Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (174829 June 1784),ÓSúilleabhá anglicized as Owen Roe O'Sullivan ("Red Owen"), was an Irish poet. He is known as one of the last great Gaelic poets. A recent anthology of Irish-language poetry speaks of his "extremely musical" poems full of "astonishing technical virtuosity", and also notes that "Eoghan Rua is still spoken of and quoted in Irish-speaking districts in Munster as one of the great wits and playboys of the past."
Although previously known to speakers of Irish, especially in Munster, Ó Súilleabháin was relatively unknown to English speakers until the early 20th century. The Gaelic League published an Irish-language collection of his poems, with editorial apparatus in English, in 1901. In a 1903 book, Douglas Hyde, an Irish scholar from Roscommon who had learned Irish, referred to him as "a schoolmaster named O'Sullivan, in Munster" in his book The Songs of Connacht (which includes a drinking song by Ó Súilleabháin). The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911) mentioned Eoghan Rua in an article on "Celt" § Celtic Literature, calling him "the cleverest of the Jacobite poets" and noting that "his verses and bons mots are still well known in Munster."
In 1924, Daniel Corkery devoted a chapter of his groundbreaking book The Hidden Ireland (1924) to Ó Súilleabháin. The book was the first comprehensive look at the world of Irish-speakers during the 18th century, a period which had been considered completely barren except for English-language literature.
Corkery writes, "'What Pindar is to Greece, what Burns is to Scotland... that and much more is Eoghan Ruadh to Ireland.' Alas! it is by no means so; but were Father Dinneen to write: "That and much more was Eoghan Ruadh to Gaelic Munster," he would have understated rather than overstated the matter." He then discussed at length the way country people came alive at the mention of Ó Súilleabháin's name, and could recite long poems and a hundred stories about him.
"Eoghan Rua's life was ... tragic, but then he was a wastrel with a loud laugh." Ó Súilleabháin is most famous for his aisling poems, in which the vision of a beautiful woman comes to the poet in his sleep—the woman also often symbolizing the tragic Ireland of his time. Most of the following information comes from Corkery's work. Corkery in his turn depended on a book in the Irish language, Amhráin Eoghain Ruaidh Uí Shúilleabháin, or Songs of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, written by the priest An t-Athair Pádraig Ua Duinnín (Father Dinneen).
Early life
Eoghan Rua was born in 1748 in Meentogues, Gneeveguilla, Sliabh Luachra, a mountainous part of County Kerry, in southwestern Ireland. He was from a once-prominent Irish clan, but like so many others, it gradually lost its land and its Chiefs during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. By the time of his birth, most of the native Irish in the southwest had been reduced to landless poverty in a "houseless and unpeopled", mountainous region. However, the landlord was MacCarthy Mór, one of the few native Irish Chiefs of the Name to have retained some power and was a distant relative of the Clan Ó Súilleabháin, and in Sliabh Luachra, there was at the time one of the last "classical schools" of Irish poetry, descended from the ancient rigorous schools that had trained bards and poets in the days of Irish domination. In the last few remnants of the bardic schools, Irish poets competed for attention and rewards, and learned music, English, Latin and Greek.
Eoghan Rua (the Rua refers to his red hair) was witty and charming but had the misfortune to live at a time that an Irish Catholic had no professional future in his own country because of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. He also had a reckless character and threw away the few opportunities he was given. At eighteen, he opened his own school, and "all his life through, whenever his fortunes were hopeless, on this empty trade Eoghan was to fall back." However, "an incident occurred, nothing to his credit, which led to the break-up of his establishment."