Romantic poetry in Ireland is book-ended between the verse of Thomas Moore and the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Moore grew up in the heyday of late-18th-century Enlightenment Patriotism, when the Irish Parliament had obtained a measure of autonomy from Westminster, was relaxing the anti-Catholic “Penal Laws” (which disenfranchised the country’s native population), and the Anglo-Irish elite developed an antiquarian interest in, and sense of identification with, Ireland’s Gaelic roots and antiquity. Enlightenment Patriotism foundered in the 1798 Rebellion and subsequent abolition of the Irish Parliament (Act of Union, 1801); the verse of Thomas Moore (and the National Tales of Lady Morgan) were the first signs, between 1805 and 1810, of something to fill the ideological post-Patriot vacuum: Romantic Nationalism.

Moore was a successful Regency poet, a friend of Byron, and literary socialite in London. His Anacreontic verse and his orientalist romance Lalla Rookh were celebrated; but his main importance lies in the occasional verses which, set to traditional Irish airs, appeared as the Irish melodies from 1807 onwards. The airs had been collected from performers (mostly harpers) since the mid-1790s; their melodic charm contributed much to the Melodies’ success and often helped to cloak their political radicalism. That radicalism was also veiled by the sentimental diction of the lyrics, especially in the opening stanzas. However, the Melodies were anything but sentimental or charming in their political message: that Ireland had been unjustly victimized under English hegemony, that it should cherish the glories of its antiquity and recall the rebellious stance of native rebels and Enlightenment Patriots with pride rather than embarrassment. The combination of nativism (the use of folk music) and historicism (the need for remembrance at a time of political subjugation) set the tone for nationalist poetry in Ireland throughout the following century; the Melodies had an enormous and long-standing social penetration due to their performative popularity.

The mid-century was dominated by the poetry of the antiquary Samuel Ferguson, who popularized Gaelic legend and antiquity. His verse and that of the poets around Thomas Davis and the newspaper The nation insistently linked the general virtue of “love of the fatherland” to a sense of cultural loyalty to Ireland’s Gaelic roots, thus Gaelicizing the historical frame of reference for national Irish literature – all the more remarkably so, since none of these poets knew much, if any, Gaelic and that language was languishing as a result of pauperization and the Great Famine (1845-49).

The older Gaelic tradition of anti-English verse was rooted in a messianic-Jacobite yearning for the return of the exiled Scottish Stuart kings living in continental exile, and dwindled after the 1798 Rebellion; the last representative is Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin (1766–1837). Some broadsheet ballads from this tradition were collected during the period of peasant unrest in the mid-1820s by Thomas Crofton Croker. From the 1830s onwards, however, 18th-century Gaelic ballads collected by antiquaries and philologists became popular with English-speaking readers in translation (Hardiman, Irish Minstrelsy, 1832; John O’Daly, Poets and poetry of Munster, 1849). The Gaelic-inspired verse by the “Nation” poets and by Ferguson (who, a Unionist Protestant himself, was provoked by the unrepentant anti-Protestantism of Hardiman’s collection) should be seen against this background.

The verse style of Moore (Let Erin remember) and Davis (A nation once again), easily set to music and gaining popularity in sung performance, remained widespread throughout the century and well into the 20th. “Rebel songs”, celebrating, in 19th-century ballad style, the deeds or martyrdom of anti-British insurgents, were a powerful grassroots propaganda instrument for the Republican movement throughout the 20th century, sometimes written by men of literary renown such as the playwright Brendan Behan. The new poetic developments of the Irish Literary Revival around W.B. Yeats, on the whole, avoided such overt political verse, opting for the oblique symbolism and inspiration of Celtic legends instead. However, even as elitist a poet as W.B. Yeats wrote poetry that was overtly inspired by nationalist politics (Easter 1916) and containing quotable references to “the indomitable Irishry”. This set an example well into the 1970s for modernist poets writing in a nationalist vein under the pressure of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (John Montague, Thomas Kinsella’s Butcher’s dozen, 1973).

Native literacy in Gaelic did not survive the Famine, and re-emerged only as a result of the language revival movement of the 1890s, when English patriotic verse was translated into Gaelic versions, or nationalist-revivalist learners of the language wrote in Gaelic. The language revivalist and nationalist Patrick Pearse wrote verse both in Gaelic and in English; Ireland’s national anthem is the Gaelic translation, made in 1923, of an English-language republican “rebel song” from 1907.