Lady Gregory's Poets and Dreamers gathers the living speech of rural Ireland: ballads, laments, healing lore, ghostly beliefs, comic tales, and hard-earned wisdom from workhouses, roadside camps, and village kitchens. Across its pages, poetry is not a luxury but a force that can praise, shame, bless, or wound, while folk memory preserves everything from herb-cures and fairy fears to stories of judgment, repentance, and redemption. At the heart of the collection stands the blind poet Raftery, remembered through eyewitness anecdote, song fragments, and legend as a wandering bard whose satire could humiliate the ungenerous and whose praise seemed almost magical. Around him, Gregory presents old men and women as custodians of a culture where the dead may walk with funeral processions, tinkers are explained through curse and sacred history, and a healer like Bridget Ruane can mend bodies, hearts, and spirits with plants, prayers, and charms. Rich in oral texture and mythic atmosphere, the book reveals Irish folk tradition as a source of art, identity, and moral power. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Gregory, Lady

Lady Gregory was an Irish playwright, folklorist, translator, and one of the great cultural architects of the Irish Literary Revival, born in 1852 into a landowning Anglo-Irish family in County Galway. After marrying Sir William Gregory and later becoming a widow, she devoted herself with remarkable energy to literature, folklore, and the recovery of Ireland’s cultural memory, working closely with figures such as W. B. Yeats and helping to found the Abbey Theatre, where her plays and support were vital to the shaping of modern Irish drama. Her writing drew deeply on Irish speech, legend, peasant life, and the rhythms of oral storytelling, and she became especially important for bringing Irish-language material into English with grace and precision, making older traditions accessible to new readers. Across her essays, translations, and plays, she explored identity, class, nationalism, myth, humor, and the dignity of ordinary lives, themes that still resonate in a world still negotiating cultural inheritance and belonging. Her legacy endures not only in the institutions she helped build but in her role as a bridge between folk tradition and modern literature, preserving voices that might otherwise have been lost. Readers who enjoy Irish history, myth, folklore, drama, and the work of writers who combine artistry with cultural recovery will find Lady Gregory especially rewarding.