Robert Greacen:ROBERT GREACEN was one of Ireland's foremost poets, pursuing a career as a poet, reviewer and editor in Belfast, Dublin and London, where he lived for over 40 years until his return to Ireland in 1989.
The strain of social awareness, deeply ingrained in the 1930s generation of writers, was evident in his work from an early stage and never entirely left it though a leaner, more astringent voice emerged and endured. This is best displayed in a long sequence on an enigmatic cosmopolitan figure, Captain Fox, where the follies and ambiguities of the modern world are wittily interrogated.
In the 1940s he published two volumes of poetry; there then began a long hiatus. "In my mid-thirties I ditched poetry. Or did poetry ditch me?" he said in 1990. "Unexpectedly at fifty plus I felt the urge again and created the character Captain Fox."
A Garland for Captain Fox(1975) was followed by Young Mr Gibbon(1979), A Bright Mask(1985) and Carnival at the River(1991). His Collected Poems 1944-1994won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry in 1995.
There followed Protestant Without a Horse(1997) and Lunch at the Ivy(2002); Robert Greacen: New & Selected Poemswas published in 2006.
Born in Derry in 1920, he was the only child of Henry Greacen and his wife Elizabeth (née McCrea). The family moved to Belfast where his father opened a newsagent's shop on the Newtownards Road.
The father-son relationship was "rather bitter", and family life was constantly disrupted by his father's drinking. At such times, his maternal aunts cared for him, and he said of his aunt Tillie, "she really seemed to be my mother". He also spent time with relatives in Monaghan.
In later life, he described the sectarianism of Belfast as "repulsive", whereas in Dublin he found "tolerance to the point of indifference". In one of his last poems, A Reply to Meg, he wrote: Trust no nation's will / Outgrow your tribe / Listen to your heartbeat / Sing your own song / As best you can.
At Methodist College, and by now an admirer of D H Lawrence and James Joyce, he contributed prose and poetry to the school magazine. He began reading the Daily Worker and Left Book Club publications. Having "shamefacedly" abandoned his attempt to read Karl Marx's Capital, he turned to the "stirring political poems" of Auden, Spender and C Day-Lewis.
He wrote articles for the Irish Democratbut his youthful enthusiasm for communism waned following the Hitler-Stalin pact and disclosures of repression in the Soviet Union. He enrolled in the arts faculty at Queen's University Belfast, where with John Gallen he edited the literary magazine, The Northman. He never finished his degree although he later secured a diploma in social studies at Trinity College Dublin.
His poems and reviews appeared in The Belland Horizon, and with Alex Comfort he edited an anthology, Lyra: A Book of New Lyrics. Moving to Dublin in 1943, his first collection, One Recent Evening, was published the following year, selling very well.
He assisted Peadar O'Donnell at The Bell, and with Valentin Iremonger edited the Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry(1949). Both he and Iremonger were bitterly disappointed by Patrick Kavanagh's refusal to be included in the anthology.
Greacen's second collection, The Undying Day(1948), sold less than 100 copies. This, combined with the difficulty of making ends meet in Dublin, prompted him to try his luck in London.
There he contributed to the New English Quarterlyand Poetry Quarterly, while freelancing for various publications. After he reviewed The Great Hunger in Horizon, his relationship with Kavanagh "thawed into something more than acquaintanceship, if a trifle less than friendship".
Prone to depression, in his thirties he underwent psychiatric therapy, and was convinced that he derived lasting benefit from the series of 12 LSD "trips" prescribed.
He launched the Pembridge Poets, organising readings at a theatre in Notting Hill Gate. Participating poets included Dannie Abse, Gavin Ewart, John Heath-Stubbs and Brian Patten. But it was Stephen Spender who drew the biggest crowd.
Muriel Spark helped him secure a commission to write a study of Noël Coward, which was well reviewed and netted handsome royalties. He also wrote a study of C P Snow.
He resigned from the Authors' World Peace Appeal committee in 1952 citing undue communist influence, but his sympathies remained with the left. Later he supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Northern Ireland Peace People.
Teaching at a City of London College summer school, he met Stanislaus Joyce, younger brother of James, whom he found courteous and amiable "except when Catholicism or Dublin came up".
He subsequently taught English as a foreign language. In 1986 he was elected to membership of Aosdána. Returning to Dublin, he settled in Sandymount.
The first of several volumes of autobiography, Even Without Irene(1969), took its title from the idealised young woman, who for some months before and after the outbreak of the second World War haunted his every waking minute.
His marriage to the writer and critic Patricia Hutchins ended in divorce in 1966; she died in 1985. Their daughter Arethusa survives him.
Robert Henry Greacen: born October 24th, 1920; died April 13th, 2008