A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism

Dennis Devlin's (1908-1959) poems have been championed by such Irish admirers as Brian Coffey, Beckett, Kinsella, and Montague, and by such American authors as Tate and Robert Penn Warren. This first-ever appraisal of Devlin's work, examines the poetry in the context of literary modernism and the poet's own successful career as a diplomat for the Free State and the Republic of Ireland. Setting the poetry within the wider frame of the modernism of Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, Davis compares it with that of his contemporaries. The surrealist-inspired early poetry is viewed in the light of the high modernism of Eliot and in relation to the European avant-garde, while the poems of the mid- to late period are read in relation to the American New Criticism. Davis discusses the sexual politics of Devlin's renowned love poetry and addresses the historical and biographical subtexts of his major religious poems. The book concludes with the first substantial critical readings of a number of poets associated with the Dublin-based New Writers' Press and a look at contemporary linguistically innovative poetry in Ireland.