Tying into the previous ask, how did you become interested in United Irishmen? Why do you admire them? And also, who were they (a bit of a rundown please)?
I became interested them first through my research into Lord Castlereagh, given his involvement in the rebellion. The biggest reasons I admire them are 1. their devotion to the principles of the French Revolution, which was a rare(ish) thing for a group of people in the 18th century British isles; 2. their other principles. I can definitely support the ideas of universal suffrage and Irish republicanism; and 3. I really appreciate the fact that they didn't discriminate based on religious belief, which is also a pretty rare thing for time and place.
And a rundown on who the United Irishmen were:
They originally began as a political debating club in Belfast, growing out of groups such as the Northern Whig Club. They were also influenced significantly by the Volunteers, which were groups of local militia originally raised to protect against invaders while the regular army was off fighting in American in the 1770s, but who went rogue and started putting extremely effective pressure on the British government for increased rights for non-Anglicans in Ireland.
The group was peaceful at first, being just a place for people of all religious affiliations to discuss new radical political ideas, but when the pro Catholic Lord Lieutenant was kicked out and replaced by the more harsh Lord Camden, they began to grow more militant. Not helping the matter, also, was the fact that their ranks were swelled by members of the Defenders (secret underground Catholic murder gang) who had been run out of Ulster by the Peep O' Day Boys (secret underground Protestant murder gang), and who were more than happy to kill government agents. Eventually they planned a rebellion, which involved a French invasion, but unfortunately this failed (twice). There was a rebellion, but it was disorganised, leaderless, and was easily crushed.
Notable members:
Theobald Wolfe Tone: Probably the most famous member, he wrote An Argument On Behalf Of The Catholics In Ireland (despite being Protestant himself), which protested the Penal Laws and argued for Catholic Emancipation. He was kicked out of Ireland in 1795 after he was caught speaking with a French spy, and after some time in America he sailed to France, where he helped put together a planned French invasion of Ireland, which failed, and then put together another, smaller one, which succeeded. However, the French still lost and he was caught by the British and dragged to Dublin, where he was sentenced to death and committed suicide the night before he was supposed to be executed.
Lord Edward FitzGerald: The other most famous member, he was a veteran of the American War of Independence and a soldier who had the job of arming the rebels. He also spent time with Thomas Paine in revolutionary France before returning to Ireland and going into hiding after most of the other leaders were arrested, but he was eventually captured (in an extremely dramatic fashion) and he died in prison. Also, fun fact, he was Charles James Fox's cousin.
Samuel Neilson: A Belfast wool merchant who originally came up with the idea of the United Irishmen as a group for people of all religious groups who wanted Irish independence. He also ran the Northern Star newspaper, which was the United Irishmen's propaganda organ. This led to him being arrested multiple times, and eventually he was exiled to America, where he died of yellow fever.
Henry Joy McCracken: Another wool merchant who ended up running the... ah... more militant arm of the organisation. He was (probably) in charge of many of the assassinations pulled off in the 1790s, and he went to prison several times for it. He also led armies in multiple actual formal battles, before being captured and hanged despite his sister's attempts to save him.
Mary Ann McCracken: Henry Joy's sister, she ran the family business and campaigned for women's rights and for worker's rights. She was also in charge of the women's wing of the United Irishmen.
Thomas Russell: A close friend or McCracken and Tone, he was a key figure in organising an alliance with the militant Catholic Defenders. He was arrested in 1798 and held until 1802, after which he promptly got involved in Emmet's rebellion, which he died for.
Arthur O'Connor: A leader who was basically forced to do all of the paperwork all of the time. He went to prison early on, and from there negotiated for the lives of many of the prisoners, which involved the government "allowing" them to go into exile in return for confessions. He went to France after the failed uprising and tried to get Bonaparte to give him a fleet to invade Ireland, but they disagreed because O'Connor refused to give up his principles and become a Bonapartist, so the plans fell through and O'Connor was forced to sort through the wills of dead United Irishmen from France for the rest of his life.
Oliver Bond: He didn't really do anything incredibly important BUT a lot of the leaders were arrested at his house, which was their meeting place. If you ever see "arrested at Bond's," that's what that means.
William Orr: A farmer who was accused of being a United Irishman and who was killed for it despite strong evidence that he didn't do anything. He became a martyr for the whole movement, with "Remember Orr" being their rallying cry.
Robert Emmet: The man who led the 1803 rebellion. He's honestly his own thing but I'm including him here for completion.
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what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds
I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.
I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)
The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)
The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)
A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )
Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)
Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)
Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems
The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.
But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:
anything by Sara Teasdale
Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver
Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti
Collected Poems by Langston Hughes
Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein
Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez
Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima
Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee
A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio
The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)
Crush by Richard Siken
Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail
Selected Poems by Walt Whitman
View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
Collected Poems by Vasko Popa
Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)
Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,
Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef
As for individual poems:
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"
"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith
"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib
"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise
"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth
"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros
"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky
“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda
"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost
"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail
"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov
"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,
"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider
“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin
“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón
“The Flea” by John Donne
"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore
"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland
“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker
"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside
“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio
“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver
"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin
“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott
“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney
“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen
“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska
"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy
“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden
“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris
"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats
"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass
"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer
"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings
"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski
"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje
"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis
"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)
"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz
"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye
"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman
"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel
"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah
"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert
"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller
"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May
"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou
I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:
Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver
"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca
"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger
In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky
"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan
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