A passionate commitment to the modern Irish theater marks the career of Austin Clarke, poet and playwright. Born in Dublin in the late 1890s, at the very flowering of the early Irish renaissance, and falling in his teens under the spell of Miss Annie Horniman's Abbey Theatre, he came to share with his contemporaries an enthusiasm for a national drama--particularly a poetic drama--rooted in the wealth of Irish tradition. In eighteen verse plays written over a span of fifty years, Clarke extended the work of his predecessor and sometimes mentor, William Butler Yeats, bringing to the legendary material with which they both largely worked a combined moral fervor, satirical bent, whimsical humor, and theatrical flair which are peculiarly his own. As founder of the Dublin Verse-Speaking Society and Lyric Theatre Company, he has been instrumental as well in extending the tradition of the poetic drama into our own...