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Irish Literature: What Makes Irish Writers So Good?

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James Joyce by Roger Cummiskey. When we think of Ireland, we think of a country that has a rich cultural heritage. A place which seems to be bursting at the seams with poets, novelists and playwrights, who all seem to have been gifted with an incredible innate sense of storytelling and drama. If you were to check the list of Nobel Prize winners since it’s inception, you’d find that Ireland ranks eighth in terms of how many it has produced over the years. Just what is it that makes the Irish so good at writing and the creative process? The first Irish foray into literature Culturally speaking, Ireland lays claim to the fact that it has one of the oldest forms of vernacular literature in the world, with only Greek or Latin able to match it. The Irish peoples were literate from the very earliest centuries, utilising a simple writing system called “Ogham” which was a way of communicating via inscriptions on little stone tablets. One of the very first proper written Irish wor...
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Pomes Penyeach by James Joyce

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Illustrations below by Roger Cummiskey.© Poems of James Joyce Shakespeare and Company, Paris, published Pomes Penyeach , by James Joyce, in 1927. An American, Sylvia Beach, who was a patron of Joyce, owned this publishing business and bookshop. She was the first publisher of Ulysses in 1922. Joyce also published 36 short poems entitled Chamber Music. I have painted a series of James Joyce’s Poems in watercolours using waterproof ink on hand made Indian paper where I have given the paper an aged appearance. Each painting is given its attributable date of the poems composition. The image above is the cover of the Faber and Faber edition. There are no illustrations in it. Tilly   by James Joyce The thirteenth poem, as in the Baker's dozen, from Pomes Penyeach. James Joyce wrote 12 poems that he sold for a shilli ng or twelve pence, hence the penny each. But in order to give good value he slipped in a thirteenth at no extra cost....
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Gas from a burner by James Joyce.

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On 14 September 1912 Joyce started writing ‘Gas from a Burner.’ Joyce started writing the poem in the railway station waiting room in Flushing (Vlissingen) in the Netherlands on his way from Dublin to Trieste, and he completed it between there and Salzburg. He had it printed in Trieste and sent copies to Dublin for distribution there. He gave it the dateline ‘Flushing, September 1912.’ After hearing that the already printed pages of Dubliners were to be destroyed, Joyce left Dublin for the last time on 12 September. He stopped over in London long enough to offer the manuscript of Dubliners to Charles Boon, of publishers Mills & Boon. Mills & Boon published books by Padraic Colum who had written in advance to recommend Joyce’s book. But Joyce was not hopeful. Boon told him he had read about the references to King Edward in Dubliners and said he wouldn’t care to publish something like that. Joyce’s anger at the destruction of Dubliners had not abated by the time h...
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