Clarke, Austin (1896–1974)

Irish poet. Born in Dublin, and educated at University College, Dublin, he became a leading member of the ‘second wave’ of the Irish literary revival. He found an alternative to the vague sensuousness of the Celtic twilight in the literature and art of medieval Ireland. From the mid-1950s he became the poet of modern Ireland's conscience, despising everything false, unnatural, and life-denying.

Coincident with this gravity is a view of Rabelaisian enjoyment, and his later poems celebrate sexual awakening. Among these collections are Later Poems (1961) and Flight to Africa (1964); Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966) is a terrifying account of mental collapse. His Collected Plays appeared 1963; the Collected Poems (1974).

Clarke worked in London for 15 years as a reviewer and critic, but returned to Ireland, settling in Templeogue, near Dublin.

After publishing The Vengeance of Fionn (1917), he was acclaimed as the ‘new Yeats’. However, he shook off the early influence of Yeats and Irish mythology; the volume of poems Pilgrimage (1929) shows medieval influence. Between 1929 and 1955 Clarke wrote mostly plays and three beautifully worked novels, The Bright Temptation (1932), The Singing Men at Cashel (1936), and The Sun Dances at Easter (1952). In 1955 he published Ancient Lights, poems and satires. Twice Around the Black Church (1962) and A Penny in the Clouds (1968) are autobiography.