Brian Coffey

Brian Coffey (8 June 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an Irish poet and publisher.

His work was informed by his Catholicism, his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to French surrealism.

He was close to an intellectual European Catholic tradition and mainstream Irish Catholic culture.

His father, Denis J. Coffey, was a professor of anatomy at the Catholic University of Ireland Medical School in Cecilia Street, who served as the first president following the creation of the National University of Ireland of University College Dublin (UCD) from 1908 to 1940.

He attended the Mount St Benedict boarding school in Gorey, County Wexford from 1917 to 1919 and then James Joyce's old school, Clongowes Wood College, in Clane, County Kildare, from 1919 until 1922.

In 1923, he went to France to study for a Bachelor's degree in Classical Studies at the Institution St Vincent, Senlis, Oise.

Coffey entered UCD in 1924 and earned advanced degrees in mathematics, physics and chemistry.

He also represented the college in boxing tournaments.

While still at college, Coffey began writing poetry.

He published his first poems in UCD's The National Student under the pseudonym Coeuvre.

These poems, which have never been collected, showed the influence of French Symbolism and of TS Eliot.

During this time Coffey met Denis Devlin and together they published a volume entitled Poems in 1930.

Coffey and Devlin both also participated in college dramatics, taking roles in French plays.

In the early 1930s, Coffey moved to Paris, where he studied Physical Chemistry under Jean Baptiste Perrin, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926.

He completed these studies in 1933, and his Three Poems was printed in Paris by Jeanette Monnier that same year, as was the poem card Yuki Hira, which was admired by George William Russell and William Butler Yeats.

He also became friendly with other Irish writers based in the city, including Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett.

In his 1934 essay Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett picked out Coffey and Devlin as forming 'the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland'.

He entered the Institut Catholique de Paris that year to work with the noted French philosopher Jacques Maritain, taking his licentiate examination in 1936.

He then moved to London for a time and contributed reviews and a poem to Eliot's Criterion magazine.

On trips home to Dublin, he contributed to programmes on literary topics on RTÉ radio and published poems in Ireland Today.

He also contributed translations to the same publisher's Thorns of Thunder (1936), the first collection of Paul Éluard's work published in English.

The poems of this period saw Coffey shake off his earlier influences and begin to find his own voice but, for a variety of reasons, Third Person was to be his last poetry publication for a quarter of a century.

During the war, Coffey taught in schools in London and Yorkshire, leaving his young family in Dublin.

After the war, he returned to Paris and completed his doctoral thesis.

The family then moved so Coffey could take up a teaching post at the Jesuit Saint Louis University.

During this period, Coffey seems to have done very little, if any, creative writing as he focused mainly on philosophical work based on his thesis, publishing a number of essays in The Modern Schoolman.

He returned to Paris in 1937 as an exchange student to work on his doctoral thesis on the idea of order in the work of Thomas Aquinas.

In 1938, Coffey's second volume of poetry, Third Person, was published by George Reavey's Europa Press.

By the early 1950s, Coffey had become uncomfortable for a number of reasons, including the nature of his work, his distance from Ireland and the pressures that inevitably came to bear on an academic who had previously associated with well-known left-wing writers in Paris.

For these reasons, he began to look for a suitable opportunity to leave the United States and resigned, possibly on a matter of academic principle, in 1952.

In 1952, Coffey returned to live in London and, from 1973, Southampton.

He began again to publish his poetry and translations, mainly of French poetry.

He also ran Advent Books, a small press, during the 1960s and 1970s.

Coffey was born in Dublin in the suburb of Dún Laoghaire.

The first work in English to appear after this period of silence was Missouri Sequence, apparently begun in St. Louis but first appearing in the University Review in 1962.

This poem deals with the experience of exile, memories of the poet's dead parents and the premature birth of a child.

It is written in a much more conventional syntax than most of Coffey's work and, thanks to this greater accessibility, is one of his most widely read works.

Two of his long poems, Advent (1975) and Death of Hektor (1979), were widely considered to be important works in the canon of Irish poetic modernism.

Over the next decade or so, he published regularly in the University Review (later known as the Irish University Review), a relationship that culminated in the 1975 special issue.

This featured an introduction by Dr JCC Mays, a selection of translations from French, the satire Leo and Advent, a meditation on death inspired by the death of the poet's son in a motorcycle accident.