The Poetry of Sean O’ Riordain: Broken Language for a Broken People

Sean O’ Riordain, one of Ireland’s greatest poets, was torn between two worlds, and the resulting contradictions and insecurities produced the most important poetry in the Irish language in the last 200 years.

His father spoke Irish; his mother spoke English. He believed the traditions and culture of Ireland were being overwhelmed by Western Europe, most notably England. Yet this “post-Colonial hangover” became his access to the modern world.

O’Riordain longed to break free of the constraints of the Catholic Church. When he tasted that personal freedom, however, he experienced only torment and retreated back to the structure and authority of the Church.

O’ Riordain described himself and his work as “a non-poet writing non-poetry in non-Irish for a non-people.” 

This was the title of the lecture by Louis de Paor, director of the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland in Galway, who spoke at Stonehill recently about the life and work of O’ Riordain, and his lasting importance to Irish language poetry.

An Indispensable Poet
“O’ Riordain was the most significant poet in the Irish language in the last two centuries,” de Paor said. “His work is indispensable to anyone who wants to study Irish language poetry or literature. He was a hugely influential poet, but he has no successors.”

The lecture, held on April 14 at the Martin Institute, was part of the College’s Irish Studies Program Lecture Series.

Despite his importance, de Paor said, O’ Riordain is “less read now than at any time since his death” in 1977.

O’ Riordain was born in 1916 in the west Cork village of Ballvourney, in the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking) region of Ireland. 

When he was 20-years-old, O’ Riordain contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium and was later isolated from his family and community when he returned home. The disease and his quarantine profoundly increased his already existing sense of isolation, and deeply influenced his poetry.

“Death is an ever-present reality for him since the age of 20,” de Paor said.

Because he had little contact with people in real life, de Paor said one of the first things you notice about O’ Riordain’s poetry is the absence of people.

“There is no love poetry,” he said. “He says the only thing he knows how to write is about himself.” 

Exploring Insecurity
By describing himself as a “non-poet,” O’ Riordain was revealing one of his many insecurities. 

When his first collection was published in 1952, it was recognized as a modern breakthrough in Irish language poetry. But other critics challenged this notion and chastised him for not having a firmer grasp of the Irish language. They charged that his writing accelerated the decay of the language rather than preserving it, which further fueled O’ Riordain’s insecurity.

“He was profoundly insecure about his ability to write poetry and his linguistic abilities in the Irish language,” de Paor said. 

But, O’ Riordain was supported by others, including novelist Brendan Behan, who said he had as much right to write in Irish as Samuel Beckett did in French. His reinvention of the Irish language through his poetry was compared to James Joyce’s reinvention of the English language.

“He writes Irish for his own shattered, fragmented, confused relationship with Irish,” de Paor said. “He uses broken language to express his broken existence. His use of language is completely idiosyncratic, odd.”

O’ Riordain’s poetry is characterized by feelings of isolation, alienation, instability, and insecurity, and, in it, he often confronts head-on his own death. Yet, according to de Paor he was personally, “a great joker, great company, and hilariously funny.”

Struggles with Identity, Language and Faith
In 1964, O’ Riordain published “Brosna” (“Kindling”), which de Paor described as a “nearly perfect” collection of his poetry. In it, O’ Riordain writes of his struggles with the nature of identity, language, and faith.

O’ Riordain went onto write a newspaper column in The Irish Times from 1967 to 1975, in which “he is vicious and scathing of politicians who turned Ireland toward Western Europe at the expense of its own traditions,” said de Paor. 

An accomplished poet in his own right, Louis de Paor won an Australian Council Writer’s Fellowship in 1995, and, in 2000, he became the first Irish-language poet to receive The University of St. Thomas’s Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.

In his introduction, Professor Richard Finnegan called de Paor, “a key figure of the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1970’s-1980’s, as he helped heighten the popularity of the Irish language.” 

Besides his expertise in the life and work of O’ Riordain, de Paor has also published articles on a wide range of writing in Irish, from the court poetry of medieval Ireland to the work of contemporary poets like Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Michael Davitt. He has published a number of books including a study of narrative technique in the short fiction of Mairtin O’ Cadhain. He and Sean O’ Tuama also co-edited an anthology of 20th century poetry in Irish, and he is currently at work on a study of the writings of Flann O’Brien. 

De Paor’s most recent book, published in 2005, is titled “Ag Greadadh Bas sa Relig” (“Clapping in the Cemetery”). He has taught a number of Stonehill students at the National University of Ireland and hoped his lecture would help strengthen ties between the two schools.

“That’s one of the reasons I am here,” he said.

04/21/08