Monk Gibbon

Monk Gibbon (1896-1987). Courtesy Tara Hall.

William Monk Gibbon (15 December 1896 - 29 November 1987) was an Irish poet and prose wruter, known as "The Grand Old Man of Irish Letters".

Life

Youth and education

Gibbon was born 15 December 1896 in Dundrum, co. Dublin, son of Canon William Gibbon, a rural dean in Taney parish, Dundrum, and Agnes (Pollock), who had 4 children from a previous marriage.

Gibbon was educated at St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, co. Dublin, and won a history exhibition to Keble College, Oxford, where he attended briefly, before enlisting in the British army during the first world war.

He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Dublin in 1947.

Career

He joined the British army as an officer, serving in France.

On leave in Ireland during the 1916 rising, he witnessed the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington in Portobello barracks and was also so appalled by the execution of James Connolly that it inclined him towards Sinn Féin. His later memoir, Inglorious soldier (1968), shows a keen understanding of J.C. Bowen-Colthurst, yet with no element of condonation.

Disillusioned with the war, he was invalided out of the army as a neurasthenic in 1917, commenced a farm-teaching course in Jersey, and then taught briefly in Switzerland before becoming a master at Oldfield School, Swanage, in Dorsetshire, where he remained for 12 years before returning to Ireland. In Wales he began to write poetry.

In 1928, he married Mabel Winifred Dingwall (daughter of Walter Molyneux Dingwall of Bonchurch and Mabel Sophia (Spender), a daughter of Edward Spender of Bath, Somerset), whom he had met travelling in Europe. They were the parents of 6 children.

Gibbon remained preoccupied with W.B. Yeats, with whom he had frequently disagreed, critically questioning him about his cryptic phrases and defensiveness under scrutiny, annoying the older poet with his youthful verbosity. Yeats reportedly said of him: "Monk Gibbon is one of the three people in Dublin whom I dislike ... because he is argumentative!" Gibbon wrote an unflattering account of Yeats in The masterpiece and the man (1959), which he regarded as an attempt to express the duality of his attitude to Yeats, to whom he referred as ‘that wrong-headed old man whose phrase is always right’.

An associate of George Russell, whom he regarded as having more human sympathy and benevolence than Yeats, Gibbon published Russell's writings in The living torch (1937). After the death of his friend Michael Farrell, he edited Farrell's mammoth novel Thy tears might cease for publication (1963).

Tara Hall, at 24 Sandycove Road, co. Dublin, was the Gibbon family home from 1953 until Monk Gibbon's death.

He died 29 October 1987 at his home, survived by his wife and their 2 sons and 4 daughters.

Writing

As a prose writer and poet Gibbon was prolific, and his subject matter recognised few boundaries: his output included autobiography, memoirs, biographies, travel books, and film and ballet criticism.

Prose

His prose, marked by a 19th-century style of argument, was well-structured but occasionally marred by self-indulgence and excessive length. The dominant themes in his writing were the human personality, destiny, and dynasties, often set against a pageant of visual images, where even the most apparently insignificant detail formed an integral part of experience. It was art based on suggestion; or, as he put it himself in the romantic autobiographical novel Mount Ida, which recreated 3 tentative love affairs of schoolteaching days, ‘the best moments in life are often indefinable, fragile, inexpressibly slight; a compound of mood, condition and time, defying analysis’.

All his material was highly personal, chronicling his life and times over more than a quarter of a century (he was still teaching and writing at the age of 80), displaying his ability for incisive self-scrutiny. He maintained that what interested him most was truth, and ‘an objective love of truth’, and admitted: ‘As a conservative by nature I distrust change’.

His other publications included The tales of Hoffmann (1951), An intruder at the ballet (1952), and The Rhine and its castles (1957).

Poetry

Although his poetry was by no means critically acclaimed, some of his earlier work was influenced by the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he was viewed in some quarters as a minor, conventional, and conservative poet who could occasionally rise to unexpected heights in such collections as The tremulous string (1926), The branch of hawthorn tree (1927), 17 sonnets (1932), and The insubstantial poet (1972). His poetry, dominated by themes of the dispossessed romantic, was regarded by other critics as terse, immediate, and strong, and he was credited with handling conventional sonnets with ease and fluency.

Autobiographical work included The seals (1935), a narrative of a hunting expedition in the west of Ireland and a meditation on human cruelty; Mount Ida (1948); Inglorious soldier, a searing account of his wartime experiences; and The pupil (1981), which tells of a chaste romance between teacher and student.

Recognition

In 1928 Gibbon won a silver medal for poetry at the Tailteann games, being narrowly beaten for the gold medal by Oliver St. John Gogarty.

In 1950 Gibbon became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He became a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1960, and was appointed its vice-president in 1967.

Publications

Poetry

• The Tremulous String (limited edition). Grayhound Press, 1926.
• The Branch of Hawthorn Tree (illustrated by Picart Le Doux). London: Grayhound Press, 1927.
• For Daws to Peck At. London: Gollancz, 1929.
• A Ballad. St-Cross, Winchester, UK: Grayhound Press, 1930.
• Seventeen Sonnets. London: Joiner & Steele, 1932.
• This Insubstantial Pageant. London: Phoenix House, 1951.
• The Climate of Love. London: Gollancz, 1961.
• The Velvet Bow, and other poems. London: Hutchinson, 1972.
• Corfe Castle, Dorset. Portmamock, Ireland: Poetry Ireland, 1975.

Non-fiction

• The Seals. London: Cape, 1935.
• Mount Ida. London: Cape, 1948.
• The Red Shoes Ballet: A critical study. London: Saturn Press, 1948.
• Swiss Enchantment. London: Evans, 1950.
• The Tales of Hoffmann: A study of the film. London: Saturn Press, 1951.
• An Intruder at the Ballet. London: Phoenix House, 1952.
• Austria. London: Batsford, 1953.
• In Search of Winter Sport. London: Evans, 1953.
• Western Germany. London: Batsford, 1955.
• The Rhine and its Castles. London: Putnam, 1957.
• The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeats as I knew him. London: Hart-Davis, 1959.
• Netta. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.
• foreword to Letters from AE (edited by Alan Denson). London & New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961.
• Inglorious Soldier. London: Hutchinson, 1968.
• The Brahms Waltz. London: Hutchinson, 1970.
• The Pupil: A memory of love. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1981.

Edited

• George William Russell The Living Torch. London & New York: Macmillan, 1937.
• Michael Farrell, Thy Tears Might Cease. London: Hutchinson, 1963; New York: Knopf, 1964. .

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of Irish poets

References

• Diarmaid Ferriter, "Gibbon, (William) Monk," Dictionary of irish Biography, October 2009. Web, Aug. 7, 2022.

External links

Poems

• Monk Gibbon at Poetry Nook ("From Disciple to Master")
• "The Last Thing"
• "I tell her she is lovely" & "Song"

Books

• Monk Gibbon at Amazon.com

About

• (William) Monk Gibbon in the Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
• Gibbon, Monk at Irish Writers Online
• (William) Monk Gibbon (1896-1987) at Ricorso
• "Two Traditionalists" (review of This Insubstantial Pageant), Poetry Review 1951
• Tara Hall History

This article incorporates text from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license. Original article is at: Gibbon, {William) Monk