SOURCE: “Covert Voices: Women Poets After the Revival,” in Poetry in Modern Ireland, 1998, pp. 319-28

In the following essay, Schirmer examines the poetry of Irish women writers Sheila Wingfield, Blanaid Salkeld, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Maire MacEntee, and Eithne Strong.

Irish women poets writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and during the years of the literary revival achieved a certain visibility, even if their work was often subsumed by the various literary or political movements that both supported and contained them. The poetry of Irish women writing in the wake of the revival and the establishment of the Irish Free State was much less widely noticed in its day, and has since been largely forgotten. The relative silence of the female poetic voice in these years was part of a larger phenomenon. The political, cultural, and religious conservatism that dominated Irish society in the wake of independence often...