This paper aims at investigating the ways in which Irish poets portray victims in modern Irish history. In their ekphrases, they attempt to resuscitate the excluded from official national history. Yeats invents an imagined community of the Ascendancy in his reminiscence of Lady Gregory and Synge. Unlike Yeats’s pride in the victims who once established a great tradition of Ireland, Heaney expresses his guilty conscience as he depicts ancient victims sacrificed to their communities, which reminds him of contemporary sectarian violence, the Troubles. Whereas Yeats’s ideal nationhood reflects his aristocratic class ideology, Heaney’s, represented in his bog poems, aspires to open-ended national identity. Muldoon and Durcan indict oppressive state apparatuses through the images of victims. If Muldoon exposes how systematically an individual is surveilled in a state psychiatric hospital, Durcan criticizes the authoritative state juridical system that takes control of the private realm of one’s body.