Chapter 2 - Irish Literature and Classical Modes

Summary

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.