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Denis Devlin (15 April 1908 – 21 August 1959) was, along withSamuel Beckett,Thomas MacGreevy andBrian Coffey, one of the generation ofIrishmodernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a careerdiplomat.
He was born inGreenock,Scotland ofIrish parents, and his family returned to live inDublin in 1918. He studied atBelvedere College and, from 1926, as a seminarian for theRoman Catholicpriesthood atClonliffe College. As part of his studies, he attended a degree course in modern languages atUniversity College Dublin (UCD), where he met and befriendedBrian Coffey. Together they published a joint collection,Poems, in 1930.[1]
In 1927, Devlin abandoned the priesthood and left Clonliffe. He graduated with from UCD hisBA in 1930 and spent that summer on theBlasket Islands to improve his spokenIrish. Between 1930 and 1933, he studied literature atMunich University and theSorbonne inParis, meeting, amongst others, Beckett andThomas MacGreevy. He then returned to UCD to complete hisMAthesis onMontaigne.
His nieceDenyse Woods went on to become a writer.
He joined the Irish Diplomatic Service in 1935 and spent a number of years inRome as the Irish Ambassador (1958),[2]New York andWashington. During this time he met the French poetSaint-John Perse, and the AmericansAllen Tate andRobert Penn Warren. He went on to publish a translation ofExile and Other Poems by St-John Perse, and Tate and Warren edited his posthumousSelected Poems.
Since his death, there have been twoCollected Poems published; the first in 1964 was edited by Coffey[3] and the second in 1989 byJ.C.C. Mays.[4]
His personal papers are held inUniversity College Dublin Archives.
