Irish Literature - The Early Modern Period

The Early Modern Period

The 17th century saw the tightening of English control over Ireland and the suppression of the traditional aristocracy. This meant that the literary class lost its patrons, since the new nobility were English speakers with little sympathy for the older culture. The elaborate classical metres lost their dominance and were largely replaced by more popular forms. This was an age of social and political tension, expressed with power and anguish by Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, an outstanding poet, and by the anonymous authors of Pairliment Chloinne Tomáis, a corrosive prose satire on the aspirations of the lower classes. Prose of another sort was represented by the elegant historical works of Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn) and the great compilation known as the Annals of the Four Masters.

The consequences of these changes were seen in the 18th century, when the sophistication of the old high tradition reappeared at a popular level. Poetry was still the dominant literary medium and its practitioners were poor scholars, often educated in the classics at obscure local schools and themselves often schoolmasters by trade. Such writers produced work of great refinement in popular metres for a local audience. This was particularly the case in Munster, in the south-west of Ireland, and notable names included Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin and Aogán Ó Rathaille. A certain number of local patrons were still to be found, even in the early 19th century, and especially among the few surviving families of the Gaelic aristocracy.

Irish was still an urban language, and continued to be so well into the 19th century. In the first half of the 18th century Dublin was the home of an Irish-language literary circle connected to the Ó Neachtain (Naughton) family, a group with wide-ranging Continental connections.

There is little evidence of female literacy for this period, but women were of great importance in the oral tradition. They were the dominant composers of traditional laments, which contain some of the most intense poetry in the language. The most famous of these laments is Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, composed in the late 18th century by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, one of the last of the Gaelic gentry of West Kerry. Compositions of this sort were not committed to writing until collected in the 19th century.