This chapter shows that to divorce the poetry written between 1780 and 1830 from its music is to mutilate its meaning. The proximity of poetry and music increased as both the space and the market for domestic performances grew, facilitated by an explosion in printed publications and new instrumental technologies. The demand for chamber music and for song above all was seemingly insatiable, from both players and audiences. On stage and in the home, poetry was pressed into service to cope with the boom in music publishing and the growth in popularity of the piano. As the intimacies of private performance were translated into print, music, song, and poetry worked together to shape new possibilities for cultural expression.

The Irish poetry of the romantic age is dominated by its best-known figure, Thomas Moore. While Moore claimed that his songs were responsible for saving the national literary and musical culture, there were, of course, many other writers producing poetry in differing modes, languages, and registers. This chapter begins and ends with Moore’s considerable achievements, but it also deals with three issues that preoccupied Irish poetic and cultural debate in the period and after: translation, authenticity, and quality. The debate gains its first focus in the work of Charlotte Brooke, but continues through Moore’s contact with music in the collections of Edward Bunting. This period was also one of considerable historical moment, and the chapter also addresses poetry written out of the contact with French revolutionary ideas, the United Irishmen, 1798, and Union. Among poets considered are also William Drennan, Mary Tighe, James Orr, and Thomas Dermody, writing in English and Ulster Scots as well as in contact with the Irish-language tradition, mock-epic, and the oriental.