Among the generation of poets who came to prominence in Ireland after William Butler Yeats, Austin Clarke is possibly the finest. Although he is less well known outside Ireland than Louis Mac-Neice and less obviously an influence on younger poets than Patrick Kavanagh, his metrical complexity and thematic integrity mark him as an important writer of the period. Poet, playwright, novelist, and literary critic, he was born Augustine Joseph Clarke in Dublin. His father, Augustine Clarke, was a civil servant whose nationalism he came to share, and his mother, Ellen Patten Browne Clarke, was a dominating personality whose scrupulous and narrow religiosity inculcated in him an abiding sense of guilt which produced severe mental trauma in his young manhood and haunted him most of his life.

Like James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh, but unlike most of the more famous figures of the Irish revival, Clarke was Catholic and...