Abstract
The following essay examines a selection of late poems by the important but understudied Irish-born poet Thomas Dermody (1775-1802). In the past ten years Dermody has received increasing scholarly attention after over a century of relative neglect. He has been studied in the context of "archipelagic Romanticism," which aims to "reconfigure British Romanticism as a literary phenomenon encompassing all of the nations in the British archipelago." This essay connects Dermody (who was born in Ireland but died in England) with his Irish cultural roots - an important connection insofar as many critics have dissociated Dermody from Gaelic literary tradition. I argue that three of his late poems (published in 1802 in the year of the poet's death) - which comprise what I call a "Spenserian Triad" - appropriate and personalize the aisling, a Gaelic literary genre extending from the middle ages to the folk and broadsheet ballads of the nineteenth century and beyond.