The Revival generation
Yeats and after: a literature consciously making a national tradition.
From the 1880s a generation set out to make a national literature deliberately, and largely succeeded. Yeats is the centre of it, but the Revival was a collective project: Douglas Hyde collecting and translating the Love Songs of Connacht, Lady Gregory and Synge at the Abbey, AE gathering younger writers around him.
Its politics were not settled. Alice Milligan and Ethna Carbery ran a nationalist paper; Edward Dowden opposed the whole enterprise from inside Trinity. Three of its poets — MacDonagh, Pearse and Plunkett — were executed in 1916, and Ledwidge was killed at Ypres the following year in a British uniform, having written an elegy for MacDonagh.
The recovery work on this period is ongoing, and has substantially changed who is read.
51 poets, earliest first.
- Katharine Tynan 1859–1931
- Dubhghlas de hÍde / Douglas Hyde ("An Craoibhín Aoibhinn") 1860–1949
- Moira O'Neill (Agnes Higginson) 1864–1955
- William Butler Yeats 1865–1939
- Alice Milligan 1866–1953
- Dora Sigerson Shorter 1866–1918
- Ethna Carbery (Anna Johnston MacManus) 1866–1902
- Susan L. Mitchell 1866–1926
- Ella Young 1867–1956
- George William Russell ("AE") 1867–1935
- Lionel Johnson 1867–1902
- Seumas MacManus 1867–1960
- Eva Gore-Booth 1870–1926
- Florence Mary Wilson c. 1870–1946
- Hester Sigerson Piatt 1870–1939
- J.M. Synge 1871–1909
- George Roberts (publisher) 1873–1953
- James Cousins 1873–1956
- Lola Ridge 1873–1941
- Rhoda Cosgrave Sivell 1874–1962
- Oliver St. John Gogarty 1878–1957
- Thomas MacDonagh 1878–1916
- John MacDonagh 1879–1961
- Joseph Campbell (Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil) 1879–1944
- Kathleen M. Murphy 1879–1963
- Mary Devenport O'Neill 1879–1967
- Patrick Pearse (Pádraig Mac Piarais) 1879–1916
- Seumas O'Sullivan (James Starkey) 1879–1958
- Blanaid Salkeld 1880–1959
- James Stephens 1880–1950
- Padraic Colum 1881–1972
- James Joyce 1882–1941
- Lizzie Twigg c. 1882–1933
- Winifred Letts 1882–1972
- Pádraig Ághas 1885–1966
- Val Vousden 1885–1951
- Lennox Robinson 1886–1958
- Francis Ledwidge 1887–1917
- Joseph Mary Plunkett 1887–1916
- Maurice Healy 1887–1943
- Desmond FitzGerald (politician) 1888–1947
- Nora J Murray 1888–1955
- Patrick MacGill 1890–1963
- Katherine Arnold Price 1893–1989
- F.R. Higgins 1896–1941
- Máiréad Ní Ghráda 1896–1971
- Monk Gibbon 1896–1987
- Richard Harry Graves 1897–1971
- Micheál Mac Liammóir 1899–1978
- Noëlle Ffrench Davies 1899–1983
- Séamus Ó Duilearga 1899–1980
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