Lived and learned landscapes: Literary geographies and the Irish topographical tradition

The association between literature and landscape has long been noted by scholars and writers concerned with the literary heritage in Ireland. In his essay on the sense of place in Irish poetry, Gearóid Denvir remarks that, ‘from W. B. Yeats to Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and from Patrick Kavanagh and Máirtín Ó Cadhain to John B. Keane, there is no doubt but that the land itself, both in a physical and a political sense, and also in a psychological, cultural, and aesthetic sense, is a fundamental theme in much Irish writing’ (Denvir, 2005, p. 109). John Wilson Foster has gone further to argue not just for the importance of place in the Irish literary tradition, but for its absolute centrality. He argues that Irish writers ‘tend to have almost totemic relations with one or two places’ (Wilson Foster, 1991, p. 31). And so our literary understanding of south-east Galway has been shaped through Augusta Gregory, Ben Bulben is refracted through the lens of W. B. Yeats, and the storied landscape of Corca Dhuibhne is the site from which much of the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill emerges.¹.