Some of his first published works were poetry. Three books of Terence’s verse are reproduced in the volume, The Music of Freedom (1907), Battle-Cries (1918) as well as Despite Fools’ Laughter (1944), the latter issued posthumously. 

Neil Buttimer’s introduction to each examines MacSwiney’s motivation for completing them, or, in the case of the third collection, why its editor (Dr BG MacCarthy) compiled that anthology after his death.

His working methods when composing verse or gathering the material together for publication are examined, as are the critical reaction to his writings.

Many of MacSwiney’s poems are lyrical, comprising reflection on family or personal relationships, illuminating his interior life and values. 

The greater part is devoted to political topics. Among these are deliberations on conditions in the Ireland of his day, forces governing the country’s circumstances, and how they might be altered for the better.

Quasi-theoretical musings on public affairs were given a particular urgency by day-to-day incidents occurring during the revolutionary period, and various poems capture the intensity of those happenings. 

Emotional challenges of revolution

His versifying is a window on the revolution’s emotional as well as intellectual challenges, and a case-study in how poetry embodied those realities.

This section examines the role of verse as an element of contemporary discourse, while looking also at how MacSwiney’s poetic output might be evaluated against that of his peers.

A study of MacSwiney's verse benefits from the survival of vast quantities of his personal papers. 

His daughter, Máire, and grandchildren, notably Professor Cathal MacSwiney Brugha, made those documents available generously to Irish institutions, such as Cork Public Museum, the National Library of Ireland, or University College, Dublin, thus facilitating an evaluation of his legacy. 

The papers show how carefully he drafted his verse, making multiple changes on grounds of style or content. Those records also reveal which English-language poets he read, the likes of Shelly, Rossetti or Wordsworth, and thus the extent to which late Victorian writing influenced his output. 

Much of MacSwiney's poetry in its political dimension appears as a reaction to First World War verse propaganda.

Critical commentary on what he had composed noted its strong religious dimension, together with the degree to which it reveals lesser-known aspects of his own personal preoccupations, comprising a spread of topics from bereavement to delight in the natural world.

When added to poems by Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse and other contemporaries, the MacSwiney anthologies are a window into the cultural and intellectual formation of those who participated in the movement for Irish independence, or the country's cultural and intellectual renewal.

Prose writings

The final section of the book is dedicated to his prose writings. These are arguably the most familiar to students of the period, given that the largest single section (outlining his republican philosophy), which were originally published in article form in the republican journal Irish Freedom between 1910 and 1912, were reproduced, and widely read, after his death as a single volume, The Principles of Freedom.

Less familiar is his journalistic output (he wrote for the journal of the Irish Volunteers, as well as publishing his own short-lived newspaper at the outbreak of the First World War), and his pamphlet commemorating the death in 1915 of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, his great Fenian hero.

While it is difficult to summarise such a large and diverse body of work, one theme dominates above all others. 

Perhaps surprisingly, it is not primarily a political idea (though it has clear political overtones), but rather the paramount importance of beauty in the modern world, and in the Ireland of his ambitions. 

Freedom, independence, sovereignty: these goals, vital and necessary though they were, on their own, and treated in isolation from the ends to which he believed they should be put, were not enough for MacSwiney. 

He passionately believed that separation from Britain was necessary to realise Ireland’s full, beautiful, potential, but was realist enough to appreciate that such separation on its own was no guarantee that the ensuing independence would be put to worthy ends.

For this to be achieved the act of separation itself, the republican campaign, had to be conducted upon the correct, principled, lines — the journey and destination were, in effect, indistinguishable from each other. 

It was a tall order, one that arguably out of tune with the realities of revolutionary struggle. But it was an injunction that MacSwiney certainly observed throughout his own life, to its final, awe-inspiring, climax in Brixton Gaol.

The Art and Ideology of Terence MacSwiney is edited by Gabriel Doherty, Fiona Brennan and Neil Buttimer and published by Cork University Press