Seán Ó Ríordáin

Seán Pádraig Ó Ríordáin (3 December 1916 – 21 February 1977) was one of the most important Irish language poets of the twentieth century and arguably the most significant figure in introducing European themes into traditional poetry.

Life

He was born in Baile Mhúirne, County Cork, the eldest of three children of Seán Ó Ríordáin of Baile Mhúirne and Mairéad Ní Loineacháin of Cúil Ealta.

English was his first language. His mother spoke English; his father spoke Irish and English. His father's mother, a native Irish speaker, lived next door. His next-door neighbour on the other side also spoke Irish. It wasn't long before Ó Ríordáin gained some knowledge of Irish.

Seán was only ten when his father died of tuberculosis. Five years later, the family moved to Iniscarra, on the outskirts of Cork City. After settling there, Seán and his brother Tadhg were sent to school in the North Monastery Christian Brothers School, on Cork's northside. When he was a young man he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He lived to the age of sixty and was constantly in poor health.

Louis de Paor

Louis de Paor (born 1961) is a well-known poet in the Irish language. Born in Cork in 1961 and educated at Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh, de Paor edited the Irish language journal Innti, founded in 1970 by Michael Davitt, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Liam Ó Muirthile and Gabriel Rosenstock. He was awarded a PhD in Modern Irish from the National University of Ireland in 1986 for his thesis on Máirtín Ó Cadhain.

He and his family emigrated to Australia in 1987 and lived in Melbourne, where he wrote, gave poetry readings and broadcast in Irish on the Special Broadcasting Service (a network set up for speakers of ethnic languages). He was given scholarships by the Australia Council in 1990, 1991 and 1995.

He returned to Ireland in 1996, and is now the Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

De Paor has worked alongside several other Irish language writers, such as Seán Ó Tuama, with whom he edited a twentieth century anthology of poetry in Irish. He has also published academic works.

Irish poetry

Irish poetry includes poetry in two languages, Irish and English. The complex interplay between these two traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English, has produced a body of work that is both rich in variety and difficult to categorise.

The earliest surviving poems in Irish date back to the 6th century, while the first known poems in English from Ireland date to the 14th century. Although there has always been some cross-fertilization between the two language traditions, an English-language poetry that had absorbed themes and models from Irish did not finally emerge until the 19th century. This culminated in the work of the poets of the Irish Literary Revival in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Towards the last quarter of the 20th century, modern Irish poetry tended to a wide range of diversity, from the poets of the Northern school to writers influenced by the modernist tradition and those facing the new questions posed by an increasingly urban and cosmopolitan society.