Oscar Wilde 1854 - 1900
Oh, Oscar, I love you so much. People don't tend to think of Oscar Wilde as an Irish writer, despite the fact that his full name was 'Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde' (pretty damn Irish), because after attending Trinity College in Dublin, he spent most of his life away from Ireland. But despite moving away and losing his Irish accent, Wilde still said of himself "I am not English; I'm Irish which is quite another thing."
Bram Stoker 1847 - 1912
Dracula is one of my absolute favourite books, and I never actually knew that Stoker was Irish until my first visit to Dublin 2 years ago, but he is - surprise! Stoker was actually a friend of Oscar Wilde's family, and ended up marrying the girl who Oscar wanted to marry (or...said he wanted to marry).
W.B. Yeats 1865 - 1939
By most accounts Yeats was kind of a fascist crazy person - he was pretty publicly anti-semitic, he spent 27 years pursuing the same woman and then proposed to her daughter, and he had a fairly hardcore obsession with the occult...but dang, homeboy knew how to write a damn poem. Consider the following - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, the Joni Mitchell song Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the Van Morrison song Crazy Jane on God and No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. All Yeats quotes. Because everyone wants to get in on his amazing word magic. Seriously, that list could be way longer, kinda seems like any time someone can't think of a title for something they just go "Hey, whack a Yeats quote in there, that'll do".
Jonathan Swift 1667 - 1745
Jonathan Swift was a SATIRE BOSS and I love him so much. Gulliver's Travels is awesome and everything, but my favourite things by him are without a doubt 1. This hilarious poem about a stanky lady and 2. A Modest Proposal. Ah, A Modest Proposal, I love you so. Personally, my favourite kind of satire is the kind where the people it's critiquing are too dumb to get it and they all flip the fuck out. In this essay, Jonathan Swift suggests that the poverty problem in Ireland could be solved by the Irish selling their children for meat and rather than being like "Lots of people are starving to death in Ireland and obviously we need to do something about it", all the rich English people were like "OH MY GOD JONATHAN SWIFT IS A CANNIBAL AND HE WANTS US TO MAKE GLOVES OUT OF BABIES!" Hilarious.
George Bernard Shaw 1856 - 1950
This dude wrote a lot of stuff, but is most famous for the play Pygmalion (which in turn is most famous for being turned into the musical My Fair Lady). Shaw won a Nobel Prize in 1925 for his contributions to literature and initially wanted to turn down the prize, but his wife convinced him to accept it because she considered it a 'tribute to Ireland'. Yeats had become the first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature two years previously.
Seamus Heaney 1939 - STILL GOIN' STRONG
Seamus Heaney is considered by a lot of people to be kind of the "new Yeats" in terms of important Irish poets. He wrote a lot of poems about the unrest in Ireland in the 60s and 70s (the Troubles), and many of his poems talk about the political situation in Ireland through talking about preserved bodies that were found in peat bogs. I realise that sounds incredibly weird and morbid, but they're very beautiful poems. My favourite thing by Seamus Heaney is actually his translation of Beowulf, it's totally the best one and it's lovely.
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This list is a bit of a sausage fest, and for that I apologise, These are all writers I studied over the course of my Bachelors in English Literature, and sadly for me my curriculum was a little light on ladies. I have resolved to read some more books by Irish women though, so this list is my new friend.
For those of you who noted that Beckett and Joyce were both absent from this list - sorry, but I hate them both. Deal with it.
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