‘How Mute their Tongues’: Irish Gothic Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter begins by considering the lack of a canon of Irish Gothic verse as an effect of two scholarly occlusions—a focus on the nation in nineteenth-century Irish poetry, and an emphasis on prose fiction in discussions of nineteenth-century Gothic literature. Both reinforce the elite status of poetry, as in the British canon where Gothic poetry is typically only allowed to slide in on the coat-tails of canonical poets. This chapter proposes a body of Irish Gothic poetry, that, like the English Gothic, begins with Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), but launches a very different graveyard tradition that draws on concerns about national sovereignty and the silencing of poets. That tradition begins with iterations of Gray, but then mixes with Irish, Germanic, and Nordic folklore to develop a more broadly northern European Gothic while remaining centered on burial and the graveyard, on through into prison poetry in the second half of the century. This Irish Gothic verse tradition is dominated less by supernatural tropes than by dehumanising gestures. The chapter refers to a wide range of verse, but focuses on poetry by Thomas Dermody, James Orr, William Drennan, Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, Jane Wilde, Dora Sigerson, and Oscar Wilde.