In this survey of enduring Irish classics, Declan Kiberd offers a discussion of the greatest work since 1600 in the two languages, Irish and English, that have shaped one of the world's literary cultures. Kiberd provides translations that seek to bring the texts alive for the English-speaking reader. He covers the bitter poetry of Seathrun Ceitinn and Dabhi O'Bruadair and the prose of Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke; links the modern achievements of O'Riordain and O'Cadhain with Yeats, Joyce and the other familiar figures of Irish modernism; and shows how all of them draw on early Irish themes.