SOURCE: An introduction to The Hungry Voice: The Poetry of the Irish Famine, edited by Chris Morash, Irish Academic Press, 1989, pp. 15-39.

In the following survey of Famine poetry, Morash claims that the Famine "left the poets of the 1840s abandoned by tradition," citing the difficulties the poets experienced trying to respond to the enormous tragedy and the fact that the subject matter resisted the Victorian poetic tendency to marry form with meaning.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history' that shape us,
 but images of the past embodied in language.'

Brian Friel, Translations

If you were to hike across Achill Island in County Mayo, you would find a village of roofless cottages in the island's centre, the empty shells of an entire community, piled stone upon stone. Their counterparts can be found singly and in clusters throughout every county in Ireland. There, on...