Denis Devlin (15 April 1908 – 21 August 1959) was, along with

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...

Thomas MacGreevy Thomas MacGreevy (born Thomas McGreevy; 26 October 1893 – 16 March 1967) was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the f ...

and

Brian Coffey Brian Coffey (8 June 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an Irish poet and publisher. His work was informed by his Catholicism, his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to French surrealism. He was close to an intellectual Europea ...

, one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a career

diplomat A diplomat (from grc, δίπλωμα; romanized ''diploma'') is a person appointed by a state or an intergovernmental institution such as the United Nations or the European Union to conduct diplomacy with one or more other states or internati ...

Early life and studies

He was born in

Greenock Greenock (; sco, Greenock; gd, Grianaig, ) is a town and administrative centre in the Inverclyde council areas of Scotland, council area in Scotland, United Kingdom and a former burgh of barony, burgh within the Counties of Scotland, historic ...

, Scotland of Irish parents, and his family returned to live in Dublin in 1918. He studied at

Belvedere College Belvedere College S.J. (sometimes St Francis Xavier's College) is a voluntary secondary school for boys in Dublin, Ireland. The school has numerous alumni in the arts, politics, sports, science, and business. History Belvedere owes its origin ...

and, from 1926, as a seminarian for the Roman Catholic priesthood at Clonliffe College. As part of his studies he attended a degree course in modern languages at University College Dublin (UCD), where he met and befriended

. Together they published a joint collection, ''Poems'', in 1930. In 1927, Devlin abandoned the priesthood and left Clonliffe. He graduated with from UCD his BA in 1930 and spent that summer on the Blasket Islands to improve his spoken Irish. Between 1930 and 1933, he studied literature at Munich University and the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting, amongst others, Beckett and

. He then returned to UCD to complete his MA thesis on

Montaigne Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne ( ; ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), also known as the Lord of Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a liter ...

. His niece went on to become writer

Denyse Woods Denyse Woods (born 1958) is an Irish writer. Early life Denyse Woods was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1958, daughter of Gerard Woods, Irish Consul-General in Boston and his wife Finola Devlin. Her father was to be Ambassador to Australia ...

Diplomatic career and later writings

He joined the Irish Diplomatic Service in 1935 and spent a number of years in Rome,

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

and Washington. During this time he met the French poet

St. John Perse Alexis Leger (; 31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975), better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse (; also Saint-Leger Leger), was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative im ...

, and the Americans Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. He went on to publish a translation of ''Exile and Other Poems'' by St-John Perse, and Tate and Warren edited his posthumous ''Selected Poems''. Since his death, there have been two ''Collected Poems'' published; the first in 1964 was edited by Coffey and the second in 1989 by J.C.C. Mays. His personal papers are held in University College Dublin Archives.

References

Sources

*Coffey, Brian. Biographical note in Denis Devlin ''Collected Poems'' (The Dolmen Press, 1964)
Denis Devlin at Ricorso
*Jack Morgan
''Denis Devlin (1908-1959)''.
In: ''Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook''. Alexander G. Gonzalez (Editor), pp. 64–68. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997.

External links

at Wake Forest University Press {{DEFAULTSORT:Devlin, Denis 1908 births 1959 deaths University of Paris alumni Irish modernist poets Scottish people of Irish descent Irish diplomats People from Greenock People educated at Belvedere College 20th-century Irish poets Irish expatriates in France