Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

A Book of the Moment: Gaelic Poetry Under the Penal Laws

Mr. Corkery shows us how the poets of eighteenth-century Munster, though poor and without patrons, save for a few of the surviving Gaelic and Norman gentry in the ‘big houses,’ formed a true poetic craft, maintaining that craft at a high level, keeping up ‘poetic schools’in various places, such as Charleville – or rathluirc, as it was then – and existing in such numbers that almost every parish in Munster could claim a local poet of its own. Mr. Corkery gives many translations of their work. after producing much that is incontestably high in inspiration and a great deal that has poetic merit, these schools came to an end about 1827; and it is pretty clear that daniel o’Connell, himself an irish speaker and an old irish chieftain, by his constant use of english for public purposes and his avowed contempt for irish, did more than any man of his time to hurry the old language into its rapid decay. We may conclude with a word on the poetic merit of Mr. Corkery’s Munster bards. ourselves, we feel that aodhagán Ó rathaille in some four or five lyrics is incontestably one of the world’s great lyric singers. other poems such as donagh MacNamara’s ‘Bán-chnuic eireann oigh’ or ‘fair Hills of Holy ireland’are truly noble;3 but other specimens here given of the Munster poets need explanation, analysis and understanding of their time and tradition; and so we can but commend readers to Mr. Corkery’s book, which will convince us, if anything can, that the last native Gaelic singers were poets, indeed. * * * a Book of the Moment: Gaelic poetry under the penal Laws1 Lecky said that to write the history of Catholic ireland under the penal Laws a man must draw upon the annals of france, austria and Spain; and it is true that during the eighteenth century all the best Gaelic blood sought a career overseas, leaving at home a mass of people gradually being driven down to serfdom, not even peasants in the proper sense, for they had no secure tenure of the land. yet Lecky knew about this underlying stratum of people, the part of ireland in direct contact with the soil, only what he could read in english. Now comes along another irish writer, not merely able to read Gaelic, but imbued with the spirit of a culture that has its roots very far back, long centuries before english was a language; and he is able to show 182 Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism. Selected Writings us that in the darkest hours mens agitabat molem,2 an intellectual life quickened the muddy lump.The moral of Mr. Corkery’s book is that Gaelic ireland in the eighteenth century had a future, because it retained conscious connexion with its past. two earlier volumes by him, collections of short stories and sketches, throw much light on the ireland of our day. Whoever wants to understand the struggle of 1919–21 ought to read The Hounds of Banba and learn how it looked to Sinn féin.3 But this new work of literary study, though it was nothing authoritative or final about it, illuminates irish history in its continuity. Mr. Corkery has in rare measure the gift of sympathetic interpretation, which excludes rancour, and other forms of narrowness. He can put things in their right place; his vision is at no point limited to ireland. But the case that he makes, to my mind successfully, is that irish literature has to be judged by its own standards, and not by those which the renaissance imposed. The point of special interest about irish poetry is that it was a public institution with a social character; it was essentially the product of schools. and he shows us the pathetic attempt of Gaelic ireland, when it had become one obscure mass of peasantry, to preserve this institution – an instinctive effort to perpetuate what was most characteristic in the life of the race. for, so long as there remained one unit of the loose knit fabric of States which made up Gaelic ireland, poets were maintained at the public cost. Mr. W.f. Butler in his book on the irish Confiscations quotes the letter of some english statesman marking down 2,000 acres which the Maguires of fermanagh set apart for the upkeep of their poets and chroniclers, ‘persons that merit no respect but rather discountenance from the State.’4 after the ulster plantation...