Thursday, October 15, 2015

"Since the English occupation, we have had little or no national art in Ireland at all, and there is not the slightest chance of our ever having it until we get that right of legislative independence, so unjustly robbed from us, until  we are really an Irish Nation ---  nation for whose constitutional liberty Henry Grattan lived and died. There is, however, one art which no tyranny can kill and no penal laws can stifle --- the art of poetry. An art which is one of the supreme triumphs of the race to which we belong. The poetry and music of Ireland have been not merely the luxury of the rich, but the very bulwark of patriotism, the very seed and flower of liberty."

                   --- Oscar Wilde 1882

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