‘Modern Irish Poetry’ (1894; rev. 1899, c. 1903, 1908), repr. from A Book of Irish Verse Selected from Modern Writers, ed. W. B. Yeats (1895, rev. 1900)

Abstract

The Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, ‘It is better to be quarreling than to be lonely,’¹ and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been Red O’Sullivan, Gaelic O’Sullivan, blind O’Heffernan, and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim,2 remember their ancient greatness.