Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet.
Trevor Joyce is an Irish poet, born in Dublin.
Máirtín Ó Direáin was an Irish poet from the Aran Islands Gaeltacht. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Ó Direáin was, in the words of Louis de Paor, "one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish language poetry in the 1940s and 50s." According to a 1984 lecture by Desmond Egan, "Ó Direáin's genius stands revealed - to the extent that we must look abroad for poets with whom his achievement might best be compared; to Spain and Antonio Machado's sweet intensity; to Russia and Akhmatova; to Germany and the bittersweet music of Heinrich Heine."
Richard Kerr Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet.
Michael Longley,, is an Irish poet.
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."
Aodán Mac Póilin was an Irish language activist in Northern Ireland.
Padraic Fiacc was an Irish poet, and member of Aosdána, the exclusive Irish arts academy.
Brendan Hamill is a poet and writer.
Desmond Carolan Fennell was an Irish writer, essayist, cultural philosopher, and linguist. Throughout his career, Fennell repeatedly departed from prevailing norms. In the 1950s and early 1960s, with his extensive foreign travel and reporting and his travel book, Mainly in Wonder, he departed from the norm of Irish Catholic writing at the time. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, in developing new approaches to the partition of Ireland and the Irish language revival, he deviated from political and linguistic Irish nationalism, and with the philosophical scope of his Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, from contemporary Irish culture generally.
Cathal Ó Searcaigh, is a modern Irish language poet. His work has been widely translated, anthologised and studied. "His confident internationalism", according to Theo Dorgan, has channeled "new modes, new possibilities, into the writing of Irish language poetry in our time".
Rita Ann Higgins is an Irish poet and playwright.
Edna Longley, is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.
Fred Johnston is an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic and musician. He is the founder and current director of the Western Writers' Centre in Galway. He co-founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative in 1974, and founded Galway's annual Cúirt International Festival of Literature in 1986.
Kevin Kiely is a poet, critic, author and playwright whose writings and public statements have met with controversy and also with support.
Eithne Strong was a bilingual Irish poet and writer who wrote in both Irish and English. Her first poems in Irish were published in Combhar and An Glor 1943–44 under the name Eithne Ni Chonaill. She was a founder member of the Runa Press whose early Chapbooks featured artwork by among others Jack B. Yeats, Sean Keating, Sean O'Sullivan, Harry Kernoff among others. The press was noted for the publication in 1943 of Marrowbone Lane by Robert Collis which depicts the fierce fighting that took place during the Easter Rising of 1916.
Nell Regan is an internationally renowned Irish based poet and non fiction writer.
John Wilson Foster is an Irish literary critic and cultural historian.
Máighréad Medbh is an Irish writer and poet.
The Coleraine Cluster of poets and writers was an informal collection of writers associated with the New University of Ulster in the early 1970s.
