Robert Welch: Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats

Abstract

Irish poetry in English originated in the nineteenth century, and attained such prominence in the national consciousness that even to this day the poems of that century are claimed as the works which most accurately depict the spirit of the nation. Yeats saw the major poets as forming a unit, a company, “that sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong”; he found in them a poetic tradition which was distinctive and noble. But the accuracy of Yeats’s descriptions of Davis, Mangan and Ferguson have long been questioned, and we are now inclined to see in his promotion of the nineteenth-century poets confirmation of Harold Bloom’s theory of literary influence: the poet’s appropriation and misinterpretation of earlier writers in order to satisfy his own creative needs. For Yeats, establishing an Irish past became a means of defining self. His interest in the ancient culture and his development of Cuchulain as a hero are easily explained in this manner, as is his fascination with Mangan, and, to a lesser extent, the other two poets mentioned.