Abstract
The image of Gaelic Ireland as doomed and constantly revived can be traced back to the medieval bardic tradition. If modern poetry in Irish still seems to concern itself with the general notion of the language as in extremis, one of its accepted functions has been to perpetuate that language and keep its cultural traditions alive.
Conscious of these paradoxes, women poets have largely either rejected the sentimentalising, necrolatrous concepts of Irish or referred to the language and their own work ironically as attributes of a 'living' or 'talking' corpse. This idea of modern poetry in Irish as spanning a historical vacuum - bridging the gap between a point in the past when the language and its literature were at their peak and the present time when Irish is, undeniably, still alive - is shared by most of the poets discussed in this chapter.