Máirtín Ó Direáin

Máirtín Ó Direáin was one of the leading Irish-language poets of the twentieth century. Publishing his work from the 1940s on, he was the first to make his mark in Irish poetry, heralding a new era. Influenced by the landscape, people, and spoken Irish of his Aran Island homeland, Ó Direáin characteristically produced a poetry that was dual in nature: both traditional (in its subject matter) and modern (in its post-Eliot style); both national (with its echoes of Keating, Ó Bruadair and others) and international (with its openness to European and English-language writers); both personal (focussing on his own journey from small island to big city, from Gaeltacht to Galltacht) and communal or even universal (by reaching from the horizon of the individual to the horizon of humankind).