ABSTRACT
The significance of Gaelic poetry as a historical as well as a literary source for the early modern period remains a matter of controversy. The ongoing debate about the development of Gaelic culture in the early modern period shares a common awareness of the emergent dynamic of vernacular Irish and Scottish Gaelic from the mid-seventeenth century. The political reaction of the Irish and Scottish Gaels to intrusive British influences after 1603 was no more uniform than their distinctive cultural development. Gaeldom in both Ireland and Scotland was dominated increasingly by a British rather than an English or Scottish political agenda in the course of the seventeenth century. It was the vernacular rather than the common classical Gaelic response to this evolving agenda which exhibited the greater cultural dynamism and critical divergence as evident in the poets' reaction to plantation and expropriation, to civil wars and Cromwellian occupation, and to the Restoration and Jacobitism.
