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Caball, Marc, Poets and politics: reaction and continuity in Irish poetry, 1558-1625, Cork: Cork University Press, 1998.

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Contributors
Work
Poets and politics: reaction and continuity in Irish poetry, 1558-1625
Place
Cork
Publisher
Cork University Press
Year
1998
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Description
Abstract (cited)
This book examines responses of the influential elite of Irish bardic poets known as fileadha to questions of political, cultural and religious change in late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Ireland. In the absence of Gaelic administrative records, historians of early modern Ireland are fortunate to be able to draw upon a relatively large range of literary material in Irish from which to reconstruct contemporary mentalites, and more particularly to investigate the nature of Gaelic reaction to the English crown's conquest and colonisation of the island. During this period of critical change and unparalleled upheaval, the scene was set for a series of historical developments whose impact continues to reverberate today. The bardic poets initiated a process of ideological re-evaluation which redefined indigenous commununal notions of ethnicity, culture and religion. Modern scholarship has largely depicted the bardic elite as a static, intellectual phenomenon, uncomprehending in the face of early modern English aggrandisement. In this study, an interpretative distinction is made between the formal bardic professional apparatus, which was conventional and formulaic in expression and outlook, and the influence of a modern, innovative dynamic evident in the work of some poets. While the continuity of the bardic tradition is acknowledged, this book highlights significant elements of intellectual and cultural reappraisal in bardic poetry of the period. The author demonstrates how two revolutionary concepts, those of faith and fatherland and the merger of Gaelic and Old English identities in a common Irish nationality, are developed by fileadha or by poets from a bardic background. It has become an axiom of Celtic scholarship to view James VI and I's reign as the point of termination for the bardic tradition and by extension aristocratic Gaelic literary culture. Such thinking is challenged in the present study. It is more correct to speak of a fundamental refocusing of the cultural and social assumptions underlying Gaelic poetry. The continued vitality of themes first broached by bardic poets in the work of a new generation of non-professional gentlemen poets testifies to the modernisation of a medieval elite.
(source: Cork University Press)
Subjects and topics
Headings
Ireland 16th century 17th century
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Contributors
Dennis Groenewegen
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July 2017, last updated: April 2018
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