Poets

W.B. Yeats
Austin Clarke
F.R. Higgins
Seumas O’Sullivan

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Many of his early poems are distinguished by images from legends of Celtic mythology. He was made a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922 and received the Nobel Prize for Literaturre in 1923. For more information visit W.B. Yeats.

Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was poet and verse-playwright. He was born in Dublin and educated at Belvedere and UCD. He succeeded in 1917 to the lectureship there left vacant by the execution of Thomas MacDonagh but a mental breakdown and an unhappy and short-lived marriage to the playwright Geraldine Cummins led him to London in 1922. All of his writing is about the Celtic past. He published eighteen books of poetry. During the 1930s he founded the Lyric Theatre (arising out of his Dublin Verse-Speaking Society) for which he wrote eleven plays.

F.R. Higgins (1896-1941) was a poet. He was born in Foxford, County Mayo, and brought up in Dublin. His father was an engineer from County Meath and was a strict unionist, but the son was strongly radical and, influenced by the Irish Literary Revival. He was friends with W.B. Yeats and Austin Clarke. His early poetry was influenced by the life the Connacht people he admired, and he and Clarke endeavoured to strengthen their verse with Gaelic assonance and metres. Higgins became business manager and a director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. He published in five collections of poetry.

Seumas O’Sullivan (1879-1958) (pseudonym of James Starkey) was a poet and editor. He was born in Dublin and educated mainly at home, becoming apprenticed to his pharmacist father. He was a minor figure of the Irish literary Revival, producing several books of verse.