The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte

Michael Griffin (Ed.)

2016
392 pages
ISBN 9781611487213

Though his name might not be familiar to many twenty-first century readers, Laurence Whyte (d.1753) is an important missing link in eighteenth-century Ireland's literary and musical histories. A rural poet who established himself in Dublin as a teacher of mathematics and as an active member (and poetic chronicler) of the much admired and supported Charitable Musical Society, Whyte was a poet of considerable talent and dexterity, and his body of work yields a wealth of insight into the intersecting cultures of his time and place. Published in 1740 and 1742, Whyte's writing, by turns humorous and poignant, insightful and nostalgic, straddled the worlds of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, of the rural midlands and the capital, of Catholic and Protestant. Some of the dualities explored in his verse were present, to varying extents, in the work of Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. In matters poetical, political and cultural, Whyte is an important, though as yet neglected and unstudied, figure. This edition, comprehensively introduced and annotated, retrieves him from that neglect.

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Reviews

"This is an excellent edition of an important poetic voice from the Ireland of Swift, Goldsmith and Sheridan: however, the volume is of interest also to those concerned with the Dublin print trade. The title page of the 1740 edition shows an unusual, intercultural and interdenominational cross-section of Dublin publishers to have been involved; one of those selling the book was Whyte himself from his house in Rosemary Lane. But this edition - and the subsequent enlarged reprinting of 1742 - also boasts a fascinating list of subscribers, protestant and catholic, rural and urban, upper, middle and lower-class; a particularly useful inclusion in this edition is an appendix in which Griffin lists and gives details of the subscribers, adding to comments on the list already made by Toby Barnard, Kevin Whelan and others. Whyte's list is indeed a fascinating assemblage of a cross-section of mid-eighteenth century Irish book-purchasers."
-Andrew Carpenter, University College Dublin (Emeritus); The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (31.1), March 2017

About the editor:

Michael Griffin lectures in eighteenth-century and Irish studies at the University of Limerick, where he is Director of the Eighteenth Century Research Group. He has published widely on eighteenth-century studies, utopian satire, and Irish writing in English.

Distributed by Bloomsbury (formerly by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group)

eBook: 9781611487220