Irish Poetry & Poets: 1,500 Years

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course surveys Irish history and literary culture through the specific lens of poetry and song from the sixth century to the present day. Across the turbulent and often traumatic centuries, poets witnessed and gave witness to a multiplicity of experiences and the rich and multifaceted tradition they created is both a reckoning with Irish, European, and global realities, and an imaginative response to them. This course unpacks that poetry's centrality to Irish history, culture and literature, and traces the island's constantly changing and ever evolving poetic traditions and culture. We explore Ireland's traumatic past and turbulent present, the vexed relationship between personal and political identities, as well as the aesthetic, critical and cultural dynamics that came and went during various periods of national formation and social change. Central to the course is an understanding of the complex creative connections between identity politics and aesthetic achievement in Irish poetry and song. All texts are present in original Irish and in translated English.