Yeatsian Shades In Ó Direáin and Macgill-Eain

Abstract

Michael Hartnett’s grandiloquent valediction ‘A Farewell to English’, first delivered from the stage of the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 1974, announced the thirty-three year-old poet’s decision to cease publishing in his native English, the language in which he had already earned a considerable reputation, in order to devote himself henceforth to poetry in Irish.