The position of the Cork poet J. J. Callanan (1795–1829) as a transitional figure between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish poetry is more complicated, and more revealing of its historical moment, than is implied in the usual assessments of Callanan as the first Irish poet to have found ways of reshaping poetry written in English to accommodate the formal qualities of poetry written in Irish. An analysis of Callanan’s one collection, The Recluse of Inchidoney (1829), paying particular attention to its use of doppelgangers and its indebtedness to Callanan’s English romantic contemporaries, makes it clear that Callanan occupied a conflicted, dual poetic space, informed by a desire to bring to light, in a fully sympathetic way, the Irish-speaking culture that was still flourishing in rural Ireland in the 1820s, but also recognising the force of Ireland’s English-speaking culture, grounded in a colonialist confidence, that had come to dominate Irish poetry in the eighteenth century.

The Irish poetry of the romantic age is dominated by its best-known figure, Thomas Moore. While Moore claimed that his songs were responsible for saving the national literary and musical culture, there were, of course, many other writers producing poetry in differing modes, languages, and registers. This chapter begins and ends with Moore’s considerable achievements, but it also deals with three issues that preoccupied Irish poetic and cultural debate in the period and after: translation, authenticity, and quality. The debate gains its first focus in the work of Charlotte Brooke, but continues through Moore’s contact with music in the collections of Edward Bunting. This period was also one of considerable historical moment, and the chapter also addresses poetry written out of the contact with French revolutionary ideas, the United Irishmen, 1798, and Union. Among poets considered are also William Drennan, Mary Tighe, James Orr, and Thomas Dermody, writing in English and Ulster Scots as well as in contact with the Irish-language tradition, mock-epic, and the oriental.