Daniel Corkery: The Hidden Ireland

Subtitle: A study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century.
Published by M.H. Gill and Son, Dublin. 1941.

Some teacher mentioned this when I was in secondary school, and recommended it highly. Finally got round to reading it.
Woefully self-indulgent writing, endlessly repetitive, and stridently polemical. His main message is that the Brits and the Ascendancy, with the arrogant superiority of the conqueror, were wholly unaware of the cultural life of the impoverished gaelic peasantry, but ought to have noticed it. DC was angry about this.
He relies mainly on secondary sources. This is partly justified by his declared aim of addressing the poetry, as opposed to the mere language of the poetry -- he rails against the 'grammarians'. He usually prefers to quote verse translations, sometimes very free, where these are available, instead of providing literal versions.
Ignoring its flaws, the book tells an interesting story of the bardic schools and the courts of poetry. I had not heard of the practice of composing while lying in bed, in the dark, cut off from noise. This may reflect the origin of the bards as druids, and derive from a similar method of divination. It has been suggested that some prehistoric rock-art, located in rather inaccessible recesses of cave-complexes in France, was associated with divination by shamans. (David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, Thames and Hudson, London. 2002. ISBN 0-500-28465-2; a very good book.)
The main value of DC's book is in the verse quoted. Some is very fine, and it is good to have this material on my shelf. It is a pity that he makes no attempt to explain bardic conventions. He could have added to the little I know from other sources.