Revival poetry in Irish remains the most understudied and misunderstood aspect of the twentieth-century Irish literary revival. Surveys of modern Irish-language poetry typically begin with Douglas Hyde’s Amhráin Grádh Chúige Connacht/Love Songs of Connacht (1893) before moving to Patrick Pearse and Liam Gógan as a prelude to the emergence of modernist poets in the 1940s, including Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtin Ó Direáin, and Máire Mhac an tSaoi. This chapter revises that approach and focuses on the period between Hyde’s groundbreaking anthology and the emergence of those modernist poets canonized in Seán Ó Tuama’s 1950 anthology, Nuabhéarsaíocht 1939-1949. This period suffered neither a lack of poetry, poets, nor polemics about poetry. Conversely, it teemed with them, yet it appears the most barren era in a tradition that traces back to the sixth century. Rather than retrieve a neglected major poetic voice, this chapter interrogates the period’s attitudes and understandings to see what light it may shed on wider revivalist concerns and the context from which the midcentury modernists emerged.

Despite Yeats’s claim in “On Being Asked for a War Poem” that it’s preferable that “a poet’s mouth be silent” in “times like these,” neither Yeats himself nor other Irish poets shied away from writing poems that responded – immediately or at a distance, explicitly or refracted – to the armed conflicts that racked Ireland, Britain, and Europe in the early twentieth century. This chapter will trace Irish poetry’s compound and shifting set of responses to the tumultuous decade leading to the creation of the Irish Free State.

The Irish at the dawn of the twentieth century benefitted from many positive changes over the previous half-century in health care, education and social provision, and were (in general, apart from urban slums) among the healthiest in Europe. The new dynamic trade unionism reached Ireland in the 1890s and formed a combustible force when combined with the non-parliamentary nationalisms and feminism of the early century. These all culminated in the 1916 Rising, which usurped the parliamentary nationalism of the Home Rule Party and rapidly assumed leadership of nationalist Ireland. Unionists continued to oppose national self-determination in all its forms. The state of Northern Ireland was set up by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which also set up a state in the ‘south’. This was superseded by the War for Independence 1919–1921, which culminated in a Treaty with Britain which gave dominion status to the Irish Free State, comprising twenty-six of the thirty-two counties. A civil war followed 1922–1923, between pro- and anti-Treatyites.

Over 100,000 Irishmen from all over the country served in the Great War, and 40,000 died. The war brought great prosperity to farmers and shopkeepers, industrialists and food processors, though rising food prices took their toll of townspeople.

Standish O’Grady’s treatment of Cuchulainn was central to Patrick Pearse’s vision of sacrifice. O’Grady depicts Cuchulainn’s martyrdom as Christ-like, but does so in light of contemporaneous anthropological writings on blood sacrifice and the deities of vegetative regeneration. For blood to seep into the land and revive Ireland was a compelling image to Pearse, dauntless as he imagined that Robert Emmet smiled in anticipation of death. Accordingly, Pearse urged students at St Enda’s and St Ita’s to adopt Emmet and Anne Devlin as presiding figures although – contrary to Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ – in the act of sacrifice one should not aspire to individual fame. Influenced by Pearse, the Irish landscape thirsts for blood in Dorothy Macardle’s short fiction.

From 1926, O’Casey became well known as a critic of Irish nationalism. Some commentators felt that the playwright presented a grotesque distortion of historical events, and a slander on those men who had died for Ireland, including Patrick Pearse. This chapter examines O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey’s relationship with Pearse, and the dramatist’s prose history The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919). We see how Irish nationalism changed during the first half of O’Casey’s life, and the way in which his attitude to nationalism also altered, with this chapter making the case that the relation between O’Casey and Irish nationalism was far more shifting and nuanced than has often been perceived.

This chapter examines O’Casey’s plays in the context of Irish historical revisionism, examining whether the cynicism towards nationalism that O’Casey expressed in the 1920s can really be seen as an example of revisionism avant la lettre. The chapter situates O’Casey’s views in relation to the work of Father Francis Shaw and R. F. Foster, and looks at the critique of O’Casey offered in 1926 by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. But the chapter argues that O’Casey was not seeking to evaluate the historical record in a dispassionate way. Rather, O’Casey sought to endorse a class-conscious socialist republic, and to show in his drama the way that the existing class system might use and abuse individual capability.

Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Act Two of Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play, The Plough and the Stars, has appeared onstage at the Abbey theatre between 1991 and 2016. The chapter shows how these four versions of O’Casey’s script navigate a set of contemporary concerns, from historical revisionism, through the Celtic Tiger boom, to the economic crash, and into the era when various kinds of institutional and state abuse have been revealed. Shifts in performance style also reveal changes in thinking about theatrical form in Ireland and help illuminate the role of the Irish national theatre during a period when other nearby national theatres have come to operate in profoundly different ways.