Poetry in Modern Ireland

Poetry in Modern Ireland, with illustrations by Louis Le Brocquy, is the second booklet in the series published for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland and was issued in 1951. For this second edition, the text has been revised and slightly lengthened in order to bring the essay up to date. The aim of this series is to give a broad vivid and informed survey of Irish life and culture, past and present. Austin Clarke is a distinguished poet in the generation that succeeded Yeats. His first book The Vengeance of Fionn was published in 1918 and Collected Poems in 1936. He has also published order books of verse, poetic plays and three novels set in medieval Ireland. He had won a high reputation as an acute literary critic, for his original experiments in poetry, and as a pioneer of verse speaking in the Irish theatre and Radio Eireann.

Austin Clarke (9 May 1896 - 19 March 1974), born in 83 Manor Street, Stoneybatter, Dublin, was one of the leading Irish poets of the generation after W. B. Yeats. He also wrote plays, novels and memoirs. Clarke's main contribution to Irish poetry was the rigour with which he used technical means borrowed from classical Irish language poetry when writing in English.