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The Irish mystique is everywhere these days. We hear Irish traditional music in Japanese film, we see Clint Eastwood assiduously reading Yeats in his Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby," and popular music artists are constantly emerging from its emerald shores to capture the imagination of millions. The Irish rock band U2 has established themselves as one of the most successful bands ever, garnering a record 17 Grammys and redefining what it means to be a super group in the 21st century.

Driven by a powerful, if precarious, national pride and a continually reawakened mythology, Ireland has not only left lasting works of literature but—as historians from Kenneth Clark to Thomas Cahill have revealed—they single-handedly kept Western civilization from sinking irrevocably into the dark abyss of illiteracy.

Having the distinction of owning the oldest Western vernacular literature (after Greek and Latin), Ireland's pagan mythology stems back to an ancient race of sorcerers that influenced a later Celtic mysticism and remained an important part of the culture even after St. Patrick's mass Christianization of the land. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Ireland's unique geographical position, an island at the edge of Europe, left them as preservers of Christian culture while Europe fell into the hands of Germanic invaders.

Wandering Irish monks realized the Christianization of Europe as they ventured out from remote monasteries. But the Irish scholarly, religious influence declined with a series of invasions and settlement of the Norse and the Anglo-Normans in the 9th-12th centuries; monasteries were destroyed and plundered, leaving Ireland vulnerable to contentious centuries of British, Pope-endorsed settlements. Gaelic, the ancient Irish language, deteriorated and almost entirely disappeared as Irish writers turned their pens to social issues—written in English—in the 18th century.

Jonathan Swift, in addition to introducing us to Lilliputians and Yahoos, perfected the art of political satire and comically questioned English political policies -- shocking readers with his outrageous "Modest Proposal" to cannibalize Ireland's children to solve its economic problems. Edmund Burke proposed more practical solutions to troubling socio-economic concerns and developed some of the most important political theories of his day, influencing British opinion on everything from Indian colonization to the French and American Revolutions.

Irish dramatists Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan used the stage to voice their cultural commentaries and developed the comedy of manners dramatic form that would be picked up and sharpened by another important Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, a century later. Dion Boucicault—dubiously called the Irish Shakespeare—dominated the stage in the 19th century, and took his expression to America where he made a significant impact on the form and content of early American theater, and helped pass the first copyright laws.

 
Irish Literary Renaissance

By the end of the 19th century, British occupation led to increased social unrest and a rising support for the fight for political autonomy. An invigorated nationalism and a renewed interest in the Gaelic literary heritage of Ireland prompted an Irish Literary Renaissance. With Dublin at the center of this revival, poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats established the Abbey Theater with another Irish playwright, Lady Augusta Gregory. Social and moral issues dominated the stage at the Abbey in the plays of AE (a/k/a George Russell), Sean O'Casey, and J. M. Synge whose work "The Playboy of the Western World" incited riots.

At the helm of the Abbey Theater Yeats wrote more than 30 plays, but he is best remembered as a visionary poetic alchemist of the highest order. A literary descendant of William Blake, and spiritually connected with the mythology of Ireland, Yeats' poems were unexampled in the 20th century for their technical brilliance and rarefied beauty, and are now recognized as some of the finest poetry ever written in the English language.

The stages of London in the late 19th century were riven with the bullets of Oscar Wilde's deadly wit whenever his drawing room comedies were performed. But Wilde, while in self-imposed exile in Paris, turned to the French language and Levantine exoticism for the setting of his last play, Salome.

George Bernard Shaw (who won the Nobel Prize for literature two years after Yeats in 1925) was a scintillating intellect who wrote brilliant criticism and plays that established him as one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century.

And pagan ritual and Christian iconography clashed wickedly in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a defining work of the horror genre.

The Irish Literary Revival paved the way for the revolutionary expression of James Joyce, a towering figure of the 20th century literature who ushered in a new literary era with the publication of his novel Ulysses in 1922. His stream of consciousness method propelled the novel into near fantastical regions of the interior monologue and opened up new narrative possibilities for every writer after him. His work, which Joseph Campbell characterized as "the process of a total transmutation of the whole world of human experience", ascended to dizzying heights with his meta-mythological Finnegans Wake.

 
Ireland Today

A leading writer of the Theater of the Absurd in France, Samuel Beckett, who worked for James Joyce in Paris, challenged the boundaries of drama by abandoning a conventional development of plot, action and character, creating tragicomedies that were both nihilistic and funny. His play "Waiting for Godot" did for drama what Joyce's Ulysses did for the novel. Beckett went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

James Joyce's short story collection Dubliners inspired a host of gifted Irish writers to explore this form. Mary Lavin, James Plunkett, Edna O'Brien, and Frank O'Connor all made significant contributions to the Short Story genre.

Mounting social unrest in Northern Ireland provoked Brendan Behan to write his essential 20th century play, "The Quare Fellow," tackling, in Gaelic no less, capital punishment. A little less provocative, but no less effective, Seamus Heaney's poems of Northern Irish rural life evoke Irish history and mythology garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

The plays of Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh (whose latest play can be seen on Broadway this spring with Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum) continue to enjoy commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic. Contemporary Irish novelists often harken back to legends and events of the past creating works rife with memorable characters and settings. Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy, Nuala O'Faolain, William Trevor, Brendan O'Carroll, Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt, Colm Toibin repeatedly pick up awards, critical praise, and enviable positions on bestseller lists for their novels.

Perhaps there is a mythic storytelling power that belongs only to the Irish…some sort of spell a Celtic conjuror cast thousands of years ago.

 
Clinton Wilson claws his way out of his winter hibernaculum every year around early May. He has written for Just Out Newsmagazine and Black Lamb.