SOURCE: MacLochlainn, Alf. “Corkery's Advice to a Young Writer.” Eire-Ireland 35, no. 1-2 (spring-summer 2000): 219-25.

In the following essay, MacLochlainn focuses on a dispute between O'Faoláin and his former mentor Daniel Corkery, using a letter from Corkery to Art Ó'Riann to illuminate Corkery's views on modern Irish literature.

Patrick Maume's life of Daniel Corkery¹ appeared when Maurice Harmon was already correcting proofs of his biography of Sean O'Faolain,² neither scholar obviously having had the advantage of the mature opinions of the other. That is a pity, as Corkery and O'Faolain have become handy pegs on which to hang tracts in an ongoing disputation about insularity versus cosmopolitanism in modern Irish culture.³

Corkery gave O'Faolain a copy of The Hidden Ireland, his first monographic work of criticism, at Christmas 1924, when it was, so to speak, hot off the press. In this work, Corkery lauded the eighteenth-century Munster poets writing...