Word: irelands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Robert Frost was given an honorary degree at Oxford University a few years ago, he stopped in Ireland to receive the same honor from the University of Ireland. Frost met Austin Clarke, earlier a very promising Irish poet who, through too many years of personal anguish, had lost his touch. But Frost was anxious to talk with Clarke, and taking him aside, they spent several hours together, Clarke later said that Frost asked him what kind of verse he wrote and uncertain of the proper answer he blurted out. "I load myself with chains...
...have many readers." In fact, Clarke's readership was never impressive and rarely extended beyond the shores of his homeland. Yet until his death last year at the age of 78. Austin Clarke had claim to the grandest title of the richest language in the world: Ireland's greatest living poet. It was not a claim that went unchallenged, for some maintain that Thomas Kinsella had and continues to hold the title hands down. But since W.B. Yeats's death in 1939, Clarke was Ireland's unofficial poet laureate. The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke (Oxford University Press...
Austin Clarke's poetry is divided here into the three major periods of his life. The publication in 1917 of his first long poem, "The Vengeance of Fionn" set the mood for his early narratives based on the saga cycles of ancient Ireland. These include the Fiannaigheacht, a series of stories about Fionn MacChumhall and his young, unmarried, Fenian warriors, 2000-year-old stories that were lost to the mainstream of Irish consciousness but survived and multiplied among the peasantry; and the Ulster cycle, another series whose central epic, the Tain, relates the deeds of the mighty hero, Cuchulain...
...sectarian violence-the worst in more than a year-has occurred despite a ten-week truce between the militant Provisional Irish Republican Army or Provos and the British army. It comes as an ill-timed blow to Merlyn Rees, Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who is attempting to restart a political dialogue. On May 1, elections are scheduled for a 78-seat convention whose members are to work out a new government for Ulster's 1 million Protestants and 500,000 Catholics...
...Bacon. "I've led a very hypnotic and curious one - being homosexual I have lived with the most marvelously disastrous people. Of course one suffers. You like somebody and you suffer from it. But that's how life is." Born the son of a horse trainer in Ireland, raised in a thick atmosphere of decayed gentility and Sinn Fein violence, flung out of home at 16 for making love to the grooms, drifting into Berlin and the tackiest pits of Weimar decadence, changing addresses almost as often as shirts, surviving in an utterly provisional manner as unsuccessful interior...