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This chapter examines women's authorship and patronage of poetry in Irish. It focuses on the keen (caoineadh), in which the female speaker laments the death of an individual, and amateur syllabic verse, locating both in the context of professional bardic poetry. The chapter demonstrates how Caitilín Dubh, Fionnghuala Ní Bhriain, and Brighid Fitzgerald engaged with bardic tradition and expressed complex positions in relation to gendered and ethnic identity. It analyses the legitimizing contexts for women's authorship of verse, discussing the more prolific Scottish Gaelic context as an important reference point for the understanding of Irish women's compositions. Finally, the chapter explores Irish noblewomen's patronage of poetry, arguing that this evidence throws light on women's critical engagement with bardic culture.

Michael Longley writes of Jamie: 'She has perfect pitch, a natural sense of cadence and verbal melody that helps to give her work the feel of organic inevitability'. Longley flies close to the heart of his own work, revealing their shared aesthetic practice, central to which is the idea of poetry as dialogue. This chapter tunes in to Longley and Jamie as poets in conversation with each other, across boundaries of nation, time and space, and not merely at the level of shared subject matter, but more profoundly at the level of poetic technique and formal concerns. Both are poets of the singing line and both are shifting, sea-faring poets crossing sound- and sight- lines in their endless probings of words and worlds. Both engage with and extend the limits of the lyric, in particular the sonnet form, and in the work of both the energies of translation lie at the core of the artistic enterprise. Jamie and Longley see into the life of poetry as an act of conversation, an art of conversion.

Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) is known chiefly as the promoter of a revival in Scots poetry. This has been seen as a form of nationalist, even Jacobite resistance to post-Union anglicization and Whiggism. Ramsay’s efforts were criticized by some for ‘barbarity’; ‘Bagpipes no Musick’ was the title of a typical attack. One of his defenders was James Arbuckle (1700-42), a Glasgow/Irish poet, a unionist Whig, whose Scottish poems included Glotta (Latin for Clyde), an extended meditation on post-Union Scotland. Arbuckle’s poems were in standard English and acknowledged the influence of Pope, Addison, and Dryden. Nevertheless Ramsay and Arbuckle exchanged friendly poetic epistles, which recognized a joint enterprise of Scottish literary improvement. This chapter considers Ramsay through his relationship with Arbuckle, exploring themes in post-Union Scots culture including the poetic use of Scots, attitudes to union, Augustanism, Horatianism, and the literary patronage of the Scottish Whigs.

Sixteen years after his death in 1986, W. S. Graham's poetry has remained current, even gaining in stature and attracting more readers, particularly in the 1990s. Graham's growing reputation during the period was evident in the publication of Uncollected Poems in 1990, Aimed at Nobody in 1993, and Selected Poems in 1996. Graham was considered a victim of literary fashion and, more specifically, of the Movement. His early work, influenced by the Apocalyptic school and by Dylan Thomas in particular, was opposed to all the principles of the Movement. However, seeing Graham as a victim of the Movement oversimplifies him and his place in post-war poetry. This book argues that Graham was not comfortable with poetic labels and schools and that his poetry has some of its roots in Modernism, some in the Apocalyptic school, and others in the tradition of Scottish poetry. It shows that both Graham and Philip Larkin had interest in Thomas during the 1940s. It also explores Graham's links to other writers, thinkers, and artists as well as his place among post-war poets.