This chapter builds on the pioneering work of John Wilson Foster (‘Encountering Traditions’, in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, ed. John Wilson Foster (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997) and John Waters (‘Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1772–1820’, in Romantic Generations, ed. Ghislaine McDayter, Guinn Batten, and Barry Milligan (Lewisbury: Bucknell University Press, 2001)), both of whom considered the ways in which English-language poets of the eighteenth century wrote about Irish land and landscape. The essay looks at poems written to celebrate the world of English-speaking owners of Irish farms and estates – vistas and pleasure gardens for instance – and poems about activities taking place in the countryside – gardening, farming, hunting, and team sports. Verses praising the wildness of untamed nature are also considered as are poems on violent events such as storms and extended frosts. The poems raise practical, theological, and aesthetic issues in both pastoral and mock-pastoral modes as well as in the emerging genre of ‘picturesque’ poetry. The chapter also considers popular poetry, such as demotic verse about country life, and indicates that, for some poets – Goldsmith and Laurence Whyte for instance – life in rural Ireland was not always idyllic.

One of the least explored and potentially most interesting areas of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish writing is the vernacular poetry found in its printed verse chapbooks. These chapbooks are fragile items – folded half sheets, poorly printed on cheap paper by Irish jobbing printers (mostly in provincial towns like Monaghan, Limerick and Strabane) and sold by chapmen throughout the countryside; most (probably over 99 per cent) of them have long since disappeared, but several hundred of them have, somehow, survived and they give us, between them, a fascinating glimpse of what was sung and recited to Irish town and country audiences between about 1780 and about 1820. The song chapbooks are particularly unusual in that their contents were not copied from one printed text to another but taken down, at dictation, by compositors for whom the singer would recite the words. Thus what we have is the unedited, unabridged, uncensored, unadulterated texts of what was actually sung in rural Ireland during a period of social (as well as political) upheaval.

This material is in English – or rather in Hiberno-English – though some songs contain passages in a phonetically rendered form of Irish. Though everyone concerned with these songs would have been functionally bilingual – that is, able to understand and to speak both English and Irish – few (if any) of them, poets, compositors, printers, chapmen or eventual purchasers, would have been able to read or write the Irish language correctly or with any facility, despite the fact that material in Irish was widely disseminated orally throughout Ireland.

In December 1690, five months after the Battle of the Boyne, a little-known Dublin printer called John Brett printed the first poem of what was to be a golden age for Irish verse in English. The grandiloquent and florid ‘Ode to the King on his Irish Expedition’ was intended to flatter the unattractive but victorious Dutchman whom the Protestants of Ireland were hailing as their ‘Providential deliverer’ from the horrors of popery and tyranny under Jacobite rule.

asked the poet, in a flourish of rhetorical exuberance. Whatever William of Orange might have answered to these – and many other similarly euphuistic – questions, the poet (a 23-year-old graduate of Trinity College, Dublin named Jonathan Swift) hoped that this – his first printed work – would be sufficiently well regarded by those around the king to bring him some reward for the trouble of writing it, and presumably for the expense of having it printed. Even though, it seems, nothing came of Swift’s efforts to attract patronage by the poem, the verse itself marks an important moment in the history of Irish poetry. Not only is it the first appearance in print of the poet who was to dominate Irish poetry in English for the first half of the eighteenth century, but it is also the first poem of the new Williamite era, one in which peace and prosperity in Ireland would provide a nurturing environment not only for the writing and reading of verse but for its printing. Between the Battle of the Boyne and the Act of Union, the muse of poetry was very busy in Ireland.