1780-1880: The Celtic Revival
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a Europe-wide vogue for all things Celtic prompted a renaissance in Irish music and literature. This period also saw the birth of that misty, ineffable Celtic spirit, which was to influence Yeats a century later. A couple of important books appeared, inlcuding Joseph Cooper Walker 's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) and Edward Bunting 's General Collection of Irish Music (1796). Dublin at the tome of the Act of Union with Britain (1801) had long been a truly European city, frequently visited by French, German and Italian composers. Indeed, Handel's Messiah was first performed in Dublin's Fishamble Street. One Irish composer and writer who thrived under the European influence was the harpist Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1738), who met and traded riffs with the Italian composer Geminiani. At the turn of the century a series of Irish harp festivals began, their purpose being to recover the rapidly disappearing ancient music. With their evocation of the bardic tradition they became a focus not just for nifty fingerwork but for political agitation. The harpists continued into the nineteenth century until Thomas Moore (1779-1852) finally stole many of their traditional airs, wrote words for them, published them as Moore's Irish Melodies (1808) and made a lot of money. The concomitant literary revival entailed a resurrection of the Irish language too, and although few went so far as to learn it, it became a vague symbol of an heroic literary past that implied a fundamentally nationalist world view. John Mitchell's Fenian movement, provoked by Britian's callous response to the Famine, was at least as influenced by the Celtic Revival as it was by the new revolutionary ideas being imported all the time from Europe. The Fenians were to provide a bridge between the heroic past and the demands of modernism and had a huge impact on the thinking of Yeats and other leaders of the Celtic revival. One of their supporters, James Clarence Mangan (1803-49), inaugurated in My Dark Rosaleen (1846) the image of suffering Ireland as a brutalized woman, awaiting defence by an heroic man. In a country where visual and literary imagery of the Virgin Mary is ubiquitous, the symbolism escaped nobody.
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