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 early decades of the twentieth century, when American poetry was undergoing one of its most dramatic transformations, a young man of Irish heritage was crafting verses that sought to bridge the ancient traditions of Celtic literature with the modern sensibilities of his adopted homeland. Shaemas O'Sheel, born James Shields in New York City on January 12, 1886, would become one of the more intriguing yet ultima…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Spirituality
