In 1942, following an extended spell as a literary journalist in London, Austin Clarke was living with his wife and three children in Templeogue in his home city. He continued to work as a freelancer, writing the Irish Times poetry column, verse dramas for the stage and for Radio Éireann, and fiction. But Clarke’s busy if hand-to-mouth existence as a writer was hampered by both global and local contingencies. The Second World War cut him off from regular trips to London and his connections there, while the increasingly theocratic bent of the Irish state meant that his fantastical and often comic novels would be inexplicably banned, and barely reviewed, through the next decade.

Clarke’s changing poetics seemed to anticipate his lean middle years: the early mythological poems, and the sprightly, engaging travelogues of The Cattle-Drive in Connaught and Pilgrimage, had been followed, in 1938, by the pamphlet Night and Morning, published in Dublin in an edition of 300 copies by the Orwell Press. It remains a striking publication, a high point of mid-century Irish writing (which bears comparison with Louis MacNeice’s The Last Ditch, his great 1940 Cuala Press pamphlet). Its impact, not much noticed in recent accounts of Irish poetry, is corroborated by the recent discovery of a letter to Clarke from John Betjeman, who now joins Donald Davie, Augustine Martin, Maurice Harmon and others as one of the advocates for his mid-century poems.

At the time Betjeman was Press Attaché to the British Mission in Dublin, working to ameliorate anti-British feeling, befriending revolutionary families like the ...