Tag Archives: Irish poetry

It’s the birthday of Irish poet Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide (Michael Hartnett)

“I’ll never forget reading his first short poems in the early sixties; they had a kind of hypnotic power, as if a new Orpheus had emerged from Newcastle West. He was Limerick’s Lorca.” — Seamus Heaney on Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide … Continue reading

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“Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” — Irish poet Louis MacNeice

“Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified.” — Louis MacNeice Born in Belfast on this day in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to … Continue reading

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“I like myself poems that are gentle rather than arrogant intellectually. Where language fades into cries or whispers.” — Irish poet Medbh McGuckian

“Hate those two words together, they are so unwomanly and unpoetic together they cancel each other out. ‘Poet’ I don’t like or ‘woman’ or ‘man’ none of these words although I have had to use them. ‘Female’ not much better. … Continue reading

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“I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.” — Irish poet Michael Longley

Michael Longley was born on this day in Belfast in 1935. He is still going strong. He went to Trinity where he studied classics. Much of his poetry shows a classical influence, with references to the ancient Greek and Roman … Continue reading

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“I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.” — Irish poet Paul Muldoon

“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon It’s his birthday today. A giant in … Continue reading

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“That is no country for old men.”: Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats

“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats William Butler … Continue reading

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“Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.” — Irish poet Austin Clarke

“He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is meaningless.” – Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets Austin Clarke was born in Dublin on this day … Continue reading

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“Is there any virtue, for literature, for poetry, in the simple continuity of a tradition? I believe there is not.” — Irish poet Thomas Kinsella

The Dolmen Press, operated out of Dublin, was founded in 1951 by Liam Miller, and played a crucial part in the development of Irish poetry in the mid-20th century. It was a strictly nationalist operation; before The Dolmen Press, poets … Continue reading

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“What is important is to continue believing in the Irish language as a vibrant creative power while it continues to be marginalised in the process of cultural McDonaldisation.” — poet Michael Davitt

Michael Davitt, born in Cork on this day, didn’t grow up speaking Irish at home. He learned it at school. Munster Irish! His academic background in the Irish language gave him a different perspective than a person who grew up … Continue reading

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“I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally as the-thing-in-itself but that would also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.” — Seamus Heaney

It’s his birthday today. Jean and I went to visit Siobhan in Ireland. Siobhan was in school, so while she was in classes Jean and I rented a car and drove across the country to Galway, and other Western points. … Continue reading

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