Valentin Iremonger (1918-1991). Courtesy Tumblr.
Valentin Iremonger (14 February 1918 - 22 May 1991) was an Irish poet and diplomat.[1]
Life[]
Youth and education[]
Iremonger was born 14 February 1918 at 96 Sandymount Road, Dublin, eldest among 4 children of John Iremonger (1887–1947), sculptor of monuments, and his wife Annie (Murphy) (1887–1950), shopkeeper. Christened Valentine Iremonger, he dropped the last ‘e’ early on and was known throughout his career as Valentin.[1]
He was educated by the Christian Brothers in Synge St. and at Coláiste Mhuire, where he went on a scholarship.[1]
On leaving school he spent a year (1938-1939) in the Abbey School of Acting.[1]
Early career[]
A published poet before he was 20, Iremonger was precociously talented and avant-garde, with dark, matinée-idol looks, and was a founder-member of the New Theatre Group in 1937. This left-wing group, based initially in Charlemont Road, then Rutland Place and Baggot St., put on plays by writers such as Stephen Spender and Robert Sherwood, and by Soviet playwrights, and was possibly the earliest group to perform the dance plays of W.B. Yeats outside the drawing room.[1]
The Iremonger family had earlier moved from Sandymount Road to 135 Tritonville Road, also in Sandymount, and from this address Valentin, together with Belfast poets Robert Greacen and Bruce Williamson, published a book of verse, On the barricades (1944), under their own imprint, New Frontiers Press. Iremonger was singled out by The Bell as the most impressive and original of the trio. Another book by the same 3, One recent evening, appeared that year under a London imprint, the Favil Press.[1]
Iremonger's verse play ‘Wrap up my green jacket’ was performed on BBC radio in 1946 and at the Peacock in 1947.[1]
Energetic and enthusiastic, he helped Robert Graves with source material for The white goddess (1944), an eccentric study of poetic myth. He was fluent in Irish from his schooldays and presumably provided Graves with ancient Irish sources.[1]
Iremonger's stance as a young iconoclast was cemented when he rose before the 3rd act of an Abbey production of ‘The plough and the stars’ on 10 November 1947 to complain that ‘under the utter incompetence of the present directorate's artistic policy, there is nothing left of [Yeats's] fine glory’ (cited Hunt, 173). He and University College academic Roger McHugh then walked out in a protest aimed at the policy of Abbey director Ernest Blythe of putting on staid productions of old favourites and prioritising plays in Irish. The Irish Times and other papers joined the fray enthusiastically.
Iremonger was made poetry editor (1949–1951) of the short-lived but influential magazine Envoy. The magazine's equally short-lived publishing company brought out Iremonger's prizewinning but hitherto unpublished collection, Reservations (1950).[1]
With his friend Robert Greacen, he co-edited the Faber edition of Contemporary Irish poetry in 1949. It was critically acclaimed for including the work of younger writers but was conspicuous for the absence of the greatest living Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, who refused to allow his verse to be included. 3 years later Iremonger was the author of an anonymous waspish profile of Kavanagh in the Leader (11 Oct. 1952), in which he accused him of bombast, abstraction, and rhetoric.[1]
Iremonger had started working as a civil servant in the Department of Education in 1946. On 1 April 1948 he married Sheila Manning (died 2001), an Abbey actress who specialised in Gaelic drama, and was soon providing for a family of 5 children.[1]
Diplomatic career[]
The late 1940s marked the highpoint of his literary career, but after moving to the Department of External Affairs, he embarked on a 2nd successful career as a diplomat, helped by his marked linguistic gifts. In 1956 he was sent as 1st secretary to the embassy in London, where he remained 5 years, becoming counsellor in 1959. These years were among his happiest, as the embassy became a literary hangout.[1]
Although reserved and sometimes moody, Iremonger was gregarious and liked to attract writers and artists to the embassies he worked in. On his next posting as ambassador to Sweden and minister to Finland (1964-1968), he befriended film-maker Ingmar Bergman. After a year he could speak and read Swedish, and could also read Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish.[1]
He was subsequently ambassador to India (1968-1973), Luxembourg (1973-1978), and finally Portugal, where he did not finish his term due to ill health.[1]
Throughout his years in the foreign service he kept up his literary work, though it inevitably lacked his previous intensity and focus. In 1960 he edited for Faber a book of Irish short stories. He translated into English many poems in Irish and 2 books by emigrants: Diallan Deoraí, by Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, appeared as An Irish navvy (1964), and he rendered Micí Mac Gabhann's Rotha Mór an Tsaoil as The hard road to Klondyke (1973). He also published a translation of Rilke into Irish in a dual-language edition, as Beatha Mhuire: sraith dhánta Ghearmáinise le Rainer Maria Rilke (1990).[1]
His last years were marked by ill health, aggravated by heavy drinking; he retired to his home in Blackrock and was unable to do sustained work. He died 22 May 1991 of pneumonia in Dublin and was buried in Shanganagh cemetery and not in Sandymount as he had wished. He was survived by his wife, son, and 3 daughters; a 4th daughter had predeceased him by a few months.[1]
Writing[]
Iremonger's early poems brought him significant critical attention. His language was vivid and direct, influenced by Auden, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, as well as by Gaelic poetry. Among the earliest of his contemporaries to break with the influence of Yeats, he credited himself with helping introduce the modern idiom to Irish poetry. Others did not join him in this claim, but critic Dennis O'Driscoll allowed that his colloquial, breezy idiom anticipated some of the characteristics of the Movement poets, while John Hewitt wrote of being deeply moved by the simplicity of the early poems, ‘the simplicity and clarity of crayons and glass marbles’ (Irish Writing, Mar. 1951, p. 66).[1]
His collected poems, Horan's Field, and other reservations (1972) were followed 16 years later by Sandymount, Dublin (1988). A poet of nostalgia and regret, he saw in Sandymount the lost idyll of his childhood.[1] Dennis O'Driscoll called his poems ‘love-torn, time-worn, decay-haunted . . . hovering between cynicism and romanticism and redolent of certain adolescent moods of youthful despondencies’ (O'Driscoll, 109). Of an estimated 800 poems written, 80 were published.[1]
Iremonger's failure to concentrate exclusively on literature meant that he never fulfilled his early promise, and he remains an ‘anthology poet’ known for a handful of notable poems, such as ‘Icarus’, ‘Hector’, ‘The dog’, all written when young. ‘This houre her vigill’, regarded by many as his finest poem and dealing with his earliest experience of death, was written when he was 25, and was originally published as ‘Elizabeth’.[1]
Recognition[]
Iremonger's collection Reservations won him the AE Memorial Prize 1945.[1]
Publications[]
Poetry[]
- On the Barricades (by Robert Greacen, Bruce Williamson, & Valentin Iremonger). Dublin: New Frontiers, 1944.
- Reservations: Poems. Dublin: Envoy, 1950; London: Macmillan, 1950.
- Horan's Field, and other reservations. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972.
- Sandymount, Dublin: New and selected poems. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1988.
- Poems. Cork: Run Press, 2014.
Translated[]
- Micí Mac Gabhann, The Hard Road to Klondike. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
- Dónall Mac Amhlaigh; An Irish Navvy: The diary of an exile. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
Edited[]
- Contemporary Irish Poetry (edited with Robert Greacen). London: Faber, 1949.
- Irish Short Stories. London: Faber, 1960.
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[2]
Audio / video[]
- By Sandymount Strand: Valentin Iremonger reads his own poetry. Dublin: Claddagh Records.[2][
See also[]
References[]
- Bridget Hourican, Iremonger, Valentin," Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009. Web, Aug. 19, 2022.
Notes[]
External links[]
- Poems
- Books
- Valentin Iremonger at Amazon.com
- About
- The Poems of Valentin Iremonger reviewed by Todd Swift
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: Iremonger, Valentin
This article is licensed for noncommercial purposes under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License.
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