Michelle O Riordan

Poetics and Polemics is about the polemical presentation of Irish history in five ballad-style poems in Irish in the period c. 1630-1660. The five poems in question have achieved an iconic status as the ''voice'' of the Gaelic Irish in the turbulent mid-century. The book interrogates each element of the poems in the contemporary context, using literary, devotional, official documentation, and polemical sources in Irish, English, Latin and French, where relevant. Poetics and Polemics presents readings of the poems as literary works, and also as works of contemporary polemic engagement, participating in the vital, vigorous, and multilingual debates of the day. It examines the religious and political loyalties expressed in the poems; it queries the single voice allotted to them. The close readings reveal works that share genre and style essentials, but express, within those constraints, all the nuances, varieties of allegiance, and fractured and tortuous loyalties, that characterized that febrile and convulsed century. Poetics and Polemics completes Professor O Riordan's suite of three works, examining Irish poetry within its genre and historical contexts - The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of the Gaelic World (Cork University Press, 1994) and Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality (Cork University Press, 2007) being the other two. Poetics and Polemics re-establishes the multivalent voices subsisting in the mid-century poems, and returns agency and art to their shadowy authors.

This study explores the rhetorical devices used by Irish bardic poets to create poetry of literary worth and abiding interest. A number of poems selected for this study are read with emphasis on the rhetorical characteristics they shared with work of similar status in other parts of Europe in the High Middle Ages.Irish bardic poetry is an expression of medieval European high literary cultures. Its themes, tropes and treatments are, along with being an expression of indigenous Irish literary culture, reflexes of the shared classical culture of the Europe of the High Middle Ages. This work explores the rhetorical reality in the works of poets from the thirteenth (Adamh O Fialan) to the seventeenth centuries (Eochaidh O hEoghusa). Emphasis is placed on the literary world of the poetry, building on the metrical, linguistic, textual studies and editions published by scholars over the last century. The readings presented here reveal the world of Irish bardic poetry as a fully chromatic, vibrant, humorous, scholarly and literary enterprise. Poets participated creatively and consciously in contemporary literary movements, filtering and selecting to suit the sensibilities of the vital indigenous literary culture. The readings offered in this study re-establish the international flavor of Irish bardic profane poetry and, in doing so, return the poet and the poetry to a world in which the literary works have merit in their own right. In this study, bardic poetry is not explored for its immediate historical references to events or to people. The result of this is to cast a bright light both on the literary nature of the poetry and on the vigorous and engaged literary culture in Ireland, abandoning, for once, the necessity to refer everything to the duality of conquered and conqueror. "