Chapter 7 - Masculinity, Nationhood, and the Irish Woman Poet, 1860–1922

Summary

Given the gender segregation of the times, Irish women poets in the decades between the Famine and the revolutionary period often wrote about events they had witnessed but not participated in at first hand. Nowhere is this gap more noticeable than in representations of conflict and the valorous male warriors who waged it. In the mid-nineteenth century the poets of the Nation, including Francesca Elgee (‘Speranza’) employed ballad forms to orient women’s poetry firmly towards nationalist self-assertion. In Revivalist times Katharine Tynan wrote sensitively of Anglo-Irish relations, and of soldiers’ lives in the First World War, a conflict in which two of her sons served. Martyred Irish manhood is a classic nationalist trope, but acquires wider resonances when applied to First World War elegies too. The neglected work of Winifred Letts is also considered, helping to build a larger picture of the connections between Irish and English traditions at a time of conflict and transition.