My focus as the volume’s editor was on Trump’s dangerousness because
of my area of expertise in violence prevention. Approaching violence as a
public health issue, I have consulted with governments and
international organizations, in addition to 20 years of engaging in the individual assessment and treatment of violent offenders.
The book proceeded from an ethics conference I held at Yale, my home
institution. At that meeting, my psychiatrist colleagues and I discussed
balancing two essential duties of our profession. First is the duty to
speak responsibly about public officials, especially as outlined in “the Goldwater rule,”
which requires that we refrain from diagnosing without a personal
examination and without authorization. Second is our responsibility to
protect public health and safety, or our “duty to warn” in cases of danger, which usually supersedes other rules.
Our conclusion was overwhelmingly that our responsibility to society and its safety, as outlined in our ethical guidelines,
overrode any etiquette owed to a public figure. That decision led to
the collection of essays in the book, which includes some of the most
prominent thinkers of the field including Robert J. Lifton, Judith
Herman, Philip Zimbardo and two dozen others. That decision was controversial among some members of our field.
We already know a great deal about Trump’s mental state based on the
voluminous information he has given through his tweets and his responses
to real situations in real time. Now, this week’s credible reports
support the concerns we articulated in the book beyond any doubt.
These reports are also consistent with the account I received from
two White House staff members who called me in October 2017 because the
president was behaving in a manner that “scared” them, and they believed
he was “unraveling”. They were calling because of the book I edited.
Once I confirmed that they did not perceive the situation as an
imminent danger, I referred them to the emergency room, in order not to
be bound by confidentiality rules that would apply if I engaged with
them as a treating physician. That would have compromised my role of
educating the public.
The psychology behind the chaos
The author of the New York Times op-ed makes clear that the conflict in the White House is not about Trump’s ideology.
The problem, the author sees, is the lack of “any discernible first
principles that guide his decision making . . . his impulsiveness [that]
results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions
that have to be walked back, and there being literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next.”
These are obviously psychological symptoms
reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration,
narcissism and recklessness. They are identical to those that Woodward
describes in numerous examples, which he writes were met with the
“stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to
control his impulses and prevent disasters.”
They are also consistent with the course we foresaw early in Trump’s
presidency, which concerned us enough to outline it in our book. We
tried to warn that his condition was worse than it appeared, would grow
worse over time and would eventually become uncontainable.
What we observed were signs of mental instability — signs that would eventually play out not only in the White House, as these accounts report, but in domestic situations and in the geopolitical sphere.
There is a strong connection between immediate dangerousness — the
likelihood of waging a war or launching nuclear weapons — and extended
societal dangerousness — policies that force separation of children from
families or the restructuring of global relations in a way that would
destabilize the world.
I am concerned that his mental challenges could cause him to take
unpredictable and potentially extreme and dangerous measures to distract
from his legal problems.
Mental health professionals have standard procedures for evaluating
dangerousness. More than a personal interview, violence potential is
best assessed through past history and a structured checklist of a person’s characteristics.
These characteristics include a history of cruelty to animals or
other people, risk taking, behavior suggesting loss of control or
impulsivity, narcissistic personality and current mental instability. Also of concern are
noncompliance or unwillingness to undergo tests or treatment, access to
weapons, poor relationship with significant other or spouse, seeing
oneself as a victim, lack of compassion or empathy, and lack of concern
over consequences of harmful acts.
The Woodward book and the New York Times op-ed confirm many of these
characteristics. The rest have been evident in Trump’s behavior outside
the White House and prior to his tenure.
That the president has met not just some but all these criteria should be reason for alarm.
Other ways in which a president could be dangerous are through
cognitive symptoms or lapses, since functions such as reasoning, memory,
attention, language and learning are critical to the duties of a
president. He has exhibited signs of decline here, too.
The president has already shown an alarming escalation of irrational
behavior during times of distress. Others have observed him to be “unstable,” “losing a step” and “unraveling.” He is likely to enter such a state again.
Violent acts are not random events.
They are end products of a long process that follow recognizable
patterns. As mental health experts, we make predictions in terms of
unacceptable levels of probability rather than on the basis of what is
certain to happen.
Trump’s impairment is a familiar pattern to a violence expert such as
myself, but given his level of severity, one does not need to be a
specialist to know that he is dangerous.
What next?
I believe Woodward’s book and the revelations in the New York Times
op-ed have placed great pressure on the president. We are now entering a
period when the stresses of the presidency could accelerate because of
the advancing special counsel’s investigations.
The degree of Trump’s denial and resistance to the unfolding revelations, as expressed in a recent Fox interview, are telling of his fragility.
From my observations of the president over extended time via his
public presentations, direct thoughts through tweets and accounts of his
close associates, I believe that the question is not whether he will
look for distractions, but how soon and to what degree.
Just as suspicion of crime should lead to an investigation, the severity of impairment that we see should lead to an evaluation, preferably with the president’s consent.
Mental impairment should be evaluated independently from criminal investigations, using medical criteria and standardized measures. A sitting president may be immune to indictments, but he is subject to the law, which is strict about public safety and the right to treatment when an individual poses a danger to the public
because of mental instability. In the case of danger, the patient does
not have the right to refuse, nor does the physician have the right not
to take the person as a patient.
This evaluation may have been delayed, but it is still not too late.
And mental health professionals have extensive experience assessing,
restraining and treating individuals much like Trump — it is almost
routine.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on
September 7, 2018; it reflects new information about the author’s
contact with White House staff.
Irish literature comprises writings in the Irish, Latin, and English (including Ulster Scots)
languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing
dates from the seventh century and was produced by monks writing in
both Latin and Early Irish. In addition to scriptural writing, the monks
of Ireland recorded both poetry and mythological tales. There is a
large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as The Táin and Mad King Sweeny.
The English language was introduced to Ireland in the thirteenth century, following the Norman invasion of Ireland.
The Irish language, however, remained the dominant language of Irish
literature down to the nineteenth century, despite a slow decline which
began in the seventeenth century with the expansion of English power.
The latter part of the nineteenth century saw a rapid replacement of
Irish by English in the greater part of the country. At the end of the
century, however, cultural nationalism displayed a new energy, marked by
the Gaelic Revival (which encouraged a modern literature in Irish) and more generally by the Irish Literary Revival.
The Anglo-Irish literary tradition found its first great exponent in Jonathan Swift. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan are often claimed for Ireland, though their lives and their works were essentially English. The same can be said of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and C.S. Lewis, prominent writers who left Ireland to make a life in England. More recognisably "Irish" writers included Louis MacNeice, George Bernard Shaw (though he spent most of his life in England) and W. B. Yeats.
The descendants of Scottish settlers in Ulster formed the Ulster-Scots
writing tradition, having an especially strong tradition of rhyming
poetry.
Though English was the dominant Irish literary language in the
twentieth century, much work of high quality appeared in Irish. A
pioneering modernist writer in Irish was Pádraic Ó Conaire,
and traditional life was given vigorous expression in a series of
autobiographies by native Irish speakers from the west coast,
exemplified by the work of Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Peig Sayers. The outstanding modernist prose writer in Irish was Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and prominent poets included Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi. Prominent bilingual writers included Brendan Behan (who wrote poetry and a play in Irish) and Flann O'Brien. Two novels by O'Brien, At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman, are considered early examples of postmodern fiction, but he also wrote a satirical novel in Irish called An Béal Bocht (translated as The Poor Mouth). Liam O'Flaherty, who gained fame as a writer in English, also published a book of short stories in Irish (Dúil).
Most attention has been given to Irish writers who wrote in
English and who were at the forefront of the modernist movement, notably
James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses is considered one of the most influential of the century. The playwright Samuel Beckett, in addition to a large amount of prose fiction, wrote a number of important plays, including Waiting for Godot. Several Irish writers have excelled at short story writing, in particular Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. In the late twentieth century Irish poets, especially those from Northern Ireland, came to prominence with Derek Mahon, John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Other notable Irish writers from the twentieth century include, poet Patrick Kavanagh, dramatists Tom Murphy and Brian Friel and novelists Edna O'Brien and John McGahern.
Irish has one of the oldest vernacular literatures in western Europe (after Greek and Latin).
The Irish became fully literate with the arrival of Christianity
in the fifth century. Before that time a simple writing system known as
"ogham" was used for inscriptions. The introduction of Latin led to the
adaptation of the Latin alphabet to the Irish language and the rise of a
small literate class, both clerical and lay.
The earliest Irish literature consisted of original lyric poetry
and versions of ancient prose tales. The earliest poetry, composed in
the 6th century, illustrates a vivid religious faith or describes the
world of nature, and was sometimes written in the margins of illuminated
manuscripts. "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough",
a fragment of syllabic verse probably dating from the 9th century, has
inspired reinterpretations and translations in modern times by John Montague, John Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Thomas Kinsella, as well as a version into modern Irish by Tomás Ó Floinn.
The Book of Armagh is a 9th-century illuminated manuscript written mainly in Latin, containing early texts relating to St Patrick and some of the oldest surviving specimens of Old Irish.
It is one of the earliest manuscripts produced by an insular church to
contain a near complete copy of the New Testament. The manuscript was
the work of a scribe named Ferdomnach of Armagh (died 845 or 846). Ferdomnach wrote the first part of the book in 807 or 808, for Patrick's heir (comarba) Torbach. It was one of the symbols of the office for the Archbishop of Armagh.
The Annals of Ulster (Irish: Annála Uladh) cover years from AD 431 to AD 1540 and were compiled in the territory of what is now Northern Ireland: entries up to AD 1489 were compiled in the late 15th century by the scribe Ruaidhrí Ó Luinín, under his patron Cathal Óg Mac Maghnusa on the island of Belle Isle on Lough Erne. The Ulster Cycle written in the 12th century, is a body of medieval Irish heroic legends and sagas of the traditional heroes of the Ulaid in what is now eastern Ulster and northern Leinster, particularly counties Armagh, Down and Louth. The stories are written in Old and Middle Irish,
mostly in prose, interspersed with occasional verse passages. The
language of the earliest stories is dateable to the 8th century, and
events and characters are referred to in poems dating to the 7th.
After the Old Irish period, there is a vast range of poetry from
mediaeval and Renaissance times. By degrees the Irish created a
classical tradition in their own language. Verse remained the main
vehicle of literary expression, and by the 12th century questions of
form and style had been essentially settled, with little change until
the 17th century.
Medieval Irish writers also created an extensive literature in Latin: this Hiberno-Latin
literature was notable for its learned vocabulary, including a greater
use of loanwords from Greek and Hebrew than was common in medieval Latin
elsewhere in Europe.
The literary Irish language (known in English as Classical
Irish), was a sophisticated medium with elaborate verse forms, and was
taught in bardic schools (i.e. academies of higher learning) both in
Ireland and Scotland.
These produced historians, lawyers and a professional literary class
which depended on the aristocracy for patronage. Much of the writing
produced in this period was conventional in character, in praise of
patrons and their families, but the best of it was of exceptionally high
quality and included poetry of a personal nature. Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh (14th century), Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn
(15th century) and Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa (16th century) were among the
most distinguished of these poets. Every noble family possessed a body
of manuscripts containing genealogical and other material, and the work
of the best poets was used for teaching purposes in the bardic schools.
In this hierarchical society, fully trained poets belonged to the
highest stratum; they were court officials but were thought to still
possess ancient magical powers.
Women were largely excluded from the official literature, though
female aristocrats could be patrons in their own right. An example is
the 15th century noblewoman Mairgréag Ní Cearbhaill, praised by the
learned for her hospitality.
At that level a certain number of women were literate, and some were
contributors to an unofficial corpus of courtly love poetry known as dánta grádha.
Prose continued to be cultivated in the medieval period in the
form of tales. The Norman invasion of the 12th century introduced a new
body of stories which influenced the Irish tradition, and in time
translations were made from English.
Irish poets also composed the Dindsenchas ("lore of places"), a class of onomastic
texts recounting the origins of place-names and traditions concerning
events and characters associated with the places in question. Since many
of the legends related concern the acts of mythic and legendary
figures, the dindsenchas is an important source for the study of Irish mythology.
Irish mythological and legendary saga cycles
There are four principal epic cycles in early Irish literature. The first of these is the Mythological Cycle, which concerns the Irish pagan pantheon, the Tuatha Dé Danann. Second is the Ulster Cycle,
mentioned above, also known as the Red Branch Cycle or the Heroic
Cycle, which concerns events during the legendary reign of King Conchobar mac Nessa in Ulster in the first century BC. The Ulster Cycle includes the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the so-called "Iliad of the Gael," and its hero, the warrior Cú Chulainn, a figure comparable to the Greek hero Achilles, known for his terrifying battle frenzy, or ríastrad. Third is a body of romance woven round Fionn Mac Cumhaill, his son Oisin, and his grandson Oscar, in the reigns of the High KingsConn of the Hundred Battles, his son Art Oénfer, and his grandson Cormac mac Airt, in the second and third centuries AD; this cycle of romance is usually called the Fenian cycle because it deals so largely with Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his fianna (militia). Fourth is the Historical Cycle,
or Cycle of the Kings, stemming from Irish court bards' duty to recount
the histories and genealogies of the dynasties they served.
The Historical Cycle ranges from the almost entirely mythological Labraid Loingsech, who allegedly became High King of Ireland around 431 BC, to the entirely historical Brian Boru, who reigned as High King of Ireland in the eleventh century AD. The Historical Cycle includes the late medieval tale Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney), which has influenced the works of T.S. Eliot and Flann O'Brien,
among others. Unusually among European epic cycles, the Irish sagas
were written in prose, with verse interpolations expressing heightened
emotion. Although usually found in recensions of the later mediaeval
period, many of these works are linguistically archaic, and thus throw
light on pre-Christian Ireland.
The Early Modern period: 1500–1800
The
17th century saw the tightening of English control over Ireland and the
suppression of the traditional aristocracy. This meant that the
literary class lost its patrons, since the new nobility were English
speakers with little sympathy for the older culture. The elaborate
classical metres lost their dominance and were largely replaced by more
popular forms. This was an age of social and political tension, as expressed by the poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and the anonymous authors of Pairliment Chloinne Tomáis, a prose satire on the aspirations of the lower classes. Prose of another sort was represented by the historical works of Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn) and the compilation known as the Annals of the Four Masters.
The consequences of these changes were seen in the 18th century.
Poetry was still the dominant literary medium and its practitioners were
often poor scholars, educated in the classics at local schools and
schoolmasters by trade. Such writers produced polished work in popular
metres for a local audience. This was particularly the case in Munster,
in the south-west of Ireland, and notable names included Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin and Aogán Ó Rathaille of Sliabh Luachra.
A certain number of local patrons were still to be found, even in the
early 19th century, and especially among the few surviving families of
the Gaelic aristocracy.
Irish was still an urban language, and continued to be so well
into the 19th century. In the first half of the 18th century Dublin was
the home of an Irish-language literary circle connected to the Ó
Neachtain (Naughton) family, a group with wide-ranging Continental
connections.
There is little evidence of female literacy for this period, but
women were of great importance in the oral tradition. They were the main
composers of traditional laments. The most famous of these is Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, composed in the late 18th century by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, one of the last of the Gaelic gentry of West Kerry. Compositions of this sort were not committed to writing until collected in the 19th century.
The manuscript tradition
Well
after the introduction of printing to Ireland, works in Irish continued
to be disseminated in manuscript form. The first printed book in
Ireland was the Book of Common Prayer.
Access to the printing press was hindered in the 1500s and the
1600s by official caution, although an Irish version of the Bible (known
as Bedell's
Bible after the Anglican clergyman who commissioned it) was published
in the 17th century. A number of popular works in Irish, both devotional
and secular, were available in print by the early 19th century, but the
manuscript remained the most affordable means of transmission almost
until the end of the century.
Manuscripts were collected by literate individuals
(schoolmasters, farmers and others) and were copied and recopied. They
might include material several centuries old. Access to them was not
confined to the literate, since the contents were read aloud at local
gatherings. This was still the case in the late 19th century in
Irish-speaking districts.
Manuscripts were often taken abroad, particularly to America. In the 19th century many of these were collected by individuals or cultural institutions.
The Anglo-Irish tradition (1): In the 18th century
Jonathan Swift
(1667–1745), a powerful and versatile satirist, was Ireland's first
earliest notable writer in English. Swift held positions of authority in
both England and Ireland at different times. Many of Swift's works
reflected support for Ireland during times of political turmoil with
England, including Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Drapier's Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729), and earned him the status of an Irish patriot.
Oliver Goldsmith
(1730–1774), born in County Longford, moved to London, where he became
part of the literary establishment, though his poetry reflects his youth
in Ireland. He is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). Edmund Burke
(1729–1797) was born in Dublin and came to serve in the House of
Commons of Great Britain on behalf of the Whig Party, and establish a
reputation in his oratory and published works for great philosophical
clarity as well as a lucid literary style.
Literature in Ulster Scots (1): In the 18th century
Scots, mainly Gaelic-speaking, had been settling in Ulster since the 15th century, but large numbers of Scots-speaking Lowlanders, some 200,000, arrived during the 17th century following the 1610 Plantation, with the peak reached during the 1690s. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one.
In Ulster Scots-speaking areas the work of Scottish poets, such as Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) and Robert Burns
(1759–96), was very popular, often in locally printed editions. This
was complemented by a poetry revival and nascent prose genre in Ulster,
which started around 1720. A tradition of poetry and prose in Ulster Scots began around 1720. The most prominent being the 'rhyming weaver' poetry, publication of which began after 1750, though a broadsheet was published in Strabane in 1735.
These weaver poets looked to Scotland for their cultural and literary
models but were not simple imitators. They were inheritors of the same
literary tradition and followed the same poetic and orthographic
practices; it is not always immediately possible to distinguish between
traditional Scots writing from Scotland and Ulster. Among the rhyming weavers were James Campbell (1758–1818), James Orr (1770–1816), Thomas Beggs (1749–1847).
The Modern period: from 1800
In the 19th century English was well on the way to becoming the dominant vernacular. Down until the Great Famine of the 1840s, however, and even later, Irish was still used over large areas of the south-west, the west and the north-west.
A famous long poem from the beginning of the century is Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court), a vigorous and inventive satire by Brian Merriman from County Clare. The copying of manuscripts continued unabated. One such collection was in the possession of Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin, a teacher and linen draper of County Kilkenny
who kept a unique diary in vernacular Irish from 1827 to 1835 covering
local and international events, with a wealth of information about daily
life.
The Great Famine of the 1840s hastened the retreat of the Irish
language. Many of its speakers died of hunger or fever, and many more
emigrated. The hedge schools
of earlier decades which had helped maintain the native culture were
now supplanted by a system of National Schools where English was given
primacy. Literacy in Irish was restricted to a very few.
A vigorous English-speaking middle class was now the dominant
cultural force. A number of its members were influenced by political or
cultural nationalism, and some took an interest in the literature of the
Irish language. One such was a young Protestant scholar called Samuel Ferguson who studied the language privately and discovered its poetry, which he began to translate. He was preceded by James Hardiman, who in 1831 had published the first comprehensive attempt to collect popular poetry in Irish. These and other attempts supplied a bridge between the literatures of the two languages.
The Anglo-Irish tradition (2)
Maria Edgeworth
(1767–1849) furnished a less ambiguous foundation for an Anglo-Irish
literary tradition. Though not of Irish birth, she came to live there
when young and closely identified with Ireland. She was a pioneer in the
realist novel.
Other Irish novelists to emerge during the 19th century include John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Charles Kickham and William Carleton.
Their works tended to reflect the views of the middle class or gentry
and they wrote what came to be termed "novels of the big house".
Carleton was an exception, and his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry showed life on the other side of the social divide. Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was outside both traditions, as was the early work of Lord Dunsany. One of the premier ghost story writers of the nineteenth century was Sheridan Le Fanu, whose works include Uncle Silas and Carmilla.
The novels and stories, mostly humorous, of Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin
(who wrote together as Martin Ross), are among the most accomplished
products of Anglo-Irish literature, though written exclusively from the
viewpoint of the "big house". In 1894 they published The Real Charlotte.
George Moore
spent much of his early career in Paris and was one of the first
writers to use the techniques of the French realist novelists in
English.
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900), born and educated in Ireland, spent the latter half of his
life in England. His plays are distinguished for their wit, and he was
also a poet.
The growth of Irish cultural nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, culminating in the Gaelic Revival, had a marked influence on Irish writing in English, and contributed to the Irish Literary Revival. This can be clearly seen in the plays of J.M. Synge (1871–1909), who spent some time in the Irish-speaking Aran Islands, and in the early poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), where Irish mythology is used in a personal and idiosyncratic way.
Literature in Irish
There was a resurgence of interest in the Irish language in the late 19th century with the Gaelic Revival. This had much to do with the founding in 1893 of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge).
The League insisted that the identity of Ireland was intimately bound
up with the Irish language, which should be modernised and used as a
vehicle of contemporary culture. This led to the publication of
thousands of books and pamphlets in Irish, providing the foundation of a
new literature in the coming decades.
Patrick Pearse
(1879–1916), teacher, barrister and revolutionary, was a pioneer of
modernist literature in Irish. He was followed by, among others, Pádraic Ó Conaire (1881–1928), an individualist with a strongly European bent. One of the finest writers to emerge in Irish at the time was Seosamh Mac Grianna
(1900–1990), writer of a powerful autobiography and accomplished
novels, though his creative period was cut short by illness. His brother
Séamus Ó Grianna (1889–1969) was more prolific.
This period also saw remarkable autobiographies from the remote Irish-speaking areas of the south-west – those of Tomás Ó Criomhthain (1858–1937), Peig Sayers (1873–1958) and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (1904–1950).
Máirtín Ó Cadhain
(1906–1970), a language activist, is generally acknowledged as the
doyen (and most difficult) of modern writers in Irish, and has been
compared to James Joyce. He produced short stories, two novels and some
journalism. Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910–1988), Máire Mhac an tSaoi (b. 1922) and Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916–1977) were three of the finest poets of that generation. Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (1919–1982), who wrote both in Irish and English, was noted for his readiness to experiment in both prose and verse. Flann O'Brien (1911–66), from Northern Ireland, published an Irish language novel An Béal Bocht under the name Myles na gCopaleen.
Caitlín Maude (1941–1982) and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
(b. 1952) may be seen as representatives of a new generation of poets,
conscious of tradition but modernist in outlook. The best known of that
generation was possibly Michael Hartnett (1941–1999), who wrote both in Irish and English, abandoning the latter altogether for a time.
Writing in Irish now encompasses a broad range of subjects and
genres, with more attention being directed to younger readers. The
traditional Irish-speaking areas (Gaeltacht)
are now less important as a source of authors and themes. Urban Irish
speakers are in the ascendancy, and it is likely that this will
determine the nature of the literature.
Literature in Ulster Scots (2)
In Ulster Scots-speaking areas there was traditionally a considerable demand for the work of Scottish poets, such as Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, often in locally printed editions. This was complemented with locally written work, the most prominent being the rhyming weaver poetry, of which, some 60 to 70 volumes were published between 1750 and 1850, the peak being in the decades 1810 to 1840.
These weaver poets looked to Scotland for their cultural and literary
models and were not simple imitators but clearly inheritors of the same
literary tradition following the same poetic and orthographic practices;
it is not always immediately possible to distinguish traditional Scots
writing from Scotland and Ulster. Among the rhyming weavers were James Campbell (1758–1818), James Orr (1770–1816), Thomas Beggs (1749–1847), David Herbison (1800–1880), Hugh Porter (1780–1839) and Andrew McKenzie (1780–1839). Scots was also used in the narrative by novelists such as W. G. Lyttle (1844–1896) and Archibald McIlroy (1860–1915). By the middle of the 19th century the Kailyard school
of prose had become the dominant literary genre, overtaking poetry.
This was a tradition shared with Scotland which continued into the early
20th century.
A somewhat diminished tradition of vernacular poetry survived
into the 20th century in the work of poets such as Adam Lynn, author of
the 1911 collection Random Rhymes frae Cullybackey, John Stevenson (died 1932), writing as "Pat M'Carty" and John Clifford (1900–1983) from East Antrim.
A prolific writer and poet, W. F. Marshall (8 May 1888 – January 1959) was known as "The Bard of Tyrone". Marshall composed poems such as Hi Uncle Sam, Me an' me Da (subtitled Livin' in Drumlister), Sarah Ann and Our Son. He was a leading authority on Mid Ulster English (the predominant dialect of Ulster).
The polarising effects of the politics of the use of English and
Irish language traditions limited academic and public interest until the
studies of John Hewitt
from the 1950s onwards. Further impetus was given by more generalised
exploration of non-"Irish" and non-"English" cultural identities in the
latter decades of the 20th Century.
In the late 20th century the Ulster Scots poetic tradition was revived, albeit often replacing the traditional Modern Scots orthographic practice with a series of contradictory idiolects. James Fenton's poetry, at times lively, contented, wistful, is written in contemporary Ulster Scots, mostly using a blank verse form, but also occasionally the Habbie stanza. He employs an orthography that presents the reader with the difficult combination of eye dialect, dense Scots, and a greater variety of verse forms than employed hitherto. Michael Longley is another poet who has made use of Ulster Scots in his work.
Philip Robinson's (1946– ) writing has been described as verging on "post-modern kailyard". He has produced a trilogy of novels Wake the Tribe o Dan (1998), The Back Streets o the Claw (2000) and The Man frae the Ministry (2005), as well as story books for children Esther, Quaen o tha Ulidian Pechts and Fergus an tha Stane o Destinie, and two volumes of poetry Alang the Shore (2005) and Oul Licht, New Licht (2009).
A team in Belfast has begun translating portions of the Bible into Ulster Scots. The Gospel of Luke was published in 2009.
Irish literature in English (20th century)
James Joyce
The poet W. B. Yeats was initially influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and made use of Irish "peasant folk traditions and ancient Celtic myth" in his early poetry. Subsequently, however, he was drawn to the "intellectually more vigorous" poetry of John Donne, along with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and became one of the greatest 20th-century modernist poets. Though Yeats was an Anglo-Irish Protestant he was deeply affected by the Easter Rising of 1916 and supported the independence of Ireland. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was a member of the Irish Senate from 1922–28.
A group of early 20th-century Irish poets worth noting are those associated with the Easter Rising of 1916. Three of the Republican leadership, Patrick Pearse (1879–1916), Joseph Mary Plunkett (1879–1916) and Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), were noted poets.
However, it was to be Yeats' earlier Celtic mode that was to be most
influential. Amongst the most prominent followers of the early Yeats
were Padraic Colum (1881–1972), F. R. Higgins (1896–1941), and Austin Clarke (1896–1974). However Irish poetic Modernism
took its lead not from Yeats but from Joyce and the 1930s saw the
emergence of a generation of writers who engaged in experimental writing
as a matter of course. The best known of these is Samuel Beckett
(1906–1989), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Beckett's
poetry, while not inconsiderable, is not what he is best known for. The
most significant of the second generation Modernist Irish poets who
first published in the 1920s and 1930s include Brian Coffey (1905–1995), Denis Devlin (1908–1959), Thomas MacGreevy (1893–1967), Blanaid Salkeld (1880–1959), and Mary Devenport O'Neill (1879–1967).
While Yeats and his followers wrote about an essentially aristocratic
Gaelic Ireland, the reality was that the actual Ireland of the 1930s and
1940s was a society of small farmers and shopkeepers. Inevitably, a
generation of poets who rebelled against the example of Yeats, but who
were not Modernist by inclination, emerged from this environment. Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), who came from a small farm, wrote about the narrowness and frustrations of rural life. A new generation of poets emerged from the late 1950s onward, which included Antony Cronin, Pearse Hutchinson, John Jordan, and Thomas Kinsella,
most of whom were based in Dublin in the 1960s and 1970s. In Dublin a
number of new literary magazines were founded in the 1960s; Poetry Ireland, Arena, The Lace Curtain, and in the 1970s, Cyphers.
Though the novels of Forrest Reid
(1875–1947) are not necessarily well known today, he has been labelled
'the first Ulster novelist of European stature', and comparisons have
been drawn between his own coming of age novel of Protestant Belfast, Following Darkness (1912), and James Joyce's seminal novel of growing up in CatholicDublin, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1924). Reid's fiction, which often uses submerged narratives to
explore male beauty and love, can be placed within the historical
context of the emergence of a more explicit expression of homosexuality
in English literature in the 20th century.
James Joyce
(1882–1941) is one of the most significant novelists of the first half
of the 20th century, and a major pioneer in the use of the "stream of consciousness" technique in his famous novel Ulysses (1922). Ulysses has been described as "a demonstration and summation of the entire Modernist movement". Joyce also wrote Finnegans Wake (1939), Dubliners (1914), and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15). Ulysses, often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, is the story of a day in the life of a city, Dublin. Told in a dazzling array of styles, it was a landmark book in the development of literary modernism. If Ulysses is the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is a night epic, partaking in the logic of dreams and written in an invented language which parodies English, Irish and Latin.
Joyce's high modernist style had its influence on coming generations of Irish novelists, most notably Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Brian O'Nolan (1911–66) (who published as Flann O'Brien and as Myles na gCopaleen), and Aidan Higgins
(1927–2015). O'Nolan was bilingual and his fiction clearly shows the
mark of the native tradition, particularly in the imaginative quality of
his storytelling and the biting edge of his satire in works such as An Béal Bocht. Samuel Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1969, is one of the great figures in 20th-century world literature.
Perhaps best known for his plays, he also wrote works of fiction,
including Watt (1953) and his trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1956) and The Unnamable (1960), all three of which were first written, and published, in French.
The big house novel prospered into the 20th century, and Aidan Higgins' (1927–2015) first novel Langrishe, Go Down (1966) is an experimental example of the genre. More conventional exponents include Elizabeth Bowen (1899–73) and Molly Keane (1904–96) (writing as M.J. Farrell).
After 1922 Ireland was partition into the independent, Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, which retained a constitutional connection to the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland has for several centuries consisted of two distinct communities, Protestant, Ulster Scots and Irish Catholics. While the Protestants majority emphasise the constitutional ties to the United Kingdom, most Catholics would prefer a United Ireland. The long-standing cultural and political division led to sectarian violence in the late 1960s known as The Troubles,
which officially ended in 1998, though sporadic violence has continued.
This cultural division created, long before 1922, two distinct literary
cultures.
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) and Louis MacNeice (1907–63) are two
writers who were born and raised in Northern Ireland, but whose careers
took them to England. C. S. Lewis was a poet, novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist. Born in Belfast, he held academic positions at both Oxford University, and Cambridge University. He is best known both for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Chronicles of Narnia (1949–54), and The Space Trilogy (1938–45), and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
His faith had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio
broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Louis MacNeice was a poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" that included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group – a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco
(1946). His body of work was widely appreciated by the public during
his lifetime. Never as overtly (or simplistically) political as some of
his contemporaries, his work shows a humane opposition to
totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots.
MacNeice felt estranged from the Presbyterian Northern Ireland, with its "voodoo of the Orange bands", but felt caught between British and Irish identities.
Derek Mahon
Northern Ireland has also produced a number of significant poets since 1945, including John Hewitt, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, James Fenton, Michael Longley, Frank Ormsby, Ciarán Carson and Medbh McGuckian. John Hewitt (1907–87), whom many consider to be the founding father of Northern Irish poetry, was born in Belfast, and began publishing in the 1940s. Hewitt was appointed the first writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast in 1976. His collections include The Day of the Corncrake (1969) and Out of My Time: Poems 1969 to 1974 (1974) and his Collected Poems in 1991. John Montague (1929– ) was born in New York and brought up in County Tyrone.
He has published a number of volumes of poetry, two collections of
short stories and two volumes of memoir. Montague published his first
collection in 1958 and the second in 1967. In 1998 he became the first
occupant of the Ireland Chair of Poetry (virtually Ireland's Poet laureate).
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) is the most famous of the poets who came to
prominence in the 1960s and won the Nobel prize in 1995. In the 1960s
Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, and others, belonged to the so-called Belfast Group. Heaney in his verse translation of Beowulf (2000) uses words from his Ulster speech. A Catholic from Northern Ireland, Heaney, however, rejected his British identity and lived in the Republic of Ireland for much of his later life. James Fenton's poetry is written in contemporary Ulster Scots,
and Michael Longley (1939– ) has experimented with Ulster Scots for the
translation of Classical verse, as in his 1995 collection The Ghost Orchid.
Longley has spoken of his identity as a Northern Irish poet: "some of
the time I feel British and some of the time I feel Irish. But most of
the time I feel neither and the marvellous thing about the Good Friday agreement was that it allowed me to feel more of each if I wanted to." He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001. Medbh McGuckian's, (born Maeve McCaughan, 1950) first published poems appeared in two pamphlets in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach, and has translated into English (with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) The Water Horse (1999), a selection of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Among her recent collections are The Currach Requires No Harbours (2007), and My Love Has Fared Inland (2008). Paul Muldoon (1951– ) has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. Derek Mahon's (1941– ) first collection Twelve Poems appeared in 1965. His poetry, which is influenced by Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden, is "often bleak and uncompromising". Though Mahon was not an active member of The Belfast Group, he associated with the two members, Heaney and Longley, in the 1960s.[61] Ciarán Carson's poem Belfast Confetti, about the aftermath of an IRA bomb, won The Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry in 1990.
The most significant dramatist from Northern Ireland is Brian Friel (1929– ), from Omagh, County Tyrone, hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov", and "the universally accented voice of Ireland". Friel is best known for plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa but has written more than thirty plays in a six-decade spanning career that has seen him elected Saoi of Aosdána. His plays have been a regular feature on Broadway.
Among the most important novelists from Northern Ireland are Flann O'Brien (1911–66), Brian Moore (1921–1999), and Bernard MacLaverty (1942– ). Flann O'Brien, Brian O'Nolan, Irish: Brian Ó Nualláin, was a novelist, playwright and satirist, and is considered a major figure in twentieth century Irish literature. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he also is regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature. His English language novels, such as At Swim-Two-Birds, and The Third Policeman, were written under the nom de plume Flann O'Brien. His many satirical columns in The Irish Times and an Irish language novel An Béal Bocht
were written under the name Myles na gCopaleen. O'Nolan's novels have
attracted a wide following for their bizarre humour and Modernist metafiction. As a novelist, O'Nolan was powerfully influenced by James Joyce.
He was nonetheless sceptical of the cult of Joyce, which overshadows
much of Irish writing, saying "I declare to God if I hear that name
Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob." Brian Moore was also a screenwriter and emigrated to Canada, where he lived from 1948 to 1958, and wrote his first novels. He then moved to the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times (in 1976, 1987 and 1990). His novel Judith Hearne (1955) is set in Belfast. Bernard MacLaverty, from Belfast, has written the novels Cal; Lamb (1983), which describes the experiences of a young Irish Catholic involved with the IRA; Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Anatomy School. He has also written five acclaimed collections of short stories, the most recent of which is Matters of Life & Death. He has lived in Scotland since 1975.
Other noteworthy writers from Northern Ireland include poet Robert Greacen (1920–2008), novelist Bob Shaw (1931–96), and science fiction novelist Ian McDonald (1960). Robert Greacen, along with Valentin Iremonger, edited an important anthology, Contemporary Irish Poetry in 1949. Robert Greacen was born in Derry,
lived in Belfast in his youth and then in London during the 1950s, 60s
and 70s. He won the Irish Times Prize for Poetry in 1995 for his Collected Poems, and subsequently he moved to Dublin when he was elected a member of Aosdana. Shaw was a science fiction author, noted for his originality and wit. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1979 and 1980. His short story "Light of Other Days" was a Hugo Award nominee in 1967, as was his novel The Ragged Astronauts in 1987.
Theatre
George Bernard Shaw
The first well-documented instance of a theatrical production in Ireland is a 1601 staging of Gorboduc presented by Lord MountjoyLord Deputy of Ireland in the Great Hall in Dublin Castle.
Mountjoy started a fashion, and private performances became quite
commonplace in great houses all over Ireland over the following thirty
years. The Werburgh Street Theatre in Dublin is generally identified as the "first custom-built theatre in the city," "the only pre-Restoration playhouse outside London," and the "first Irish playhouse." The Werburgh Street Theatre was established by John Ogilby at least by 1637 and perhaps as early as 1634.
In the 19th century, Dion Boucicault (1820–90) was famed for his melodramas.
By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on
both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful
actor-playwright-managers then in the English-speaking theatre. The New York Times heralded him in his obituary as "the most conspicuous English dramatist of the 19th century." However, it was in the last decade of the century that the Irish theatre finally came of age with the establishment in Dublin in 1899 of the Irish Literary Theatre, and emergence of the dramatists George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900), though both wrote for the London theatre. Shaw's career
began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and he wrote more
than 60 plays. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian
theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social
issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and
the rights of women.
In 1903 a number of playwrights, actors and staff from several companies went on to form the Irish National Theatre Society, later to become the Abbey Theatre. It performed plays by W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), Lady Gregory (1852–1932), John Millington Synge (1871–1909), and Seán O'Casey (1880–1964). Equally importantly, through the introduction by Yeats, via Ezra Pound, of elements of the Noh theatre of Japan, a tendency to mythologise quotidian situations, and a particularly strong focus on writings in dialects of Hiberno-English, the Abbey was to create a style that held a strong fascination for future Irish dramatists. Synge's most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. O'Casey was a committed socialist and the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, which is set during the Irish War of Independence, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. It was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The former deals with the effect of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city, while the latter is set in Dublin in 1916 around the Easter Rising.
The Gate Theatre, founded in 1928 by Micheál MacLiammóir, introduced Irish audiences to many of the classics of the Irish and European stage.
Denis Johnston's most famous plays are The Old Lady Says No! (1929), and The Moon in the Yellow River (1931).
While there no doubt that Samuel Beckett is an Irishman he lived much of his life in France and wrote several works first in French. His most famous plays are Waiting for Godot (1955) (originally En attendant Godot, 1952), Endgame (originally Fin de partie) (1957), Happy Days (1961), written in English, all of which profoundly affected British drama.
Samuel Beckett. Painted by Reginald Gray from life in Paris 1961.
In 1954, Behan's first play The Quare Fellow was produced in Dublin. It was well received; however, it was the 1956 production at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in Stratford, London, that gained Behan a wider reputation – this was helped by a famous drunken interview on BBC television. Behan's play The Hostage (1958), his English-language adaptation of his play in Irish An Giall, met with great success internationally.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Hugh Leonard was the first major
Irish writer to establish a reputation in television, writing
extensively for television, including original plays, comedies,
thrillers and adaptations of classic novels for British television.
He was commissioned by RTÉ to write Insurrection, a 50th anniversary
dramatic reconstruction of the Irish uprising of Easter 1916. Leonard's Silent Song, adapted for the BBC from a short story by Frank O'Connor, won the Prix Italia in 1967. Three of Leonard's plays have been presented on Broadway: The Au Pair Man (1973), which starred Charles Durning and Julie Harris; Da (1978); and A Life (1980). Of these, Da, which originated off-off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theatre before transferring to the Morosco Theatre, was the most successful, running for 20 months and 697 performances, then touring the United States for ten months. It earned Leonard both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Best Play. It was made into a film in 1988.
Brian Friel, from Northern Ireland, has been recognised as a major Irish and English-language playwright almost since the first production of "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" in Dublin in 1964.
Tom Murphy is a major contemporary playwright
and was honoured by the Abbey Theatre in 2001 by a retrospective season
of six of his plays. His plays include the historical epic Famine (1968), which deals with the Irish Potato Famine between 1846 and spring 1847, The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), The Gigli Concert (1983) and Bailegangaire (1985).
Frank McGuinness first came to prominence with his play The Factory Girls, but established his reputation with his play about World War I, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which was staged in Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1985 and internationally. The play made a name for him when it was performed at Hampstead Theatre. It won numerous awards including the London Evening Standard "Award for Most Promising Playwright" for McGuinness.
Since the 1970s, a number of companies have emerged to challenge
the Abbey's dominance and introduce different styles and approaches.
These include Focus Theatre, The Children's T Company, the Project Theatre Company, Druid Theatre, Rough Magic, TEAM, Charabanc, and Field Day.
These companies have nurtured a number of writers, actors, and
directors who have since gone on to be successful in London, Broadway
and Hollywood.
Irish language theatre
Conventional drama did not exist in Irish before the 20th century.
The Gaelic Revival stimulated the writing of plays, aided by the
founding in 1928 of An Taibhdhearc,
a theatre dedicated to the Irish language. The Abbey Theatre itself was
reconstituted as a bilingual national theatre in the 1940s under Ernest Blythe, but the Irish language element declined in importance.
In 1957, Behan's play in the Irish language An Giall had its debut at Dublin's Damer Theatre. Later an English-language adaptation of An Giall, The Hostage, met with great success internationally.
Drama in Irish has since encountered grave difficulties, despite the existence of interesting playwrights such as Máiréad Ní Ghráda.
The Taidhbhearc has declined in importance and it is difficult to
maintain professional standards in the absence of a strong and lively
audience. The tradition persists, however, thanks to troupes like
Aisling Ghéar.
