irishpoetry.ie

a curated directory of Irish poetry · by Simon James Brady

Dispossession

After Kinsale and the confiscations: lament, satire and the aisling.

After 1601 the poets lost the world that employed them. The bardic schools closed, the Gaelic aristocracy went into exile, and men trained for a hereditary profession became schoolmasters, labourers and spailpíní.

The poetry that came out of it is the most direct in the tradition. Dáibhí Ó Bruadair wrote with contempt about a society that no longer valued learning; Aogán Ó Rathaille, at the end, declared he would follow his lost lords into the grave rather than beg from the new order. The aisling — the vision-poem in which Ireland appears as a woman prophesying deliverance — belongs to this period and became its signature form.

It also holds the best-known of the Irish laments, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, composed extempore by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and preserved through women's memory rather than manuscript — a reminder of how much of the period's poetry was oral, and how much of that was women's work.

101 poets, earliest first.

Last checked