally interesting is the work of the weaver poets of Ulster who wrote in vigorous and energetic Ulster-Scots. The anthology also includes political poems dating from the reign of James II to the Act of Union, as well as a selection of lesser-known nationalist and Orange songs. Each poem is fully annotated and the book also contains a glossary of terms in Hiberno-English and Ulster Scots.

Bitter harvest: an anthology of contemporary Irish verse

Bitter harvest: an anthology of contemporary Irish verse

An Irish Threshing Proverb

Talk of threshing at the Ambleside conference of the Society brought to mind a rare proverb from oral tradition quoted by E. Estyn Evans:An Irish verse giving the four essentials of a good thrashing, collected [? by him] in Co. Armagh, runs in translation:A hand-staff of holly,A souple of hazel,A single sheaf,And a clean floorand the following description of flail threshing, which also explains ‘hand-staff’ and ‘souple’, was collected about I940 in the same county from Thomas Mallon, Drumart, Loughgall, when he was around seventy years of age:When I was a boy people wud hire a man for the winter's threshin'. Sometimes indeed ye'd see two of them with flails, facing each other across a winnowing cloth. An' when it was thrashed they'd take it till a hill an' the wind wud blow the chaff away.

Hisperic Style in the Old English “Rhyming Poem”

The “Rhyming Poem” is a bizarre verse experiment combining a rhyme scheme common in Latin hymnody with a stringent use of Old English alliterative meter. It has been thought that the poet, in his unsuccessful effort to carry out his self-appointed metrical task, strained his language to the breaking point, producing a poem crackpot, incompetent, and quickly corrupted. It is more likely, however, that the poet was being linguistically inventive in the manner of many such experiments in Carolingian and Hiberno-Latin poetry. Such obscurantism only exaggerates a quality already present in much Old English verse, notably in the latter part of The Exeter Book, where the “Rhyming Poem” is found, and also in much Norse and Irish verse. Considering the several poetic traditions coexisting in Anglo-Saxon England, it is surprising that the “Rhyming Poem” is the only example of the genre in Old English.

Early Irish Verse

Early Irish Verse

Reviews and Comment

Book reviewed in this article:Keats and Embarrassment. By Christopher Ricks.Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page. Routledge and Kegan Paul,The Faber Book of Irish Verse. Edited by John Montague.

Basic metrical pattern in the poems of the rigveda

Abstract It is nearly half a century ago that A. Meillet established the field of Indo-European (IE) Metrics on the comparative evidence of the poetic form In Greek and Vedic Sanskrit. 1 A. Meillet, Les origines indoeuropéennes des mètres grecs (Paris, 1923). He further indicated the major structural features of IE verse; confirmation of this was adduced later by others from evidence in Slavic 2 Roman Jakobson, “Studies in Comparative Slavic Metrics”, Oxford Slavonic Papers III (1952), pp. 21-66. and Old Irish. 3 Calvert Watkins, “Indo-European Metrics and Archaic Irish Verse”, Celtica VI (1963), pp. 194-249. Though our knowledge of the metrical patterns employed In the older IE dialects Is considerable, thebasic verse line in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) however remains to be established.

Review of Book: The Oxford Book of Irish Verse

Review of Book: The Oxford Book of Irish Verse

Elegies Attributed to Dallan Forgaill

Previous articleNext article No AccessElegies Attributed to Dallan ForgaillJames TravisJames Travis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 19, Number 1Jan., 1944 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2856857 Copyright 1944 The Mediaeval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.