Washington DC
and London,
1939–50

 

CHRONOLOGY

	1939
August	DD appointed Irish consul in New York.
	1940
March	DD quickly transferred to the legation in Washington DC after an urgent request for more staff.
April	Appointed acting secretary of the Irish legation; his position as secretary is soon secured.
May	DD gives a reading of his poems at the ‘Y’ in New York, organised by Norman Macleod.
	1941
February	‘Farewell and Good’ is published in Poetry, vol. 57, no. 5.
July	DD begins discussion with publisher William M. Roth regarding a Celtic poetry anthology, co-edited with Macleod.
	1942
Spring	‘Lough Derg’ is published in the final issue of the The Southern Review before it suspends publication during the war years.
June	Roth announces that his publishing house, the Colt Press, will have to cease operations because of the war.
	1943
Winter	‘Ank’hor Vat’ is published in The University Review, vol. 10, no. 2.
	1944
October	‘Rains’, DD’s translation of Alexis Leger’s ‘Pluies’, appears in The Sewanee Review, vol. 52, no. 4.
November	DD attends the International Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago.
	1945
Spring	Leger’s ‘Neiges’ and DD’s ‘Snows’ are published as parallel texts in The Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 2. DD spends two months in Ireland, returns by flying-boat from Foynes.
Summer	‘Twenty-four Poets’, a review of a number of contemporary poetry volumes, appears in The Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 3.
	1946
January	Leger’s ‘Poème à l’étrangère’ and DD’s ‘Poem to a Foreign Lady’ are published as parallel texts in Briarcliff Quarterly, vol. II, no. 8.
May	Lough Derg and Other Poems is published by Reynal & Hitchcock.
	1947
January	DD marries Caren Randon in Washington; they honeymoon in Mexico.
February	Assigned to London as counsellor of the High Commissioner’s Office; the Devlins depart.
December	DD and CD spend Christmas at the Slopes, the Devlin family home in Dún Laoghaire.
	1948
Summer	Devlins vacation in Sirmione, Italy, joined by Robert Penn Warren and his wife Emma Brescia.
	1949
May	DD involved in discussions at St James’s Palace leading to the Treaty of London, and the establishment of the Council of Europe.
Summer	Exile and Other Poems is published in a bilingual edition with DD’s translations, as the fifteenth number in the Bollingen Series. DD transferred to Department of External Affairs headquarters in Dublin, in the role of counsellor in the Political Division.
August	Attends the first international parliament of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
	1950
March	Dublin’s Envoy and the Italian journal Inventario degli oggetti d’arte d’Italia publish, respectively, a short extract and a longer version of The Heavenly Foreigner; the Inventario publication includes a parallel Italian translation by Tommaso Giglio.

 

To Niall Montgomery

10 January 1940

Dear Niall,

As you know, the post is haphazard and I didn’t hear till well afterwards about your marriage. My congratulations to you and my best wishes to Hop on the same account.1 I wish you both luck and fun.

I am settling down with less surprise than I had thought, due to my advancing years, no doubt. Eire doesn’t cut any ice as a sensation now nor North Eire either. Finland is the baby.² America is worrying itself sick about the European War and all the moral values that are being destroyed. It says it is preparing itself to be the reservoir of Western civilization, so far they have buried several of the major poets well below the surface in special-process anti-dissolution steel books. That’s the Universities. As for the Government, it has accepted the custody of 71 Masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and the Domesday Book.³ The Book of Kells is not felt to be such a Significant Landmark of Progress. They are also embalming Toscanini and making citizens out of Auden & Isherwood; though some of them are suspicious regarding the motivation behind these Limey poets’ casual activation – and would you blame them?⁴ But Finland is real front-page – to Finland they are giving their moral support with an open hand. The conscience of the nation has been so deeply shocked by the brutality of Russia that Senate Commissions have been able to reprove various schoolboy organisations for unAmericanism. If I go any further, it might look as if I were being amusing whereas I’m merely being coy. But there are no public lavatories in the whole bloody town.

You know, I suppose, that Carroll’s Kindred got a hell of a slashing here and only lasted two weeks.⁵ Carroll did the Dublin trick of protesting, in letters to the papers, against the poor reviews and how his message was misunderstood. As a matter of fact, I thought the play a lot better than was said, as a simple audience, I enjoyed it. But poor Carroll is tearing the skin off himself with rage. They are all trying to take up a position about Finnegan’s [for Finnegans] Wake but it has them flat – me too if I had read it.6

I liked your card which arrived a few days ago. – I see the Sweeneys from time to time and they’re very kind – Didn’t everybody meet Saroyan when he was in Dublin?⁷ I think you must have been in London at the time. It’s very queer. He has got a very successful play running now and it seems he wrote it simply to fulfil a life-long ambition to go to Dublin. So he wrote it and the backer gave him a lump sum and off he went to Dublin. It seems he refuses to say a word about it. People are curious & they ask him [?an[d] be jamesy] if the lad will say a word except “Yes, I’ve been to Dublin” in a pleasant informative voice.

Well all the best. Remember me to Hop.

Denis.

Personal address

43 E. 50th St., New York City

Autograph letter signed. 2 leaves, 4 sides. Header: Consulate General of Ireland, New York. Niall Montgomery Papers, MS 50, 118/26/23, NLI.

1. Niall Montgomery married Rose Anna Hopkins (known familiarly as Hop) in October 1939.

2. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, marking the beginning of the Winter War. President Roosevelt responded quickly by extending financial aid to Finland; the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union.

3. Devlin is being flippant here; before the USA entered the Second World War, and Americans made a significant contribution to the cultural preservation of ‘The Monuments Men’, there was no government-led initiative for American custody of European art. At the approach of war, the Roerich Pact, an agreement for the protection of artistic and scientific institutions, was signed in Washington in 1935. In a non-governmental move that was nonetheless political for the cultural platform it gave Mussolini, an exhibition of Italian Renaissance masterpieces ‘Lent by the Royal Italian Government’ was on an extended tour of American galleries including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939–40.

4. Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957), Italian conductor, was a fierce critic of Mussolini and Hitler, and left Milan for New York in 1938 to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra; Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), English novelist of the Auden Group. Auden and Isherwood entered the United States on temporary visas at the outbreak of war in 1939, becoming American citizens in 1946.

5. Paul Vincent Carroll (1900–68), Irish dramatist and screenwriter. Kindred, a play about the artist in wartime, premiered at the Abbey in September 1939 and came to New York in December of the same year.

6. Finnegans Wake (1939) was Joyce’s final and much-vaunted novel which had been unfolding under the title Work in Progress while Devlin and Coffey were in Paris. It is notorious for its linguistic and narrative difficulty.

7. James Johnson Sweeney (see DD to Ruth de Verry, transition magazine, 13 October 1936, n. 1) and his wife Laura (Harden) Sweeney (1902–82). William Saroyan (1908–81), Armenian-American novelist and playwright, sold Sunset Sonata to Broadway actor-producer-director Eddie Dowling in 1939. The New York Times reported that Saroyan would be spending two or three weeks ‘loafing among the Irish’ (9 June 1939, p. 30).

 

To Amy Bonner, Poetry Magazine

23 January 1940

Dear Miss Bonner,

Thanks very much for your kind invitation to join your table at the dinner of the Poetry Society of America to be held on January 25^th at the Biltmore Hotel. I am very sorry I shall not be able to come. It would indeed have been a pleasure to join you and to hear the very wise words that will be spoken.1

With best wishes and thanks,

Yours sincerely,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Consulate General of Ireland, New York. Amy Bonner Papers, Box 1, Folder 5, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

1. The dinner was hosted by A.M. Sullivan (see letter dated 24 April 1940, and Correspondents’ Biographies), the newly-appointed president of the Poetry Society of America. He gave an address about the deplorable lack of interest in poetry in contemporary society (The New York Times, 26 January 1940, p. 13).

 

To Norman Macleod

30 March 1940

Dear Norman,

It occurs to me that you may be getting anxious about my poems for mimeograph; I have just finished the last non-published one I wish to include and I shall send you the whole list next week.1 I have not said how glad I am for the chance of becoming better known but I am deeply grateful to you and I’m looking forward to the reading with excitement.² My apparent indifference to fame – let me use the old word – has been, of course, partly a reactive defense [sic] against disappointment. But if you have no signs of being believed, your belief in yourself slips away without noticing and that was happening to me. The poem I have just finished was written five years ago en bloc and there were few changes to be made but I just let it drift until New York.³ Fortunately, I don’t depend on the continuance of the mood in which a poem was begun. Now I can polish all my raw work of the last few years; it is good for me now. I think I shall do you justice at the reading: I shall read slowly and that will overcome the disadvantages here of my different pronunciation. I shall also have to see to it that my voice carries, even in Ireland that has been a difficulty, but I shall manage.

I am to be Secretary of Legation here.

I enjoyed our night out immensely. I hope Vivienne was not too fatigued.⁴ I’ve been thinking about our discussion about conventional forms & self-discovering, self-resolving forms, it is an old preoccupation. I’ve not been convinced by the productions of those who practise the latter. However, till another date.

Best wishes

Yours.

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Norman Macleod Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature (MSS 718), Box 7, Folder 65, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

1. Macleod had requested poems for a contemporary poetry anthology he was editing as an extension of his work for the YMHA Poetry Center in New York, Calendar: An anthology of 1940 poetry (Prairie City: The Press of James Decker, 1940). A single poem of Devlin’s was included, ‘Little Elegy’, which had previously been published in Ireland Today, vol. II, no. 3, March 1937, pp. 33–4. mimeograph: the process of reproducing text from a stencil with the use of a mimeograph machine.

2. Devlin gave a reading of ‘Little Elegy’ and other poems at the ‘Y’ on 6 May 1940.

3. There were no unpublished Devlin poems included in the 1940 edition of Calendar. Devlin may have sent along ‘Love from Time to Time’: J.C.C. Mays notes that a typescript of this poem in the NLI archive is marked ‘Published Calendar’, although it never appeared in Macleod’s Calendar anthologies of 1940 or 1942.

4. Macleod was at this time married to Vivienne Koch. See Correspondents’ Biographies.

 

To George Dillon, Poetry Magazine

6 April 1940

Dear Mr. Dillon,

Mr. James Sweeney told me some time ago that you were good enough to say you liked my book Intercessions and that I might send you something with a view to possible publication in Poetry. I am therefore sending the enclosed poem Farewell and Good for your consideration.

I should have hurried much sooner to get in touch with you had I not been prevented by the unfinished state of the poetry I have by me at present and by the confusion accompanying a sudden transfer from New York to Washington. I hope you will not think I have been casual about your kind invitation.

A stamped addressed envelope is enclosed.

Yours very faithfully,

Denis Devlin.

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: The Fairfax Hotel, Washington DC. Address: George Dillon, Esq., Editor, Poetry, 232 East Erie Street, Chicago, Illinois. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Records, 1895–1961, Box 74 Folder 1, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

 

To A.M. Sullivan, Poetry Society of America

24 April 1940

Dear Mr. Sullivan:

Many thanks for your kind invitation to the meeting of the Poetry Society to be held on Thursday, April 25 at Roosevelt House. I much regret, however, that I shall not be able to attend as I have been transferred to the Legation here at Washington.

I hope things are going well with you in the society. You seem to be putting new blood into it and even if you don’t agree with Oscar Williams (I don’t know whether you do or not) it seems a useful sort of thing to have people like him about.1

If I should come to New York sometime I shall give you a ring and I hope to see you.

Very sincerely yours,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Address: Mr A.N. Sullivan, President, Poetry Society of America, 290 Broadway, New York City. A.M. Sullivan Papers, Correspondence Box 3, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

1. Oscar Williams, born Oscar Kaplan (1900–64), American poet, editor and anthologist, became a member of the Poetry Society of America in 1937. In the 1920s Williams had edited Rhythmus, a short-lived magazine devoted to avant-garde and experimental poetry; Rhythmus had promoted the work of Eugene Jolas, editor of transition, in which some of Devlin’s early poems had appeared.

 

To Joseph P. Walshe, Secretary, Department of External Affairs

25 November 1940

On the invitation of the Emmett Club (Clan-na[-]Gael) Baltimore, Maryland, I attended their Annual Banquet in celebration of the Manchester Martyrs on November 23^rd, 1940. Having been asked to speak I conveyed to the club greetings from Ireland and described recent social and economic developments which the independence of Ireland made it possible to achieve. Most of the speakers had supported Irish neutrality and I, therefore, felt obliged to make some reference to the subject, although, as there were newspaper representatives present, I thought it necessary not to be too direct on account of the sensitiveness of American opinion, at present getting more marked, to propaganda. I confined myself, accordingly, to generalizations on the necessity and the advantage to Europe of maintaining the independence of small countries, pointing out that these countries being without the means to practice imperialism, always tended to support peace and also that the maintenance of their cultural particularity made for the greater variety and richness of the general European culture.

Denis Devlin

Typed memo signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Address: included as an enclosure in a letter from Minister Robert Brennan to The Secretary, Dept. of External Affairs, Dublin, dated 10 December 1940. Department of Foreign Affairs Papers, DFA/219/3A, NAI.

 

To Joseph P. Walshe, Secretary, Department of External Affairs

11 December 1940

As the Minister was suddenly called to New York, he was unable to make the usual report on the political situation.1 I am forwarding herewith the newspaper clippings which would have accompanied the report. It will be seen that the important topic is America’s entry into the war, and that most opinion and feeling is tending to urge in that direction.

Denis Devlin

for Minister

Typed letter signed. Handwritten annotations and filing stamp from the Department. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Address: The Secretary, Department of External Affairs, Dublin. Marked with departmental ref. no. 108/109/40. Department of Foreign Affairs Papers, DFA/219/3A, NAI.

1. Robert Brennan (1881–1964) was minister plenipotentiary to the USA at this time.

 

To the Editors, Poetry Magazine1

27 January 1941

Gentlemen:

I return herewith corrected proof of “Farewell and Good.” I have made two changes; I hope this will not be inconvenient to the printers.² The words “at bay” are inserted between “world” and “bitten” in line 4; “of” is changed to “by” in the twelfth line. The second last line which must have crept in by mistake is erased. I hope I have not delayed too long in returning the proof.

Yours sincerely,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Address: The Editors, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 232 East Erie Street, Chicago, Ill. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Records, 1895–1961, Box 74, Folder 1, UChi.

1. George Dillon’s editorship of Poetry magazine ran from 1937 to 1949. Devlin was evidently known to the wider team at Poetry at this time. He is cited in the ‘News Notes’ section of the January 1941 issue for providing comment on a shift taking place in contemporary Irish poetry, away from agricultural themes and ‘sophisticated ballad’ forms, towards a poetry that is ‘urban and sociological in emphasis’ (‘News Notes’, Poetry, vol. 57, no. 4, January 1941, p. 282).

2. ‘Farewell and Good’ was published in Poetry, vol. 57, no. 5, February 1941, pp. 300–1.

 

To William M. Roth

8 August 1941

Dear Mr. Roth,

Many thanks for your letter of the 1^st. July about the possibility of publishing the Celtic Anthology.1 As regards copyright, there would be little difficulty, I think, as the poets were asked to send unpublished work, copyright free for this country; Mr. Macleod was given the right to use the material by the poets submitting it to him for publication in a Celtic Anthology. In the case of Dylan Thomas, I shall set about obtaining permission from NEW DIRECTIONS to include poems, previously sent by him to Macleod, which were brought out by that house in their Thomas volume.² The same for McGreevey [for Mac-Greevy] who is the only other exception.³

I quite agree with you that some of the poetry is bad but the material I sent was intended as a representative selection from the rather large amount of mss. on my hands; and at the time I was undecided about editorial policy. I wondered, that is, whether a publisher might not be more interested in a book made up with an eye to other values than the strictly poetic, whether, especially in the case of foreign poetry, social or merely geographical interests might not be inviting. Heresy, of course. I had much rather the book were exclusive and, helped by the point of view in your letter, I agree that only the very best should be included. Will you, therefore, kindly return to me the mss. I forwarded (for which postage forwarded) and from that and the material I have here I will make a selection on the principle of poetic quality for submission to you.

About Higgins: he was too well established, I think, for our company of unknown poets and, from my knowledge of him, I don’t think he would have taken kindly to being presented as what he would have called a “modern” poet. And there may be devotional poetry in the making under the impact of war but, unfortunately in the bad state of communications, I have been rather out of touch with things for the last year or so. I don’t think much is being done in Ireland though; among my own contemporaries, prose has been practised with more interest than poetry.

What are your ideas about contract terms[?]

Forgive me for taking so long in replying: I had to make sure about the copyright position by writing to Macleod.

With best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. Handwritten corrections. 2 leaves, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records, c. 1941–70 (MSS 94/15), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

1. This Celtic anthology (the MS for which eventually circulated under the title Modern Celtic Poetry: An anthology), an editorial collaboration with Norman Macleod, originated as a solo project for Macleod in the late 1930s. A letter from Macleod to James Decker in January 1940 suggests it was originally destined for the Decker Press. Macleod seems to have been particularly interested in representing poets associated with the ‘New Romantic’ and ‘New Apocalypse’ movements, which were emerging from the Celtic nations in the British Isles. Dylan Thomas (see n. 2 below) was the poet principally associated with New Romanticism; the work of the New Apocalypse poets was heralded by an anthology of that name, edited by Henry Treece and J.F. Hendry, and characterised by anti-rationalist, politically sceptical poetry reacting to the work of the Auden generation. As an early draft of Macleod’s prefatory note indicates, he was particularly interested in the representation of war (‘on the breadline as well as in the trenches’) in these national poetries. Devlin was likely recruited to add his expertise to the Irish selections. A copy of the letter to Decker, along with the table of contents and editorial preface, are contained in the Brian Coffey Papers, Box 29, Folder 43, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library.

2. Dylan Thomas (1914–53), Welsh poet. Thomas was introduced to American audiences in a New Directions in Prose and Poetry anthology of 1938, from James Laughlin’s recently founded New Directions press. The following year Laughlin published The World I Breathe from New Directions, which gathered selected poems from Thomas’ British volumes and a clutch of stories.

3. MacGreevy’s Poems (1934) was published by London’s Heinemann, and reprinted by Viking Press in New York. He had largely moved away from poetry by the late 1930s, his attention turned to critical prose. The poems Devlin hoped to include were ‘Nocturne’, ‘Homage to Marcel Proust’ and ‘Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence’.

 

To Joseph P. Walshe, Secretary, Department of External Affairs

2 October 1941

I beg to state that the Consul at Boston reports that he was invited to give a talk at a luncheon meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Somerville, Mass. on the 25^th of September last, on the subject of Ireland’s Neutrality.1

The Kiwanis Clubs are an important benevolent association, many of them are unsympathetic to our position; however, none expressed any feeling after the talk except that they did not envy us “the spot” on which we have been placed by circumstances outside of our control.

Denis Devlin

for Minister

Typed letter signed. Handwritten corrections; stamped by the department. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Address: Secretary, Department of External Affairs, Dublin. Marked with departmental ref. no. 36-5/41. Department of Foreign Affairs Papers, DFA/219/3A, NAI.

1. Brendan O’Riordan (dates unknown) had been consul in Boston since 1939, after a period as consul in New York. In 1955 he was appointed Irish representative to the Council of Europe. The Kiwanis Club is a charitable organisation founded in Detroit in 1915, dedicated to improving community services for under-privileged children.

 

To William M. Roth

11 October 1941

Dear Mr. Roth,

I am sending you the manuscript now, the final choice. I hope it will look more attractive to you. The Preface enclosed is merely tentative and I shall be glad to alter it if you wish – it is perhaps too long.1 The contract terms you mention seem pretty fair and we accept them. Sales, by the way, in this case, may be better than average as I may succeed in interesting our Consuls in various cities in the book; a word of recommendation here & there from them would be helpful.

I shall send you the biblio biographical notes on the authors next week. I’ve had to revise what was there & do some research.

I hope I’ve not delayed too long in sending back the MS. The work was slowed down when I went on holiday. It seems to me now to have the makings of an interesting book.

[W]ith best wishes.

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. If Devlin redrafted Macleod’s preface, the later version has not been found.

 

To William M. Roth

2 December 1941

Dear Mr. Roth,

I am wondering if you have received the MSS for the Celtic Anthology, which I despatched to you by registered mail on the 11^th October. If not, would you kindly let me know so that I can take the matter up with the Post Office.

I’m glad to see, from its advertisements, that the Colt Press is making itself known[…]1

With best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. A recent Colt Press volume, The Epicure in Imperial Russia (1941) by Marie Alexandre Markevitch, had received publicity in Edward Larocque Tinker’s ‘New Editions, Fine & Otherwise’ column for The New York Times (23 November 1941).

 

To William M. Roth

22 December 1941

Dear Mr. Roth,

Thanks for your note of December 9^th. I shall be glad, of course, to wait until after the New Year for further discussion of plans regarding the book.

With best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

 

To William M. Roth

6 February 1942

Dear Mr. Roth,

I am very sorry that you find it impossible to proceed with the publication of the anthology. I had counted on it and, indeed, the course of our correspondence implied, I think, that you had decided to go ahead with the book.

Naturally I understand that your firm, a new one, should have been faced with difficult problems, especially with the outbreak of war. I hope things will pick up.

I have considered your offer to keep the MS. with a view to eventual publication. There is, however, a possibility of publication elsewhere and I’d therefore like you to return it to me as soon as possible.

With best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

 

To John Palmer, The Southern Review

19 March 1942

Dear Mr. Palmer,

I am extremely sorry to learn that The Southern Review will have to cease publication.1 Its place can’t be taken by any other magazine and its loss will be a great blow to your readers as it must be to yourselves.

I don’t know whether, in the circumstances, you intend to publish my Lough Derg in the final issue; but if you do, and if there is still time, could you substitute for the copy I gave you, the enclosed version? I have inkmarked it B for your convenience.

Very sincerely yours,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. The Southern Review Records, Yale Collection of American Literature (MS 694), Series 1, Box II, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

1. The Southern Review suspended publication in 1942, in the wake of America’s entry into the war, not resuming until 1965. John Palmer, managing editor 1940–2, served in the US Navy.

 

To William M. Roth

19 March 1942

Dear Mr. Roth,

I’m afraid you can’t have had much time to prepare your memorandum that night. But it was good fun.1 I hope you were able to finish it later. It’s an exciting publishing scheme.

Miss Steloff is really very interested in the anthology: [s]he thinks she can push it and is strongly of the opinion that summer publication would be advisable.² Naturally I agree with her! She emphasised that the sale of poetry has nothing to do with the seasons. And you would have it off your hands for the strenuous autumn publishing.

I am making the changes we agreed on. I think they will definitely improve the book.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you on all this.

With best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. Some punctuation marks inserted by hand. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records, UCB.

1. In a letter from Norman Macleod to Roth, dated 26 February 1942, we see that Roth changed his mind about cancelling publication weeks after Devlin’s letter of 6 February, possibly as a result of a conversation with Macleod. Macleod’s letter also indicates that Roth was planning a trip to Washington and a meeting with Devlin in person. See Colt Press Records, c. 1941–70 (MSS 94/15), Bancroft Library, UCB.

2. Frances Steloff (born Stelov) (1887–1989), founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, which became a hub for avant-garde literary artists. Devlin and Macleod were both urging Roth to publish quickly, perhaps mindful of the effects of the war on the publishing industry.

 

To William M. Roth

8 April 1942

Dear Roth,

I am enclosing a contract in one copy signed and initialed [sic] where necessary.

I am very happy to hear that you will try to get the Anthology out during the summer. I shall send the manuscript very soon; I am waiting the publisher’s permission to include MacNeice and Rodgers.1 I have seen White here; he showed quite some interest in the book.²

I hope you are keeping well.

With best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. Louis MacNeice (1907–63), Belfast-born poet, playwright and critic associated with the Auden Group in the 1930s, and W.R. Rodgers (see Correspondents’ Biographies). Both were working in radio broadcasting in the 1940s.

2. White has not been identified.

 

To William M. Roth

16 April 1942

Dear Roth,

I asked permission of the publishers of MacNeice (Random House) and Rodgers (Harcourt, Brace) to include them in the anthology. Random want $10 per poem and Harcourt sent me a contract form to be filled out. I know you, as the publisher, did not envisage paying out fees for copyright stuff and I don’t feel inclined to either. So I think we shall have to leave MacNeice & Rodgers out – a pity from the publicity point of view. I am asking Macleod if he thinks we should pay the fees & get the poems. In the meantime, in case we decide to do so, I am sending you the Harcourt forms; they are only applications which need not be followed up. As for Higgins, I am including poems which have not been published here.

Would you, then, complete the forms and lodge them with Harcourt? I shall send you Random’s forms later, if necessary.

Yours,

Denis Devlin

The typing is mine, unfortunately.

Typed letter signed. Corrections and postscript handwritten. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

 

To John Palmer, The Southern Review

22 April 1942

Dear Mr. Palmer:

The following are some facts about myself, from which you might make the biographical note for Notes on Contributors:

Formerly instructor in English Poetry at University College, Dublin. At present, Secretary of the Irish Legation in Washington. Book of poems, Intercessions, published London, Europa Press, 1937. Have appeared in various reviews, Dublin Magazine, Transition, The New Republic, and Poetry. Translations from Paul Eluard in the English edition of his poems, Thorns of Thunder, 1938. Editing, with Norman Macleod, Modern Celtic Anthology, to be published this summer by the Colt Press, San Francisco.

With best wishes,

Very sincerely yours,

Denis Devlin

If the type is not already set up, I should be much obliged if you would inscribe the poem as follows: To Adrienne Koch.1 I hope my requests for changes have not been too much of a nuisance to you.

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. The Southern Review Records, Series 1, Box II, Beinecke, YU.

1. Adrienne Koch (1913–71), renowned historian and Jefferson scholar, was completing her philosophy doctorate at Columbia Graduate School at this time. It is likely she was introduced to Devlin by her sister Vivienne Koch and brother-in-law Norman Macleod, and a close relationship developed – the NLI drafts show that Devlin is thinking of Koch during the composition of other early American poems.

 

To William M. Roth

23 April 1942

Dear Bill Roth,

I agree that it would be of great advantage to include Rodgers & MacNeice. I had an agreeable letter about the latter from Saxe Cummings [for Commins] of Random House, so I shall write to him and ask him to send the contract forms direct to you.1 It will be good if yo[u] can get the poems for a small fee.

The MacNeice poems I want are from Poems 1925-40, Random House; they are, Dublin (p.260), The Expert (p.280) and Cradle Song (p.322).²

I shall seem vacillating but, on thinking it over, I am again doubtful of the wisdom of including Higgins.³ It would defeat the purpose of the Irish section, which is to show what has been done since the days of the Celtic Twilight school; and we should be questioned about the absence of Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum and James Stephens, as well as others closely associated with him in style and outlook.⁴ I think our book is happily homogenous without them. Besides, they have all copyright and the fees would amount to more than we should like to pay when there’s no pressing reason for it.

I shall [send] you a list of possible subscribers in a few days.

Yours,

Denis Devlin

(one n)⁵

Typed letter signed. Some over-typing to cover mistakes. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. Saxe Commins (?1892–1958), editor in chief at Random House, who had worked with Eugene O’Neill and William Faulkner. Devlin’s mistake with the surname was not uncommon. The Saxe Commins Papers at Princeton do not contain a record of Devlin’s correspondence with Random House.

2. All of these poems are from Plant and Phantom (London: Faber, 1940). ‘Dublin’ is the opening poem in ‘The Coming of War’ (later ‘The Closing Album’) sequence; ‘The Expert’ was part of the ‘Novelettes’ sequence, although it was omitted after Poems 1925–1940 (New York: Random House, 1940); ‘Cradle Song’ later took the title ‘Cradle Song for Eleanor’ – the volume was dedicated to MacNeice’s lover Eleanor Clark (see Correspondents’ Biographies).

3. See DD to William M. Roth, 8 August 1941, and DD to William M. Roth, 16 April 1942.

4. Padraic Colum (1881–1972), Irish playwright and poet, had emigrated to America in 1914 and achieved great success as the author of children’s books. For Clarke and Stephens see Correspondents’ Biographies and DD to Thomas MacGreevy, 10 November 1933, n. 2.

5. In Roth’s publishing memoir he notes that both Devlin and Macleod had cause to complain about the persistent misspelling of their names – we see Devlin campaigning on Macleod’s behalf in the letter below, dated 22 May 1942. Devlin’s first name is, on one occasion, misspelt in this memoir. See The Colt Springs High: A publishing memoir of the Colt Press, 1939–1942 (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2004), p. 185.

 

To William M. Roth

8 May 1942

Dear Bill Roth,

We might as well go ahead with our plan & have Rodgers & MacNeice, though I think their publishers have a nerve. I agree to what you propose, namely, to include The Raider & Life’s Circumnavigators of Rodgers, half the fee of 15 dollars being paid by each of us.1 And if Random insist on their terms for MacNeice, I think we should cut out one poem there also; i.e. Cradle Song, retaining Dublin & The Expert for 20 dollars[…] That’s 10 dollars each.

I hope to goodness priorities are’nt [sic] going to catch me in poetry too. It’s becoming a nightmare with me at my office.

By the way, what about the advance? Will you send it to me: you must have received the contract, duly signed?

All the best,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. Handwritten corrections. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. ‘The Raider’ and ‘Life’s Circumnavigators’ are poems from Rodgers’ Awake: And other poems (London: Secker & Warburg, 1941), which was renamed Awake! And other wartime poems on its American publication by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1942.

 

To William M. Roth

22 May 1942

My dear Bill Roth,

I am sending you herewith the script of the anthology with prefatory note and table of contents. I have adopted some of your suggestions, as you will see, and added one or two poems to the Irish section which improve it, I think. The poems of Denzell [for Denzil] Dunnett and G.S. Fraser (Scots section) were missing from t[he] script, as returned by you; perhaps they are among your files.1 I have omitted Dunnett anyhow, but, if you have the poems, you might insert Early Spring by Fraser; if not, take his name off the table of contents.²

What’s the position now about MacNeice and Rodgers? We should have them in; I have typed out those I want and include th[e]m here.

I also send a list of names from Norman Macleod – by t[he] way, note the spelling of his name.

With all best wishes,

Yours,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. One handwritten amendment, lots of faded type and incomplete words towards the right margin. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. Denzil Dunnett (1917–2016), Scottish poet and diplomat born in India, who had published in various magazines and edited a literary journal as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi, Oxford. He joined the Royal Artillery in 1939. George Sutherland Fraser (1915–80), Glasgow-born poet and critic associated with the New Apocalypse group. He published his first volume of poems, The Fatal Landscape (1941), while serving in the Royal Army Service Corps in Cairo.

2. On the original table of contents, one poem by Dunnett, ‘Fantasy’, is included (this poem has not been identified), and three from Fraser: ‘Early Spring’, ‘The Fatal Landscape’ and ‘Meditation of a Patriot’, from The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems (London: Poetry London, 1944).

 

To William M. Roth

15 June 1942

Dear Bill Roth,

I quite understand your difficulties about the book though, of course, it is a pity that it will not come out in summer. I’m sorry your last few books lost money: may that not be an ominous portent for ours!

I’m sending you the third MacNeice poem, The Expert.

I don’t suppose it matters very much if you don’t find the Fraser and Dunnet [for Dunnett] poems; they were’nt [sic] very good anyhow.

This shocking typing is by myself.

All best wishes,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. Drawings and notes in lower left-hand corner in a hand other than Devlin’s, probably Roth’s. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

 

To William M. Roth

20 June 1942

Dear Bill Roth,

I am very upset to hear that the firm has to stop. Indeed, though the news that the book will not appear is a severe blow, I can truly say that I am more affected by the general loss of the Press’s going; I have seen one or two of your books, fine jobs. Without being sentimental, I am sure that books is one of the few reliefs in the foul shrieking of the war. And your press meant more to you than the anthology to me, so you have my full sympathy.

I do, of course, want you to try and get Laughl[i]n interested in the book.1 Will you send on the MS to him? I shall take it that you will and write to him myself in a week or so. It would be good if he would accept it. I notice from British magazines that some of our Celts are already making a name for themselves: Vernon Watkins, Henry Treece, Ruthven Todd.² What happens about the copyright for MacNeice & Rodgers? If you have paid the fees, will they carry over to the next publisher?

Well, hard luck and best of luck. If you come to Washington, as almost everyone does nowadays, be sure and look me up; I shall be very glad to see you[.]

[A]ll the best,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. Overtyped corrections. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Colt Press Records (MSS 94/15), UCB.

1. James Laughlin (1914–97), American poet and publisher, founder of New Directions. Roth had written to Laughlin on 10 June 1942, recommending the Celtic anthology along with other manuscripts ready for the printers. New Directions (Am 2077), Series 1, Folder 1470, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

2. Vernon Watkins (1906–67), Welsh poet, translator and painter. After Watkins’ first volume of poetry, Ballad of the Mari Lwyd (1941), was published by Faber with the endorsement of T.S. Eliot, his poems appeared in The Welsh Review, Horizon and The Listener. Henry Treece (1911–66), British poet and teacher of Welsh-Irish extraction, later the author of historical novels aimed at adults and children. Treece associated himself with Scottish and Welsh movements and writers, co-founding the New Apocalypse group with Scottish poet J.F. Hendry (see DD to William M. Roth, 8 August 1941, n. 2), and producing the first critical study of Dylan Thomas’ work in 1949. Ruthven Todd (1914–78), Scottish poet, novelist, biographer, and editor of William Blake’s works. Todd’s biography of Alexandre Dumas, The Laughing Mulatto, was published in 1940, and his poems were appearing in anthologies of New Apocalypse writing as well as English literary journals and reviews such as New Verse and Twentieth Century Verse.

 

To James Laughlin, New Directions

24 August 1942

Dear Mr. Laughlin,

I understand from Mr William Roth of the Colt Press, San Francisco, that you expressed interest in an anthology of modern Celtic verse which I compiled and that he forwarded the script to you for consideration.

I wonder if you have been able to look through the collection and to decide whether you would be interested in taking it up for publication[?]

Yours sincerely,

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. New Directions Corp. Records, Series 1, Folder 438, HU.

 

To James Laughlin

3 September 1942

Dear Mr. Laughlin,

We have permission to publish in the case of all the poets represented in the anthology except two, MacNeice and Rodgers. In the latter instances, the American publishers have agreed to allow publication on payment of fees and Roth[,] on breaking the contract with us[,] undertook to meet part of this expense.

The position with regard to the others is that Norman Macleod, who collected their stuff some four years ago, asked them to submit unpublished, copyright-free poems, which they did. There would seem to be no difficulty here. There are, however, two borderline cases: Dylan Thomas and Thomas McGreevy [for MacGreevy]. Some of the poems in the book were later issued in your D. Thomas book, but Thomas had previously given them to us as free. I had intended to write to you on this point, once I was sure that our book was coming out. Would your permission be necessary in this case? Much the same holds for McGreevy, who came out here with the Viking Press; and if the anthology is to be brough[t] out, I shall write them in the matter.1

I’m glad you find the book interesting. It is very kind of you to consider it.

Yours very faithfully,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. New Directions Corp. Papers (Am 2077), Series 1, Folder 438, HU.

1. See DD to William M. Roth, 8 August 1941, n. 3.

 

To Clarence Decker, University Review1

27 October 1943

Dear Mr. Decker,

Thank you very much indeed for the news that you have accepted my poem “Ank’hor Vat” for publication in the University Review.² I am deeply gratified.

As for autobiographical details: I was born in Scotland and educated in Ireland and France – am in our Foreign service and have served in various posts abroad – book of verse “Intercessions” published in London in 1937 – since I came here in 1939, have appeared in Southern Review, New Republic and Poetry (Chicago).

Again, with many thanks,

Yours sincerely,

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. David Ray Papers 1936–2008, Box 47, Folder 23, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

1. The University Review, founded in 1934, became The University of Kansas City Review in 1944, and was again re-branded as New Letters, its current title, in 1971.

2. Devlin’s ‘Ank’hor Vat’ appeared in The University Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Winter 1943, p. 117, alongside poems from Norman Macleod. The editorial correspondence in the University of Chicago archive shows that Macleod sent the poem to the journal on Devlin’s behalf (David Ray Papers 1936–2008, Box 47, Folder 23, UChi).

 

To Alexis Leger

3 August 1944

Dear Léger [for Leger],

Forgive me for not replying sooner to your letter – I have been out of town for a few days. I think you could publish Neiges with advantage in the North Carolina Quarterly Review: it is young, of course, but quite respectable from what I have seen of it.1 As for the translation, I would undertake that with great pleasure, should you wish me to; you know I should look on such a commission as an honour. I should, nevertheless, have found it difficult to ask Tate for the manuscript, unless you had done so too, as I understood that he had already given it to Cummings.² However, I learned yesterday from Miss Clarke [for Clark] that you handed her the poem for transmission to me; and I shall set to work on it with gusto when it comes to hand.³

With kindest wishes,

Yrs.

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Correspondance particuliere de Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger) et Dorothy Leger, Les Collections Patrimoniales, Fondation Saint-John Perse, Aix-en-Provence.

1. The Quarterly Review of Literature was founded by the poets Theodore Weiss and Warren Pendleton Carrier in 1943, while they were teaching at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Neiges had first appeared in the Buenos Aires-based journal Les Lettres françaises, July 1944, pp. 6–10.

2. e.e. cummings (1894–1962), American poet and occasional translator. Cummings was a friend of Leger’s, and his poem ‘being to timelessness as it’s to time’ was dedicated to him and intended for a special 1950 tribute number of Cahiers de la Pléiade (the poem arrived too late for inclusion). See St-John Perse, Letters, trans. and ed. by Arthur J. Knodel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 615–16. It is not known whether he was ever given the translation commission for Neiges.

3. ‘Miss Clarke’ is a misspelling of Eleanor Clark (see Correspondents’ Biographies), a mutual Washington friend and occasional translator; her translation of Leger’s ‘Berceuse’ was published with the French text in Partisan Review, vol. XIII, no. 4, 1946, p. 442. Devlin’s translation, ‘Snows’ was published alongside the French text in Tate’s Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 2, Spring 1945, pp. 186–97.

 

To Allen Tate

10 August 1944

Dear Allan [for Allen],

Impediments, ending now with the illness of my colleague, which will keep me in the office for some time, are piling up on me and I shall have to put off my visit till September. I hope that will not inconvenience you. My Minister, you see, is away too and I have also one of those brews stewing, in the office, which never comes to a head because there are too many cooks, merry damn to them!

I had a letter from Léger [for Leger] asking me if I knew anything about Neiges and if you had given it to E.E. Cummings. The Chapel Hill Quarterly had approached MacLeish for something of his (L.’s). He would like me to translate it. A few days later Eleanor Clarke [for Clark] phoned saying that she had the MS from Leger for me – although L. had implied in his letter that he had no copy of the poem by him. It’s all rather odd & roundabout and Leger is away, so I can’t clear it up with him. I’d do the translation if it weren’t bespoken but wouldn’t dream of interfering otherwise, of course. What’s the position thereabout?

I’m looking forward to SR.1

Yours,

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Allen Tate Papers (C0106), Box 25, Folder 27, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

1. The anticipated issue of The Sewanee Review, vol. 52, no. 4, Oct–Dec 1944 contained ‘Rains’, Devlin’s translation of Leger’s ‘Pluies’, pp. 483–92.

 

To Allen Tate

15 September 1944

Dear Allan [for Allen],

I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come after all: I hope this will not have inconvenienced you in any way and that you and Caroline will not too much blame my discourtesy.1 It amounts to that, really, for when the day of my deliverance approached, at the end of August, I was so damp & so null from the heat-wave that I couldn’t resist the temptation to go to the seaside. It’s an annual pilgrimage with me anyhow; I always manage it no matter where I am. Then I thought I might get down to Tennesee [for Tennessee] at the end of this month; now, I find myself tied here in view of the Int[ernational] Aviation Conf[erence] in November.² I’m sorry for what I’m missing.

I wonder if you are writing anything these days? I’ve done some small pieces, singularly bad – Léger [for Leger] has been away from Washington for the last 6 weeks so I’ve not settled about the appearance of Nuages [for Neiges]; however, I’m going ahead with the translation.

Warren tells me you are coming up in October. I look forward to seeing you then. Reading the Paradiso; full of delight.³

With all best wishes.

Yours

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Allen Tate Papers, Box 25, Folder 27, PU.

1. Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon (1895–1981), were at this time based in Sewanee, Tennessee. Tate became managing editor of The Sewanee Review in 1944, after having served as an advisory editor.

2. See DD to Allen Tate, 12 November 1944, n. 1.

3. Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, the third book of his epic poem Divina Commedia (completed c. 1320).

 

To Allen Tate

12 November 1944

Rm 642A Stevens Hotel, Chicago

Dear Allan [for Allen],

I am marooned here at the Aviation Conference and I’m very disappointed as it’s probable that I shan’t be back in time to see you on your visit to Washington – unless you are staying longer than the 2 or 3 days you foresaw! It looks at present as if we shall not finish here until the 23^rd or 24^th.1

The Conference is one of the most interesting I’ve attended but I’m so loaded with work that I’ve not even read a poem for weeks. I’m sure you must have something new which I cld. have seen in Washington but for this ill-timed excursion.² It’s a damn shame, really.

Enjoy your stay in what I think of in Chicago as my home town. Though I rather like Chicago.

Yours

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 2 leaves, 2 sides. Header: International Civil Aviation Conference. Allen Tate Papers, Box 25, Folder 27, PU.

1. The International Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago took place from 1 November to 7 December 1944. Representatives of fifty-four Allied and neutral nations met to discuss the principles for international cooperation with regard to the safety and efficiency of post-war global air travel; the resulting agreement, the Chicago Convention, anticipated the emergence of the United Nations, establishing the International Civil Aviation Organization which became the UN agency responsible for regulating air travel.

2. Tate’s The Winter Sea was to be published the following month by the Cummington Press.

 

To Joseph Hergesheimer

13 February 1945

Dear Mr Hergesheimer,

Thanks very much for such a good time at your dinner party last week[…] I enjoyed it all, the good talk, the good cheer, even your mysterious allusions to Planck & Venetian Blinds[…]1

I look forward to seeing you again sometime here.

Yours very sincerely,

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: University Club, Washington. Joseph Hergesheimer Collection (MS 1921), Container 32.5, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

1. Max Planck (1858–1947), German theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for his contribution to quantum theory.

 

To Allen Tate

28 February 1945

Dear Allen,

Thank you very kindly for your present of a copy of The Winter Sea and for inscribing it; I shall cherish it.1 You should be pleased and satisfied; it’s a fine collection. I like Seasons the best still, it becomes richer with growth and those parts I couldn’t quite understand at first now fall necessarily into the course of the poem.² I notice the reviewers, though they praise it, are being rather wary of tackling it head on and I won’t try to yet, or in a letter, but I should think it will be recognised as one of the major poems since the last war. My next favourites are the sonnets, which are powerful and sombre, and then the Proconsuls.³ I haven’t been able so far to place the final satirical poems in my mind justly.⁴ May the book receive the esteem of the best!

The proofs of Neiges arrived today; I shall return them with all despatch. This winter has been dirty and disagreeable and its breaking up will be welcome. Woe to the conquered!

All best wishes,

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: University Club, Washington DC. Allen Tate Papers, Box 25, Folder 27, PU.

1. The Winter Sea was published in a limited edition of 330 in December 1944 by the Cummington Press, a fine hand-printing outfit run by Harry Duncan in Massachusetts. The small print run and expense of the volume meant that it was very gradually taken up by reviewers the following year; Cleanth Brooks’ review appeared in Poetry, vol. 66, no. 6, September 1945, pp. 324–9.

2. ‘Seasons of the Soul’, a poem dedicated to the memory of John Peale Bishop. First published in The Kenyon Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Winter 1944, pp. 1–9, it is the opening poem in The Winter Sea.

3. ‘More Sonnets at Christmas’, a sequence Tate was later to dedicate to Devlin’s memory; ‘Ode to Our Young Proconsuls of the Air’, dedicated to St-John Perse.

4. The volume closes with ‘Eclogue of the Liberal and the Poet’ and ‘False Nightmare’.

 

To Allen Tate

8 March 1945

Dear Allen,

Rains is a beautifully done job, the design and printing.1 There is nothing but good words for it from all sides. You may want to know the numbers of the copies taken: by Léger [for Leger], I, II, 1, 2, 8 and 9; by me III, VII, 3, 12, 18 and 34.

I am amusing myself more than necessary but I have a mountaineous [sic] aversion to turning to higher pursuits after the brutal futilities of my days in the Legation. Consequently, I am behind with my translations and have not started to write the review of poetry yet.² And my holiday is looming ahead. So won’t you let me know for which issue of the Sewanee you want my review and what is the deadline. The books have been reviewed threadbare by now, you will have noticed[,] and I’m appalled when I think of the only solemn generalities which seem to be within my reach on the subject. Jarrell’s notice in the last Partisan is good.³

All best wishes,

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header : Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Allen Tate Papers, Box 25, Folder 27, PU.

1. Following the publication of Devlin’s translation of ‘Rains’ in The Sewanee Review, January 1944, Tate issued a pamphlet version of Leger’s original poem accompanied by the Devlin translation in 1945.

2. The review was ‘Twenty-four Poets’, treating a number of recent poetry volumes, including Robert Lowell’s Land of Unlikeliness (1944) and Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas oratorio (1944). It appeared in The Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 3, Summer 1945, pp. 457–66.

3. Randall Jarrell (1914–65), American poet and critic. Jarrell published ‘Poetry in Peace and War’, an omnibus review of recent poetry volumes, including those of Lowell, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, in Partisan Review, vol. XXII, no. 1, Winter 1945, pp. 124–5.

 

To Norman Macleod

24 March 1945

Dear Norman,

I must wish you and Vivienne well this fine Spring. I’m going home on leave at the end of next week and shall be there for two months. I’m flying. So be good in the mean time and we must meet when I come back.

Your Briarcliff Quarterly continues to be most interesting, viewed from the basis on which it’s run – I mean student management, editorship, etc.1 You will have the last Sewanee with Vivienne’s review, which is first-rate, my congratulations.² There’s a bad misprint in Snows (English version) – “liberation” shld. read “libration”.³

I mean to write poetry when I go home. I’m crowded with work these days, but secondary stuff; and with pleasure – Spring always complicates my affairs.

Best wishes

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Norman Macleod Papers, Box 7, Folder 65, Beinecke, YU.

1. The Briarcliff Quarterly began as the Maryland Quarterly, a journal which ran for three issues under Macleod’s editorial direction, from the English department of the University of Maryland. When Macleod moved to Briarcliff Community College in New York in 1945, it became the Briarcliff Quarterly. In addition to high-profile contributors like Weldon Kees and William Carlos Williams, the journal represented the work of students.

2. Vivienne Koch’s ‘Accentuate the Positive’, a review of Van Wyck Brooks’ The World of Washington Irving, was published in the Spring 1945 issue of The Sewanee Review, which also contained the parallel text of ‘Snows’/‘Neiges’.

3. Devlin’s translation of ‘rompant soudain l’immense libration’ should have read: ‘suddenly breaking asunder the vast libration’ (CPDD, p. 256). libration: state of balance, the oscillating motion of a balance beam upon a pivot.

 

To Allen Tate

11 September 1945

Dear Allan [for Allen],

I’m looking forward to seeing you when you come up. Thanks very much for your invitation; I assure you I shall take you up on it for the first leave I can take after my long spell in Ireland.

I see Léger [for Leger] has brought out his four poems in B[uenos] A[ires].1 I’ve not seen him recently[.]

V’s review was the only intelligent one so far of Seasons that I’ve seen.²

All the best

Yrs

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Allen Tate Papers, Box 25, Folder 27, PU.

1. Quatre Poèmes: 1941–1944, collecting ‘Exil’, ‘Pluies’, ‘Neiges’ and ‘Poème à l’étrangère’, and introduced by Archibald MacLeish, was brought out by Roger Caillois’ Buenos Aires-based Editions des lettres françaises in February 1945.

2. If the ‘V’ Devlin refers to is Vivienne Koch, it is not clear which review he is referring to. Four years later, Koch published an influential essay on ‘The Poetry of Allen Tate’, The Kenyon Review, vol. XI, no. 3, Summer 1949, pp. 355–78, the final section of which is devoted to The Winter Sea. Perhaps a version of this essay was circulating long before its publication.

 

To Alexis Leger

5 November 1945

Dear Mr. Léger [for Leger],

Enclosed is a draft of the translation of Poème à L’Etrangère.1 Would you, as in previous cases, look through it with a view to our discussing meanings and amendments? I shall get in touch with you to arrange a meeting.

Best wishes,

Yours very sincerely,

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Les Collections Patrimoniales, FSJP.

1. Devlin’s translation of Leger’s ‘Poème à l’étrangère’, ‘Poem to a Foreign Lady’, was first published alongside the French text in Briarcliff Quarterly, vol. II, no. 8, January 1946, pp. 214–21 (217–21).

 

To Niall Montgomery

24 March 1946

Dear Niall,

A friend of mine, Frank Taylor of Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, is go[i]ng to Europe on a publisher’s tour to see what he can get in the way of MSS. for his firm.1 He is including Dublin, on my advice, and will be there for about a week in the near future. At his request I gave him a list of names of people he should see; and included yours. I hope you will not mind. You may have something to offer him or may, in talking to him, work out a book to be written. I made the list as comprehensive as I could, which meant the inclusion of people whose writing I don’t necessarily think good; but I felt I had to be impartial in the circumstances. Reynal and Hitchcock are the publishers of my book. It will be out in May and will be called: Lough Derg and Other Poems, in slightly archaic style, I suppose. I shall send you a copy; you may be surprised to see a few included from Intercessions, but I put them in on advice.²

I was delighted, on picking up the phone not long ago[,] to hear the voice of Ruth.³ We met and had dinner and a talk, together with her husband, John Boland, who seems very nice.⁴ Ruth was looking very pretty and sparkling and is enjoying herself and amusing John with her discovery of America. They seem very happy.

Are you writing? or is you[r] free time still taken up with M. n. gC.?⁵ Colum in an article in the Saturday Review of Literature on MacDonagh’s anthology says “someone called Myles na gCopaleen, which must be a misprint.”⁶ (I don’t know whether I quote exactly). I’m glad to hear that you’ve set up in private practise [sic], though it’s probably pretty tough, at first.⁷

Best wishes. Remember me kindly to Hop. And, if you can, I should like to hear from you when you’ve seen T.⁸

Yours,

Denis.

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Niall Montgomery Papers, MS 50,118/26/23, NLI.

1. Frank Taylor (1916–99), editor in chief at Reynal & Hitchcock. Taylor’s publishing clients included Arthur Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell and Karl Shapiro. He worked in the film industry during his long publishing career, producing The Misfits (1961), scripted by Miller.

2. Devlin and Taylor’s correspondence over the publication of Lough Derg is not included in Taylor’s archive at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, and the Reynal & Hitchock publishing archive has not been found. The firm was absorbed by Harcourt, Brace in 1948. A later letter (see DD to Selden Rodman, 29 June 1946) reveals that Devlin struggled to find a publisher for his poems. In William Roth’s publishing memoir he notes that a selection of Devlin’s poems was another project the two had discussed before the Colt Press folded, in addition to the Celtic poetry anthology. See The Colt Springs High, p. 185.

3. Niall Montgomery’s sister, Ruth Montgomery (1916–2002).

4. Ruth Montgomery married Major John P. Boland (1907–76), a major in the US Army in Europe and a trained attorney, in Dublin in September 1945. They were among the first passengers to embark on a transatlantic flight to New York from Shannon (then Rineanna) airport in December 1945 (‘Record-Making Continues at Rineanna’, The Irish Times, 29 December 1945).

5. Montgomery collaborated on Brian O’Nolan’s satirical ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column, under the shared pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen.

6. Padraic Colum’s review of Donagh MacDonagh’s anthology Poems from Ireland (Dublin: The Irish Times, 1944), ‘The Irish Are Still Poets’, appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature, vol. XXIX, no. 12, 23 March 1946, pp. 18–19, and was reprinted in The Irish Times, 4 May 1946, p. 4. The line reads: ‘[T]here [is] a contrasting lightness and gracefulness that [is] also in the direct translations [from Irish Gaelic] made by the poet whose pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen, looks like a misprint.’

7. Montgomery set up his private architecture practice in Merrion Square, Dublin, in 1946.

8. If ‘T’ is not Frank Taylor, Devlin possibly refers to Thomas MacGreevy, a mutual friend. MacGreevy had moved back to Dublin in 1941 and was earning a precarious living as an art critic. In 1946 he moved into the house of his recently widowed sister in Fitzwilliam Place.

 

To Mervyn Wall

24 May 1946

Dear Mervyn,

Of course I am pleased and very grateful that you should think of dedicating your book to me; and I gladly agree.1 I prefer your ③ suggestion[:] namely my full name, Christian and sur.

I shld. commiserate with you on your exile from Dublin but if it has wrung a book out of you, it won’t have been so bad. The book may be a success, I mean may make a lot of money; and make it possible for you to leave your job[.]² I’m glad you’ve found a publisher – and so easily and am looking forward to Fursey.

My own book is out at long last – so long after its proper time, which would have been about two years ago, that most of the excitement has evaporated. I have sent you a copy. All the same I’m pleased with it and about it and am deliberately fending off all my criticisms & scruples so as to enjoy the feeling.

I don’t know whether it was Longman’s man or not who was looking for you.³ I gave your name to Taylor of Reynal & Hitchcock (my publishers.) It’s a pity you’ll miss him.⁴ However your Mavis sounds all right.⁵ I’ll probably be seeing you within the next year!

All best wishes

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Mervyn Wall Collection, HRC, UTx

1. Wall dedicated his first novel, The Unfortunate Fursey (London: Pilot Press, 1946), to Devlin. The novel follows the adventures of Fursey, a medieval Irish laybrother plagued by the devil.

2. Wall had been working for the Irish civil service since 1934; he left in 1948 to join the features department at Radio Éireann.

3. Longmans, Green & Co., the contemporary imprint of the London-based Longman publishing company, headed by Mark Longman.

4. See DD to Niall Montgomery, 24 March 1946, n. 1.

5. Possibly the New York-based literary agent Mavis McIntosh (1903–86).

 

To Selden Rodman

29 June 1946

Dear Selden,

I am deeply grateful to you for your generous letter about my book. I suppose it must seem, looking back, as if I had been secretive while you were in Washington but that was not really the case. I had the poems finished about three-quarters and started sending the manuscript around about two years ago; and the more rejections it got the less inclined I felt to work on the poems or talk about them. I really finished them during the six months before publication, which was on May 26^th last. It has not been reviewed anywhere yet so far as I know.1 I would indeed like you to review it.

The list of poems you liked was interesting since “Bacchanal” was written about twelve years ago and “Vestiges” about two months ago. I am glad you like “Ank’hor Vat”. The rhythm of the last line is meant to be different from the general; it is meant to be read legato.²

I hope I may be in New York some time soon. If so I shall let you know.

Again, many thanks.

Yours,

Denis Devlin

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Selden Rodman Papers, Collection No. 4259, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

1. Lough Derg and Other Poems received its first reviews in July 1946, beginning with Marguerite Young’s ‘New Volumes of Verse in Review’ in The New York Times Book Review on 21 July, p. 7. Reviews appeared in subsequent months in Nation (Arthur Mizener, review of Henry Treece, Collected Poems, and Denis Devlin, Lough Derg and Other Poems, vol. 163, no. 3, 10 August 1946, pp. 160–1), Irish Independent (T.O’H, ‘Verse on Lough Derg But Not So Happy’, Monday, 23 September 1946, p. 6), Poetry (Inez Boulton, ‘Celtic Nova’, vol. 69, no. 1, October 1946, pp. 169–71), and The Sewanee Review (Vivienne Koch, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, vol. 54, no. 4, Oct–Dec 1946, pp. 699–716).

2. The final couplet of the poem reads: ‘Let us lie down before him/His look will flow like oil over us’ (CPDD, p. 160).

 

To Selden Rodman

8 July 1946

Dear Selden,

Lough Derg is [a] small lake in the wildest parts of Northwestern Ireland, in Donegal, with an island which has been a place of pilgrimage for the last thousand years. The atmosphere is severe, undecorative and narrow. With this as starting point, the poem goes into a meditation on religion and anti-religion, through the great religion systems, as they appear to one predisposed to the sacred: to whom both opposites seem to have failed. I feel I can’t go any further at this point. I don’t know, without whittling definition to too fine a point, whether poetry is a vehicle for conveying judgements of this kind; I think not, in fact[,] but I am not for detachment either. Bacchanal is meant to be a general celebration of revolution in its first few months, when it glorifies our view of ourselves; but there again the leaders have some doubt. This is all very inadequate and I have’nt [sic] thought out for rational statement the themes that run through these poems, and the others; so I know you will not pin me down to what I say here.

Information is different! Francois of Touraine is an accidental arbitrator; but his country and the view he urges are connected and are opposed to the befogged religiousity [sic] of the two islanders.1 A “bosthoon” is a sort of village innocent.² I think Jansenism was pretty well stamped out by Louis XIV but as an attitude it persists still in some of the ingrown pious provinces of France, as you can see from Mauriac, for example.³ In Ireland I mean it to describe the same thing: a sort of Catholic puritanism, a restricted, contracted puritanism, at that. The Dante reference in Lough Derg is more than symbolic, though it’[s] enough for it to be so.⁴ There’s a legend that Dante came to the place during his travels and had a vision of Inferno through a burning hole in the ground.

It will be fun seeing your review. I must show you some newspaper reviews I’ve had.

All best wishes,

Denis.

Typed letter signed. 2 leaves, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Selden Rodman Papers, AHC, UWy.

1. In ‘Encounter’, ‘François from Touraine’ is positioned between ‘the Englishman’ and the ‘Celt’ (the poem’s speaker) in a dramatised debate about poets and saints (CPDD, p. 136).

2. A ‘bosthoon’ appears in the opening line of the short poem ‘Handy Andy’ (CPDD, p. 156).

3. Jansenism: a theological movement emerging in the seventeenth century from the doctrine of Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, concerned with the problem of reconciling divine grace and the natural human will. Jansenism is invoked as part of the landscape of faith and deprivation in ‘Lough Derg’, and again in ‘Jansenist Journey’ (CPDD, p. 132, pp. 145–6). François Mauriac (1885–1970), French novelist, poet and critic. A devout Catholic whose stern and puritanical upbringing infused his fiction, Mauriac had criticised the Catholic Church for its support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and was involved with the French resistance during the Second World War.

4. As ‘[t]he pilgrims blacken/Out of the boats to masticate their sin’ in ‘Lough Derg’, Dante is figured ‘smell[ing] among the stones and bracken/The door to Hell’ (CPDD, pp. 133–4).

 

To Selden Rodman

[?19] July 1946

Dear Selden,

Am returning the review herewith.1 It’s a quite direct insight, I think, even to the ‘qualification’.² It is fortunate for me to have the first review by a poet and favourable; since the ‘average reader’ has no taste whatsoever, he might as well be led by you as misled by some pained elephant in the N.Y. Times. I like the style, for itself, of your statements, by the way[.]

Best wishes

Yrs. Denis

About my leaving: it’s that I’m being tra[?nsferred] to London at the end of autumn.

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Dating: Number illegible. Postscript written above letterhead. Top right-hand corner torn, obscuring some text. Selden Rodman Papers, AHC, UWy.

1. Rodman’s review, ‘Daemonic Poet’, appeared in The New Republic, vol. 115, no. 4, July 1946, pp. 106–7.

2. Rodman suggests that Lough Derg and Other Poems contains both the promise, and the achievement, of a rare quality in modern verse: the coexistence of a complex individuality and an unmistakeable consistency of style. He goes on to explain that the qualification (the areas of promise) refers to parts of the more ambitious poems like ‘Lough Derg’ which ‘are so densely elliptical that they stagger as if translated literally from some other language’, in which ‘the voice is still thick, not blurred by echoes of other poets […] but too bursting with brilliant analogies to let the theme rise above its modulations’ (ibid., p. 106).

 

To Robert Penn Warren

19 November 1946

Dear Red,

I am sending you attached, a clipping from the “Irish Times” of the 28^th September last, with a review, rather good, of At Heaven’s Gate.1

I am still here, as you see[,] and have no exact knowledge as to the time of my leaving. Perhaps you will be coming down for one of your library meetings?²

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Denis

Typed letter signed. 1 leaf, 1 side. Header: Irish Legation, Washington 8, DC. Address: Mr. Robert Penn Warren, Department of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Robert Penn Warren Papers, Box 21, Folder 410, Beinecke, YU.

1. The unattributed review of Penn Warren’s novel At Heaven’s Gate (1946) is titled ‘All Hail!’ (The Irish Times, 28 September 1946, p. 4).

2. Penn Warren had been consultant in poetry (a position later named poet laureate) at the Library of Congress in Washington from 1944 to ’45.

 

To Shiela Devlin

[January] 1947

Dear Sheila [for Shiela].

a chauntynge

EPITHALAMIUM OF

blessings and rustlings

(leaves all song)

to

Y O U1

(on your marriage

* (don’t let this be read

out

loud

at

the

wedding

breakfast

MAY YOU BE

as

BRIGHT

as a red tanager² and as

BRILLIANT

as a Pacific Ocean king dancing

and as

HAPPY

as your own laughter

is the wish of

your brother

Denis.

*written in the office at 5.20 p.m.

∴ I am not ed nor ed

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: Irish Legation, Washington, DC. Dating: By wedding date. Private collection, Caren Farrell.

1. epithalamium: a song or poem celebrating a marriage. Shiela Devlin married Kevin Healy in late January 1947.

2. Scarlet tanagers are bright red American songbirds.

 

To John Frederick Nims, Poetry Magazine

11 February 1947

Dear John Nims,

Thank you very much for your letter which I have just received. I am about to leave for London and my address there will be c/o High Commissioner’s office for Ireland. Regent S[treet]. London.

Now to answer your letter in detail! First of all I shall be glad to send you some of my new poems when they are ready. This won’t be for a while since I am so busy now with the transfer.

Secondly about the Irish issue: I have been giving this much thought, and I don’t believe that I shall be able to do it – because of lack of time.1 However, I shall be glad to give you the names of people you might get in touch with about it. I should like to be represented in an Irish issue (to answer your question on this point).

About the London letter – at present I do not see how I would have time to do it.² You see I have so little time to write my own verse. However, I shall write you about this again.

Caren asks me to relay to you her thanks about your suggestion on French poetry.³ She might have something after visiting Paris – at any rate, she will get in touch with you about this.

It was very pleasant meeting you.

Sincerely

Denis Devlin

Dictated letter, written and signed in Caren’s hand. 1 leaf (folded), 2 sides. Pencil markings on top verso side in a hand other than Caren’s, possibly that of Nims. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Records, 1895–1961, Box 74, Folder 1, UChi.

1. Poetry occasionally grouped its contributors on thematic or national lines; the issue that followed shortly after Devlin’s letter purported to be an ‘English number’; it was more properly a British number with a strong Celtic showing, including Vernon Watkins and Dannie Abse from Wales, and W.S. Graham from Scotland. An Irish number was not published in this period of Nims’ associate editorship (1942–9).

2. These reports from abroad were a periodic feature of the journal. A ‘Letter from Ireland’ by Patrick Kavanagh was published in Poetry in 1949, commenting on the current state of poetry and poetry publishing (and summarily observing that ‘[n]o books of creative interest have been published by an Irish writer recently’ (Poetry, vol. 74, no. 5, August 1949, pp. 286–91, at p. 289)). A few years later, John Montague’s ‘Letter from Dublin’ began with an appreciation of Patrick Kavanagh (Poetry, vol. 90, no. 5, August 1957, pp. 310–15).

3. Caren Devlin (née Randon) (?1922–64) and Denis married on 9 January 1947. Caren wrote and translated poetry, and practised sculpture.

 

To Allen Tate

11 February 1947

Dear Allan [for Allen],

I am leaving from New York on the 20^th of this month for England, aboard the Queen Elisabeth [sic].1 The news of my transfer came just after my return from Mexico a few days ago.

I would love to see you and your wife before leaving. Caren and I shall be up in N.Y. from the 17^th until the 20^th, and hope to see you then.

What is happening to the Irish anthology? I see it announced here and there. Would it be possible to get the contract matter before my departure?²

[L]ooking forward to next week;

as always

your devoted

Denis

[Postscript]

Dear Allen,

Since Caren wrote this for me, our reservations have become shaky and we may have to fly straight through from Washington.

I shall phone you at yr. office; that’s best.

As ever

Denis

Dictated letter, written and signed in Caren’s hand. Postscript in Devlin’s hand. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Pencil marks (Tate’s?) underlining paragraph at bottom of recto side, regarding the Irish anthology. Allen Tate Papers, Box 25, Folder 27, PU.

1. The RMS Queen Elizabeth, a luxury ocean liner operated by Cunard White Star Line, providing a service between New York and Southampton.

2. Devlin’s ‘Encounter’ and ‘The Statue and the Perturbed Burghers’ appeared in 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, edited and introduced by Kathleen Hoagland (New York: The Devin-Adair Company), published in February 1947. Devlin is among the poets Hoagland acknowledges for his advice and assistance in putting together the twentieth-century section.

 

To Brian Coffey

25 March 1947

My dear Brian,

Might we come down next week-end, i.e. Saturday the 29^th, to see you? and if so would you book a room for us at the Inn?1 It will be splendid to see you again; we shall have a lot to talk about. The American offer sounds interesting.² We must see what I can remember about salaries. Unless I get word from you that it’s inconvenient, then, we shall come down on Saturday.

Theoretically I like being back but I haven’t got into it yet. And this office is damn busy. And after having defended the English for five years, I suddenly don’t know what to make of them. For one thing their poetic criticism is childish. But let’s wish ourselves and them good fortune[…]

Looking forward to seeing you[,]

Denis

Autograph letter signed. 1 leaf, 2 sides. Header: High Commissioner for Ireland, 33-7 Regent Street, London, SW1. ÉIRE, printed under the embassy’s harp logo, is over-written with ‘IRELAND’ in Devlin’s hand. Brian Coffey Papers, Box 8, Folder 66, UDel.

1. Coffey was teaching in Spinkhill, Sheffield at this time, probably at Mount St Mary’s College.

2. Coffey’s doctorate in philosophy at L’Institut Catholique de Paris, which had been disrupted by the war, was finished in 1947. Soon afterwards he was offered a job as assistant professor of philosophy at St Louis University, Missouri; the Coffeys relocated there.

 

To Kimon Friar

29 July 1947

25 Cheyne Place Chelsea London, SW3

Dear Mr. Friar,

Thank you very much for your letter concerning the anthology of contemporary poetry which you are bringing out.1

I am very sorry to have delayed my reply to you for so long. I have been out of town. I am very pleased to hear that my poem ‘Lough Derg’ is to be included in your anthology.

I am enclosing some biographical material which might be helpful to you, but can unfortunately not provide you with a ‘Note on the Poetry’ for the appendix, due to lack of time.

As concerns my poem itself, perhaps you will allow me just to add a few words about it in this letter.

The title ‘Lough Derg’ is the name of a place of pilgrimage in Ireland.

The items you ask me about in your letter can be found in any dictionary, and I would appreciate the descriptions below as remaining anonymous:

Clan Jansen: the clan of the Jansenists²

Orphic egg: origin of life in the religion of Orphisism

[for Orphism].³

Academy: the Academy of Plato

Tragic Choir: the chorus in tragedy⁴

Merovingnian: Medieval French dynasty⁵

Bruno: Giordano Bruno, the philosopher

Watt [sic] Tyler: English agrarian rebel.⁶

Thanking you very much,

I am sincerely yours,

Denis Devlin

[Enclosure]

Biographical Material

Denis Devlin

Born: Greenock, Scotland, April 15^th, 1908

Education: Belvedere College, Dublin;

University College, Dublin; Munich University; Paris University (Sorbonne)

Taught: English literature in University College, Dublin (1935-36)

In Irish Foreign Service: 1936 Dublin; then Posts at Geneva,Rome, London, New York, Washington. At present Counsel[l]or in the London office.

Published: ‘Poems’ (with Brian Coffey) in Dublin, 1932; ‘Intercessions’ in London, 1937; ‘Lough Derg and other poems’, in New York, 1946.

Also (in book form) translations of Paul Eluard’s Poems, in ‘Thorns of Thunder’, London, 1937; translations of St. J. Perse’s ‘Rains’ and ‘Snows’, published both by the Sewanee Review in 1945.

My poems have also appeared in anthologies. ([B]ut not ‘Lough Derg’ yet[…])

Dictated letter, written and signed in Caren’s hand. Enclosed biographical note also in Caren’s hand. 3 leaves, 5 sides (including biographical material). Kimon Friar Papers (C0713), Box 137, Folder 12, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

1. Friar edited various poetry anthologies, including Modern Poetry, American and British: An anthology (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1951), with John Malcolm Brinnin. Devlin did not appear in this volume. Friar’s papers suggest that around this time he was working on the Borzoi Book of Contemporary Verse (1944–6); I have not found any evidence of that anthology’s publication.

2. See DD to Selden Rodman, 8 July 1946, n. 3.

3. Orphism: a set of beliefs and ritual practices dating from the sixth century BC, supposed to have been based on the teachings of Orpheus, Greek mythological poet and musican.

4. The Academy was founded by Plato in Athens in c. 387 BC. These references appear in the sixth stanza of ‘Lough Derg’: ‘Close priests allegorized the Orphic egg’s/ Brood, and from the Academy, tolerant wranglers/Could hear the contemplatives of the Tragic Choir/Drain off man’s sanguine, pastoral death-desire’ (CPDD, p. 133).

5. The Merovingian dynasty (c. AD 500–750) was the first dynasty of Frankish kings. ‘Part by this race when monks in convents of coracles/For the Merovingian centuries left their land,/Belled, fragrant;’ (CPDD, p. 134).

6. Giordarno Bruno (1548–1600), Italian philosopher and cosmological theorist who was tried for heresy and burned at the stake. Wat Tyler (?–1381), leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. Tyler was killed during negotiations with King Richard II. The lines read: ‘I who, in my books,/Have angered at the stake with Bruno and, by the rope/ Watt Tyler swung from, leagued with shifty looks/To fuse the next rebellion with the desperate/Serfs in the sane need to eat and get;’ (CPDD, p. 134).

 

To Kimon Friar

28 September 1947

25 Cheyne Place Chelsea London, SW3

Dear Mr. Friar,

I hope you did get my previous letter with the information wanted. So many letters get lost in the mail these days that I am never sure whether one does reach its destiny or not.

Sincerely yours

Denis Devlin

Dictated letter, in Caren’s hand. 1 leaf, 1 side. Kimon Friar Papers, Box 137, Folder 12, PU.

 

To Alexis Leger

14 November 1947

address privée: 25 Cheyne Place Chelsea London, SW3

Cher ami,

Il y a si longtemps que je ne vous ai pas écrit: les devoirs professionnels m’occupant ces jours[-]ci à un tel point et j’ai peu de temps libre. Cela n’empêche que je ne me rappelle souvent à votre souvenir à travers vos poèmes dont le travail de traduction m’est une inspiration continuelle; et je pense avec nostalgie à nos sympathiques entretiens de Washington qui m’apparaît, de cette grande Ville de Londres dégringolante et brumeuse, une vraie ville-lumière. Elle est devenue pour moi une ville d’hier pleine de charme irréele [for irréel], bien que je s[a]che que les ennuis et les petites charges de la vie quotidienne y pèsent autant qu’ici. Il est agréable d’entendre au moins que notre travail poétique avance et de souhaiter que vous y trouviez grande satisfaction et joie.

Je regrette que vous ayez eu à vous inquiéter à propos de la traduction. J’ai été étonné de savoir – moyennant une lettre de Mde Dawson à Caren – que la Bollingen Press ne vous avait pas fait transmettre les trois textes – i.e. Pluies, Neiges, et Poème à L’Etrangère [-] dont j’avais fixé la version définitive et que je leur ai envoyé à New York il y a un mois et demi.1 Il est vrai que j’étais convenu avec Chisholm, lors de son passage à Londres en été, de préparer un poème (un seulement) pour le commencement du mois de Septembre; mais la réalisation en a été, hélas! différée par des exigences familiales aussi bien que par une maladie passagère.² Cependant, j’ai bien terminé et envoyé les trois poèmes mentionnés trois ou quatre semaines plus tard; et j’en ai annoncé à Bollingen la dépêche par deux télégrammes: il ne m’en ont pas encore accusé réception. C’est pourquoi je me demande s’il est arrivé quelqu’empêchement [for quelque empêchement], si le projet d’édition a été abandonné, et dans cette crainte j’ai différé de confier à Bollingen le texte d’Exil. En y réfléchissant, pourtant, je crois que le mieux serait de vous l’envoyer; vous êtes sur place et saurez mieux que moi l’état présent du projet; si tout va bien vous seriez très aimable en confiant mon texte d’Exil à cette Press[e].

Je ne veux pas que les éditeurs altèrent en rien mon texte; cela est une question pour vous et pour moi.

Quant au contrat, que je n’ai pas encore eu de Bollingen, je crois que je ferais bien de réserver les droits anglais afin de sortir le livre ici, chez Faber et Faber peut-être. Etes-vous d’accord? Je n’ai pas encore fait la connaissance de T.S. Eliot mais j’ai rencontré un de ses amis les plus proches qui m’a dit qu’il est entièrement remis de sa maladie; je le verrai sans doute d’ici peu et ne manquerai pas de lui faire part de vos vœux.3

Caren vous remercie de votre lettre si aimable. Nous sommes très bien; Londres est triste mais Caren le rend gai. Elle trouve de quoi s’amuser, prend des leçons de guitare et de cuisine française. Nous comptons passer la Noël auprès de mes parents en Irlande et ce sera une grande réunion de famille [?et] il y aura quatre sœurs avec leurs maris, un frère marié et une douzaine d’enfants petits.⁴ Mon père présidera à la grande table en patriarche (sans barbe, Dieu merci!)

Je vous souhaite bon Noël aussi et tous mes vœux les plus amicaux[.]

Bien vôtre

Denis Devlin

Autograph letter signed. 3 leaves, 6 sides. Header: High Commissioner for Ireland, Éire, 33-37 Regent St., London, SW1. Les Collections Patrimoniales, FSJP.

 

[Translation]

private address: 25 Cheyne Place Chelsea London, SW3

Dear Friend,

It’s been so long since I last wrote to you: my days are so occupied with professional duties here that I have little free time. This doesn’t prevent me from remembering you often through your poems, the work of translating them being a continual inspiration to me; and I think with nostalgia of our enjoyable meetings in Washington, which appears to me, in this great tumble-down and murky city of London, a true city of light. It has become for me a city of yesterday full of unreal charm, even though I know that the boredom and small duties of daily life weigh as heavily there as here. It is good to hear at least that your poetry progresses and I hope that in it you find great satisfaction and joy.

I’m sorry that you have had to worry about the translation. I was amazed to learn – through a letter from Mrs Dawson to Caren – that the Bollingen Press hasn’t sent you the three texts – i.e. Rains, Snows, and Poem to a Foreign Lady [–] for which I fixed the final versions and which I sent to them in New York a month and a half ago. It’s true that I had agreed with Chisholm, during his visit to London in the summer, to prepare a poem (one only) for the beginning of September; but this work has alas!, been delayed owing to family circumstances as well as a passing sickness. However, I did indeed finish the three poems mentioned, and sent them three or four weeks later; and I announced their dispatch to Bollingen in two telegrams: they have not yet acknowledged receipt. This is why I wonder whether there has been some impediment, or if the project of the edition has been abandoned, and fearing this I have deferred sending the translation of Exil to Bollingen. Thinking about it, however, I believe it would be best to send it to you: you are on the spot and you know better than I the present state of the project; if all goes well it would be very kind of you to pass on my Exile text to this Press.

I don’t want the editors to alter anything in my text: this is a question for you and me.

As for the contract, which I have not yet had from Bollingen, I think I would do well to reserve the English rights in order to bring the book out here, with Faber and Faber perhaps. Do you agree? I have not yet made the acquaintance of T.S. Eliot but I have met with one of his closest friends who told me that he is entirely recovered from his illness; I will undoubtedly see him here soon, and I will not fail to pass on your greetings.

Caren thanks you for your kind letter. We are very well; London is sad but Caren makes it gay. She finds things to amuse her, taking lessons in guitar and French cooking. We plan to spend Christmas alongside my relatives in Ireland and it will be a big family reunion with four sisters and their husbands, one married brother and a dozen small children. My father will preside over the large table like a patriarch (without a beard, thank God!)

I wish you a merry Christmas also, and all my warmest regards.

Ever yours,

Denis Devlin

1. Possibly Carley Robinson Dawson (1909–2005), American composer, actress, author and translator, and a prominent figure in Washington society; the Bollingen Foundation (in association with Pantheon Books in New York) were publishing Leger’s Exile and Other Poems, in a bilingual edition with Devlin’s translations, as the fifteenth number in their Bollingen Series (1949).

2. Hugh Chisholm (see Correspondents’ Biographies) was an assistant editor for the Bollingen Foundation in the late 1940s, with whom Devlin corresponded over the progress of the edition (see letter below dated 12 May 1948). Chisholm’s translation of Leger’s Vents (Paris: Gallimard, 1946) was published in The Hudson Review, vol. 4, no. 3, Autumn 1951, pp. 366–95; it was republished alongside Leger’s text in a Bollingen Series edition (1953).

3. Eliot, who had translated Leger’s Anabase in 1930, had some minor operations in the summer of 1947, and spent August and September convalescing. See Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An imperfect life (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 412.

4. At this time the Devlin family had relocated to The Slopes in Dún Laoghaire, a large house in an affluent Dublin suburb. Denis and Caren stayed here during their Dublin visits, and for the brief period of Devlin’s return to the department’s headquarters in Dublin (1949–50).