One would think that poetry, which arose so early in a nation's life,
would have developed fully. But this was not the case in Ireland. No
narrative, dramatic, didactic, or epic poetry of any importance arose,
and many questions and answers might be made concerning this curious
restriction of development. The most probable solution of this problem
is that there was never enough peace in Ireland or continuity of
national existence or unity, to allow of a continuous development of
any one of the arts into all its forms. Irish poetry never advanced
beyond the lyric. In that form it lasted all through the centuries; it
lasts still at the present day, and Douglas Hyde has proved how much
charm belongs to it in his book on the _Love Songs of Connacht_.
It has had a long, long history; it has passed through many phases; it
has sung of love and sorrow, of national wars and hopes, of Ireland
herself as the Queen of Sorrow, of exile regrets from alien shores, of
rebellion, of hatred of England, of political strife, in ballads sung
in the streets, of a thousand issues of daily life and death--but of
world-wide affairs, of great passions and duties and fates evolving in
epic or clashing in drama, of continuous human lives in narrative
(except in prose), of the social life of cities or of philosophic
thought enshrined in stately verse, it has not sung.
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