Abstract
The poetic career of Austin Clarke was divided in two by a seventeen-year gap which extended from 1938 to 1955. This interval has given a curiously fractured appearance to Clarke’s poetic development, the more so as the latter part of his life was so productive. It has made it difficult to arrive at a unified perception of Clarke and his place in Irish poetry. The unusual vigour and remarkable volume of his later poems almost overwhelm the earlier pieces in which he worked towards a sense of himself as poet.
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Notes
Austin Clarke, A Penny in the Clouds: More Memories of Ireland and England (London, 1968) p. 17.
Herbert Trench, Deirdre Wed and Other Poems (London, 1901).
Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (London, 1864).
The Banquet of Dun na nGedh and The Battle of Magh Rath, edited by John O’Donovan (Dublin, 1842).
Samuel Ferguson, Poems (London and Dublin, 1882).
‘Anglo-Irish Poetry’ in Literature in Celtic Countries: Taliesin Congress Lectures, edited by J. E. Caerwyn Williams (Cardiff, 1971) p. 168.
‘Gaelic Ireland Rediscovered: The Early Period’ in Irish Poets in English: The Thomas Davis Lectures on Anglo-Irish Poetry, edited by Sean Lucy (Cork, 1973) p. 31.
Lays of the Western Gael (London, 1865).
Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish, (Dublin, n.d. [1916]) p. 102.
‘When Keats turned to Greek mythology, he went to Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary; our poets went out of doors.’ Poetry in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1951) p. 8.
Annals of Clonmacnoise, edited by Rev. Denis Murphy (Dublin, 1896) p. 145.
The texts are most readily found in Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry (Dublin, 1970).
Douglas Hyde, Abhráin Atá Leaghtha ar an Reachtuire, or Songs Ascribed to Raftery (Dublin, 1903) pp. 356–63.
David Greene, ‘The Religious Epic’ in James Carney (ed.), Early Irish Poetry (Cork, 1965) p. 80.
The most complete commentary on the poem is to be found in Maurice Harmon’s essay ‘The Later Poetry of Austin Clarke’ in Ray B. Browne, W. J. Roscelli and Richard Loftus (eds), The Celtic Cross (Purdue, Indiana, 1964).
The Poems of Joseph Campbell, edited with an Introduction by Austin Clarke (Dublin, 1963).
T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in Selected Essays (London, 1951) p. 13.
Poetry Ireland, 7 & 8 (spring 1968) pp. 109–16.
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© 1989 Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene
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Denman, P. (1989). Austin Clarke: Tradition, Memory and Our Lot. In: Brown, T., Grene, N. (eds) Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09470-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09470-7_5
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