Revolution and Radical Dissenting Poetry, 1791–8

Long before Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821) articulated the notion of poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, the written word had been credited with the potential to influence public opinion and to complement armed national struggle. But, as Fiona Stafford points out, ‘[t]he very act of writing poetry at a time when others are being shot is sometimes subject to charges of political evasion or irresponsibility, as evident in some of the more anxious, soul-searching of [Seamus] Heaney’s early volumes’ (Stafford, 2010, p. 12). This is a charge to which Irish writers from Yeats to Heaney have felt compelled to respond. While the work of each was shaped by respective historical events — that of Irish independence and the Ulster ‘troubles’ — the Irish revolutionary context of the 1790s was equally central to the formation and development of Ulster Romantic poetry. The most well-known United Irish poet, James Orr has recently formed a book-length study as Ulster’s leading ‘patriot poet’ (see Baraniuk, 2014). Much of Orr’s poetry, most of which was published between 1804 and 1817, was retrospective in its treatment of revolution and rebellion, benefitting from rumination on the events of 1791–8. He forms an interesting contrast to Thomson whose poetry, continuously in the Belfast newspapers and republished with notable emendations in his post-rebellion volume New Poems (1799), offers an intriguing, immediate, sense of an evolving political attitude which responded to the events of the 1790s as they unfolded.