The Book of Irish Poetry #267198

Of anthologies of Irish verse there have been many. Miss Charlotte Brooke's "Irish Poetry," a volume of translations of her own from the Irish, led the way in the year 1789, and was followed by Hardiman's "Irish Minstrelsy," in 1831, with metrical translations by Thomas Furlong, Henry Grattan Curran, and John D'Alton. Both these volumes contained the Irish originals, as well as the translations from them, and both volumes were extremely valuable for their preservation of those originals, but suffered from the over ornate, and, indeed, often extremely artificial English verse into which they were translated. Highly finished that verse undoubtedly was; here and there as fine as much of Macpherson's Ossian. But it was, as a rule, as untrue a presentment in English verse of Irish Gaelic poetry as Pope's version of the Iliad and Dryden's translation of the Aeneid are untrue expressions of the spirit and form of the Greek and Latin originals.