The Poetry of the Celtic Races
by Ernest Renan · La Poésie des races celtiques
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1854
- Form
- Essay
- Language
- French
- Length
- Short · 60 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Moderate2 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThe Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies, translated by William G. HutchisonWalter Scott, 1896The translation used in the Harvard Classics; it is out of print but freely available online.
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An essay first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1854, in which Renan, himself a Breton, describes the character of the Celtic peoples as timid, melancholy, imaginative, devoted to a lost cause and to the ideal woman. He surveys the Mabinogion, the Arthurian romances, the legends of the saints and the Breton folk poetry collected by La Villemarqué, and argues that the Celts gave European literature its romance and its feeling for nature. Matthew Arnold's lectures on Celtic literature took the essay as their starting point.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns The Poetry of the Celtic Races are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.