Anglo-Irish metrics
metrics, Anglo-Irish Compared with most native English speech patterns, Hiberno-English speech has longer and swifter rhythmic runs, with a far higher proportion of unstressed to stressed syllables. This feature was reflected in the development of Anglo-Irish metrics and was first felt through the rhythms of folksongs. Drawing on Irish music, Thomas Moore transformed the metrics of the Anglo-Irish lyric, and in doing so deeply influenced the rhythms of the English Romantic lyric, already to some extent Celticized by Burns and Scott. J. J. Callanan, Ferguson, Mangan, Edward Walsh, and others extended the development of a new metrics, spun in the creative tension between Gaelic and English, coming closer than Moore to the energy of the amhrán metric in Irish poetry. George Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897) outlined a history of Gaelic prosody and adapted Irish metrics to Anglo-Irish literature in a systematic if mechanical way in his translations of Irish verse. Yeats mastered the varied possibilities of Anglo-Irish rhythm, and continuing experimentation has been evident in the work of Austin Clarke, Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, Thomas Kinsella, and Eoghan Ó Tuairisc. John Montague's spare and exact style owes something to the bardic model, as does Seamus Heaney's use of the terse quatrain.
Bibliography
Seán Lucy, ‘Metre and Movement in Anglo-Irish Verse’, Irish University Review,
