This chapter explores the First World War poetry of Mary Borden, placing it against the backdrop of her critically acclaimed prose record, The Forbidden Zone (1929). Borden published her poetic responses to her war experience as a post script to this text. Like the other fragments and short stories, these poems draw on her experience with the Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1, inviting the reader to see, hear, smell, and interpret the war along with the poilus whom she treated. Borden’s poems offer a record like no other, often adopting stylistic tropes of modernism to articulate the unspeakable. The chapter also examines some very different wartime poems that document her love affair with her future husband, Edward Spears. Powerful and erotically charged, these poems encapsulate a very different kind of war experience, enabling Borden to speak with a range of poetic voices.

The publication of Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s Margadh na Saoire in 1956 marked a revolutionary moment in Irish women’s poetry. Mhac an tSaoi came from the elite stock of the new state, and as the daughter of politician Sean McEntee experienced Irish history as very much a family affair. Her childhood experiences of the Kerry Gaeltacht were heavily formative, and her intimacy with folk songs and the dán grá tradition leave a strong influence on her early work. This work stood out strongly for its frank and radical treatment of sex, love, and the female sphere in Irish life. Her writing on themes of motherhood situates itself in the currents of debate over subsequent decades on reproductive rights, and paints a withering portrait of patriarchal control over women’s bodies. Subsequent poems tackle issues ranging from commemorations of the 1916 Rising to the Holocaust, and confirm her as one of the great modern Irish lyric poets.

Classicism and classical allusion provided writers of the period with a time-honoured way of thinking about personal and political life. Fragments of classical story survived in popular culture and there was a tradition of gentry classicism, typified by Burke’s appropriation of the classical sublime, signifying expensive education perhaps supplemented by travel. Artists, sculptors, and architects who might have studied in Rome could supplement and stimulate textual appropriations with visual representations of classical myth, heroism, and civic or senatorial dignity. Patriotic antiquarianism, both exploited and mocked by Thomas Moore, selected possible references to the antiquity, civility, and fortitude of Ireland from classical sources. Poets of both sexes elegantly imitated classical praise of love and wine. But gentry classicism was gradually extended and democratised, sometimes sharpening into quasi-Juvenalian satire, through growing awareness and deployment of classically derived discourses of rights and liberty. Moore’s mellifluous Anacreon versions were followed by the more national Irish Melodies.