Despite the best efforts of those who have championed his work - I have in mind, for example, Bill McCormack's fine Penguin edition of Selected Poems - Austin Clarke's work has not yet received, especially outside Ireland, the critical attention and acclaim to which its admirers, rightly, in my opinion, think it is entitled. This year is the 25th anniversary of Austin Clarke's death and it is to be hoped the occasion will stimulate a new interest in his work, both here and abroad.
Let me say at the outset that I believe there is a stubborn Irishness at the heart of Clarke's work. Although it may not be fashionable now, that Irishness was deliberately chosen by Clarke. Almost from the beginning, he applied himself to the question of how he might be a distinctively Irish writer. At one time he thought of writing in Irish but opted instead to employ three strategies. He would use Irish material (Irish mythology, folklore, history, etc). He would exploit the prosodic resources of poetry in Irish (scarcely used until then with the notable exception of Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connaught). And, furthermore, he would concern himself with themes that were personal to himself and at the same time identifiably "nationalist", at least in his eyes. It is in the conjunction of these three strategies that Clarke's Irishness has its being.
Like so many other Irish poets in the shadow of Yeats, Clarke began his poetic career as a Celtic Twilighter. This should have put him in favour with Yeats, as it put Clarke's friend, F. R. Higgins. But for some reason Yeats never took to Clarke's poetry. It was to take Clarke years to expunge the bitterness he felt towards what he saw as Yeats's animosity towards him and his work. Later, he was to fall foul of another poet, Patrick Kavanagh, who had his own personal agenda - in which Clarke's poetry did not belong except as an object of ridicule.
From his earliest books to his last, Austin Clarke held his own self-determined course. Nothing would deter him. In the latter part of his life, he was fortunate to have his work taken up by Liam Miller's Dolmen Press. Largely as a result of this, a fair measure of fame and honour came to him in the end.
Clarke has related how for many years he abandoned the writing of lyric poetry for the writing of verse plays. These plays have dated rather badly, though one must admire his tenacity of purpose in the face of the daunting task he had set himself. His fiction has also dated. He lacked the narrative gift. Despite some richly descriptive writing, the novels generally make for tedious reading. On the other hand, his two volumes of memoirs contain wonderfully evocative descriptions of Dublin and Dubliners of the early decades of the century. The prose is leisurely paced and exquisitely modulated, characteristic of Clarke's dedication to writing as a craft.
When once more he took up the writing of poetry in the 1950s, he resolved to confront the contemporary Ireland he felt he had taken too little notice of until then (he had, of course, spent a good deal of the 1930s in London). As he saw it, the new Irish State was not developing as the idealists of the 1916 Rising had hoped.
A repressive Irish Catholic church, gombeenism in politics and crude opportunism in capitalist industry and commerce, combined to stifle that nationalist idealism which had nourished Clarke in his earlier years and the kind of idealism he had seen incarnated in Douglas Hyde, his professor of Irish at UCD. He established his own imprint, the Bridge Press, which he operated from his home in Templeogue. He issued small editions of pamphlet size, financed mainly by subscriptions. This practice was to continue until Liam Miller took up his work, though he published his last three books using the Bridge Press imprint (I had the pleasure of seeing two of these through the press for him).
One of Clarke's most famous short poems, Usufruct, is to be found in one of these Bridge Press booklets (Too Great a Vine, 1957). The interesting story behind this poem, related by Clarke himself, is that his mother had willed him the house in Templeogue where he, his wife Nora and their two sons lived. But she had stipulated in her will that on her son's death, the house was to be bequeathed to a religious order - in the belief, one can only suppose, that this generosity on her part would be repaid with many Masses for the repose of her and her son's soul. It was hardly a gesture the anti-clerical Clarke could be expected to appreciates: "This house cannot be handed down. Before the scriven ink is brown, Clergy will sell the lease of it. I live here, thinking, ready to flit from Templeogue, but not at ease."
The poetry of these small editions was mainly satirical. Some of this has dated, along with the subject matter. Much of it is in need of notes to explain topical allusions. That said, however, most of it shows extraordinary courage in confronting the turpitudes of Church and State at a time when these institutions had the collective power to inflict severe retaliations on their antagonists. This satirical streak in Clarke developed in power and range in his later poetry.
The case I would make for the continuing relevance of Clarke's poetry has to do with its central concern with the freedom of the individual in a world hell-bent on destroying that freedom, whether by the brute force of the totalitarian State or the devious manipulations of the mass-consumerism of the "free" democracies. This concern also embraces the struggle of small nations or ethnic groups to retain their own distinctive cultural identity in the increasingly homogenised global village of today. Besides this, Clarke's concern with the precarious state of the natural world takes on growing relevance with every passing decade.
Michael Smith is a poet and translator