Page 301 - Demo

Chapter eight 301
Latin and Irish, the founder of the Court of Poetry of Coshma. Known as ‘one of the last great Gaelic poets,’ Eoghan Ruadh O’ Sullivan of Limerick, a man whose poems were said to be ‘extremely musical and full of astonishing technical virtuosity.’ The esteemed and very inluential Tadh Gaolach O’Sullivan from Waterford, and the ‘last of the wandering bards,’ Antoine O Reactaire, Anthony Raftery, in Mayo, to name but four, all of whose beautiful words and melodies cheered and warmed the hearts of the people in ‘those dark and evil days.’ It was said of this period:
‘In a remarkable manner, the people turned to poetry in these dark days-obviously because, after their religion, it was one of the few consolations left to them. Almost every hedge school-master devotec himself to poetry then, and hosts of song birds warbled sweetly in every corner of the country-but more especially in the south, which produced a most proliic and remarkable harvest of verse of high quality. These poets took to a wide range of subjects, patriotism, love, drink, humour, la- ment, dream, and so-forth. If the eighteenth century was one of the darkest of Ire- land’s centuries it was, at the same time, perhaps, the most musical.’
The main Irish writers of the time in the English language were the politicians William Molyneux, Jonathan Swift, and Charles Lucas; Edmund Burke statesman and philosopher, whom we mentioned earlier; the orator and playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan; the poets Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas Parnell; Richard Steele the essayist; George Berkeley the philosopher and the patriot Theobald Wolfe Tone.
After the crushing of the rising of 1798, it was obvious to all that Ascendancy rule in Ireland had failed miserably. Not only that, there was now no guarantee that the rebellious