Excerpt from Ireland's Literary Renaissance

Since the Easter rising of 1916 there has been re newed in Ireland that sense of national identity which never fails to assert itself in the Irish people when the spirit of nationality seems near the point of extinction. On every such occasion this resurgent nationalism has become articulate and has seriously a¿ected the litera ture of the time, but it has not been until the inevitable lull, following the storm of politics, that this feeling has ¿owered in prose and poetry. The so-called literary renaissance followed the political aftermath of 1848, and the Fenian movement, when the patriotic literature of the Thomas Davis school made way for a literature whose patriotism had its roots in the rich soil of the Gaelic tradition, and was only incidentally concerned with the political passions of nationalism. Rescued from neglect by the pioneer editors and translators of the old literature, Irish culture began once more to live tn the songs and stories of the poets, instead of dying slowly in the folk-tales of the peasantry. The creation of the Gaelic League and the heightening of the national consciousness, which were the cultural achievements of Sinn Fe'in, brought about a renaissance of which An glo-irish literature was but one aspect. That new spirit has culminated in the rising of 1916, and the subse quent exacerbation of the national temper, so that the circle of experience is completed, and Ireland finds her self in literature and politics back in the era of Davis and M angan.

The most obvious result of this change has been the recrudescence of pamphleteering and the predominantly political character of the current writing. As in the eighteenth century, Dublin teems with pamphlets and jail journals: economic histories, and various types of historical and political essay absorb the energies of the writers involved in the Sinn F e'in mile'e. The majority of these are without any literary value whatsoever, and it is even doubtful if many will be of more than passing interest to the future historian as records of the time. It is only necessary to look at john Mitchel's jail journal (1854) in order to see that, whereas he added a masterpiece to anglo-irish literature, his imitators of recent years are simply journalists of varying skill. The finest piece of political writing which these years of stress have produced is The National Being, by A. E., whose ideas are as far beyond the average politi cion in Ireland as elsewhere. But it has become a con venient fiction that the policy of Sinn F ein can be iden tified with the best thought of certain individuals, sim ply because these individuals are not in opposition to the ideals of Sinn F iin.

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