On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…
“The right of revolution is sacred. It is the right of self-defence against tyranny.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow
In the annals of Irish history, few figures embody the complex intersection of literature and revolution as completely as Thomas Stanislaus MacDonagh. Born on February 1, 1878, in the small Tipperary town of Cloughjordan, and executed by firing squad on May 3, 1916, at the age of thirty-eight, MacDonagh's brief life encompassed an extraordinary range of achievements. He was a teacher who co-founded Ireland's first te…
“The poet is the interpreter of the world to men, and the interpreter of men to the world.”
Neighbourhood:
Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
