By
Alan Riach
Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University
ESSAY
Author William Sharp, left, wrote under the pen name Fiona MacLeod. Lady Augusta Gregory wrote versions of Celtic stories akin to those of WB Yeats
BY some accounts, 19th-century Gaelic poetry is less impressive than that of the preceding century, yet on the evidence of Donald E Meek’s anthology of poems from that era, Caran an t-Saoghail/The Wiles of the World, it is rich and intricately connected with the processes of industrialisation, colonialism and imperial expansion, and thus also with what was happening in contemporary Scottish literature in English and Scots. Gaelic is essential to the national story.