Since the 1930s John Hewitt has produced a body of verse which, because of its assured craftsmanship, its steady, persistent moral seriousness, and its exploration of the complex issue of Irish identity, has come to be recognized as one of the most significant achievements by an Irish poet in the twentieth century, to be set beside those of Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Austin Clarke (1896-1974), and Patrick Kavanagh (1905-1967), all poets who like Hewitt himself began their careers in the decades in which Ireland's greatest poet, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), achieved his greatest fame.

John Harold Hewitt was born in Belfast in 1907 in that part of Ireland which was to become, following the partition of the island, Northern Ireland. Both his parents, Robert Telford and Elinor Robinson Hewitt, were teachers and, like his ancestors on both sides of the family, loyal Methodists, observing the strict moral code of that...