In an era defined by rapid information, ironic detachment, and digital overload, Hozier stands out as something wholly different—a modern artist with the soul of a Romantic poet. His music evokes windswept coastlines, love that feels eternal, and a reverence for nature, myth, and mortality. While his work is deeply contemporary, it pulses with the spirits of poets past, particularly W.B. Yeats, William Blake, and the sprawling realm of Irish folklore.
Hozier isn’t just a songwriter—he’s a lyrical bridge between centuries, writing from the edges of modernity with a pen dipped in ancient ink.
W.B. Yeats: The Melancholy Mystic
W.B. Yeats, Ireland’s most iconic poet, was known for blending nationalism, mysticism, and longing into verses that were lyrical yet dark, grounded yet otherworldly. Hozier carries this same tension.
Like Yeats, Hozier often:
- Romanticizes ruin and decay (“And I have never known peace like the damp grass that yields to me” – Like Real People Do)
- Finds the sacred in sensuality and suffering
- Uses Irish imagery not as ornament but as emotional landscape
Yeats’ influence can be felt in Hozier’s rhythmic cadences and his use of symbolic language—crows, bogs, roots, blood. Both artists build their work on an aching belief in love’s transformative, and sometimes destructive, power. Hozier’s lyrics echo the Yeatsian idea that beauty and sorrow are forever entwined.
William Blake: The Sacred and the Profane
Blake, the visionary English poet and artist, was obsessed with the boundaries between heaven and earth, body and soul, innocence and experience. His belief that spirituality could be found in physicality mirrors one of Hozier’s central lyrical themes.
In Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, good and evil exist not in conflict, but in dialogue. Likewise, Hozier:
- Reveres the body as a site of divinity (“Take me to church / I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies”)
- Questions religious institutions while still exploring spiritual yearning
- Uses biblical and apocalyptic imagery to underscore emotional truths
In many ways, Hozier modernizes Blake’s radical theology—replacing angels and devils with flawed lovers and burning cities, but keeping the same reverence for the emotional and the eternal.
Irish Folklore: Roots, Rot, and Rebirth
No discussion of Hozier is complete without acknowledging the Irish folk tradition that breathes through his music. From tales of fae and banshees to the rugged wilds of Wicklow and Wexford, Irish mythology is built on cycles of death and rebirth, nature’s cruelty and kindness, and spirits that live in every stream and stone.
This mythology pulses in Hozier’s imagery:
- “I’d be the dirt beneath your feet” (earth as surrender, devotion, and decay)
- Songs set in bogs, forests, or under moonlight (echoes of old Celtic belief in the power of place)
- Themes of haunting and resurrection (especially in ‘Unreal Unearth’, his 2023 album inspired by ‘Dante’s Inferno’, but rooted in Irish earth)
Even his sonic choices—choral echoes, layered harmonies, naturalistic pacing—mirror the oral traditions of Irish sean-nós singing, where the voice bends, lingers, and carries stories across generations.
Romanticism, Reimagined
The Romantic poets of the 18th and 19th centuries believed in passion, nature, imagination, and the sublime. Their work often rebelled against the rational, mechanical worldview of industrial society. Hozier, in a parallel way, rejects the disconnection and speed of the modern digital world.
He writes not in tweets, but in incantations. He takes his time. He builds verses like ruins—weathered, crumbling, beautiful.
Romanticism was also politically charged, full of revolution and anti-institutional rage. Hozier channels this energy too, using love songs as vessels for critique—of religion, consumerism, violence, and environmental collapse.
Hozier: A Poet Disguised as a Rock Star
What makes Hozier so compelling isn’t just his voice or melodies—it’s his ability to re-enchant the modern world. He sees the divine in desire, the mythic in mourning, the poetic in protest. Like Yeats, he’s haunted. Like Blake, he’s searching. Like Irish folklore, he’s rooted in the soil and reaching toward something beyond.
In the end, Hozier isn’t trying to escape time—he’s folding it. He’s taking the language of the past and singing it forward, proving that in a fractured world, there’s still space for verses that bloom like wildflowers and burn like gospel.
Also Read: Melancholy Glamour: Core Elements of the Lana Del Rey Aesthetic
—Silviya.Y