The first edition of the letters of Denis Devlin, Irish poet,
translator and diplomat, this volume brings together a personal and
professional correspondence that has until now been scattered
across archives in Europe and North America. While representing a
transformative contribution to Devlin scholarship and the wider
field of 1930s and 40s poetry in Ireland, this edition also
provides fascinating insight into the cultural history of the early
Irish Republic and Ireland's presence in the wider world.
Associated in his youth with a group of Dublin poets, including
Samuel Beckett, who were working against the Yeatsian grain,
Devlin's career was fully international, his literary influences
complex and diverse. The edition is arranged into sections by
place, in order to best describe Devlin's life and diplomatic
career: Paris, Dublin, Washington, London and Rome. Devlin's 1930s
letters show his efforts to enter and energise literary society in
Dublin, his subsequent disillusionment with the state of the arts
in a newly independent Ireland, his struggle to find employment,
and his wavering between academia and a career as a diplomat. The
letters to Thomas MacGreevy, in particular, are replete with
critical reflections on Devlin's own work and the poetry of his
time. In wartime Washington Devlin forms lasting friendships with
the most influential American poet-critics of the time, Allen Tate
and Robert Penn Warren, embarks upon a collaborative edition of
Celtic poetry, and begins work on translations from the poems of
exiled French poet-diplomat Alexis Leger, a project partly
conducted through correspondence. In his final decade in Rome
international poetry networks are cultivated, notably that
surrounding Princess Marguerite Caetani and her magazine Botteghe
Oscure. These letters reveal the pleasures, drudgery and
insecurities of diplomatic life, and the difficulties in conducting
an active creative life in tandem. Following Devlin's untimely
death in 1959, the edition concludes with a "coda" of letters from
his wife Caren concerning the foundation of the Denis Devlin
Memorial Award.
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