Quinnipiac University Press

The heroics and humanitarian contributions of those who came to the aid of their fellow men and women during the Great Hunger of 1845 and 1852 has been largely ignored and forgotten until recently.

In the time of Ireland's Great Famine, poor people were, in places, so "reduced" that they treated each other with brutal callousness. Husbands abandoned wives and children.

Perhaps the most profound cultural change in modern Irish history has been the replacement of Irish by English as the main vernacular of the general population in the centuries since the conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth century.

The scale of the Great Irish Famine, and the horror of it, were unprecedented. It permeated everything, the traces of which remain to this day. But the visual dimensions of the loss of life and the erosions of language and culture remained unaddressed until Quinnipiac University opened Ireland's Great Hunger Museum in 2012, to considerable acclaim.

Taking poetry as an act of witness and restorative memory, this essay traces the development of poems relating to Ireland's Great Hunger from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.