When Anthony Cronin met Fintan O’Toole: ‘Poetry kept me sane’

In this 2004 interview, the late Anthony Cronin discussed his alcoholic contemporaries, poetry and Charles Haughey

Anthony Cronin's collected works show his distinctive achievement as a poet. He tells Fintan O'Toole how the art form has kept him sane

As Anthony Cronin himself remarks, there was a time when every article that mentioned him referred to the time when he was asked, as part of a survey, to name the most unfairly neglected poet in Ireland and chose himself. As he was, at the time, an influential public figure who held the office of artistic adviser to the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey, the claim that he was neglected seemed absurd. "It became," he recalls, "a journalistic tag. Any reference to me had to be accompanied by 'the most neglected poet in Ireland who earns £134 a day from the State'."

What was missed in these references was not just the fact that Cronin's claim to be a neglected poet was intended, at least in part, as a humorous remark from a man who often speaks in a tone of irony. It was also that the remark was arguably accurate. With the publication of Cronin's Collected Poems, bringing together a body of work written over the past half-century, it does not seem at all absurd to suggest that his poetry has not received the attention it deserves. Cronin's long poems in particular - RMS Titanic, first published in 1961, Letter To An Englishman, written in 1975, and the sonnet sequence The End Of The Modern World, published in 1989 - stand out as a distinctive achievement. Their lucid arguments, muscular but accessible language, technical skill and wry engagement with the contemporary world may stand at an angle to the typical Irish lyric of recent times, but they occupy their own space with an impressive confidence.

If this body of work has tended to drop off the radar of critics and literary historians, however, it is partly because Cronin himself has generated so much interference. His public profile as a combative literary journalist who also wrote about horse racing, as the biographer of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien and as the cultural politician who helped to create, through his relationship with Haughey, Aosdána, the Heritage Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art has been at odds with the common view of the contemplative poet.

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"In Ireland for some reason," he says, "people want the poet to seem poetic, whereas in other countries poets spend a lot of their time avoiding seeming poetic. And there is a serious disapproval of poets' complicating matters by doing other things. Right from the beginning, as a young fella writing controversial articles, in the Bell - attacking Sean McBride's pretensions, for example - people couldn't quite believe that someone who was up to that sort of thing was a proper poet. Academia is all right, because it's quiet and separated and never makes waves, but what I was doing typecast me. Involvement with Charlie was only a larger piece of typecasting."

When he is thought of as a creative writer, moreover, it is usually as a member of the 1950s generation of Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O'Brien, whom he recalled so vividly in his brilliant memoir, Dead As Doornails. He was, however, much younger than Kavanagh and O'Brien (Kavanagh was born in 1904, O'Brien in 1911 and Cronin in 1926). He did most of his important work as a poet after those who are thought of as his contemporaries were dead. Though he was shaped by the tough circumstances of Irish writing in the 1950s, what defines him is perhaps the fact that he survived them. One of the reasons for his survival is that he has always thought of himself primarily as a poet.

He was born in Enniscorthy, the son of a reporter on the Enniscorthy Echo. "My father was bookish, so there were a lot of books in the house, remarkable books really for someone to have in a small town: P. S. Ó hEigeartaigh's The Victory Of Sinn Féin cheek by jowl with Winston Churchill's The World Crisis and Lord Birkenhead's Famous Trials. But there was a lot of literature as well, and classics. He subscribed to John O'London's Weekly, which consisted entirely of book reviews, and it was an education in itself. When I wrote the biography of Myles na gCopaleen I discovered that his father subscribed to this journal also and that he read it as a child. I felt a bond in common."

Cronin began to write poems while at Blackrock College, in Dublin. "I wrote poems, I suppose, from when I was 14 or 15. In fact there was a sort of a strike, of which I was one of the leaders - an unheard of thing in those days, far more terrible than anything would be nowadays - but our desks were searched, and poems were discovered in mine. I was given quite a talking to and told that the sin of pride was involved. In a way now I think it is; maybe it's only beginning to dawn on me.

"But I often think of that when I think of the way people are encouraged now to write poetry by prizes and competitions. It's as if everybody had decided that in poetry lay their salvation. Unfortunately, it's usually bad poetry that's held up as a model to them."

At school he read a great deal of 19th-century English poetry, and although he is dismissive of the sentimentality and artificiality of much of it he can see now that it left its mark. In Cronin's liking for the long poem and his old-fashioned belief that complex poems can be written in a language that is accessible to most intelligent readers, the influence of Tennyson and, in particular, Browning can be traced.

"I do feel quite strongly," he says, "that poetry is a form of communication with the reader in which the basic laws of all writing have to operate. People forget that a poem has to be interesting, just like a piece of journalism has to be interesting, or a novel. The great masterpieces wouldn't have survived if they weren't interesting. Also, everything is a narrative, in a way, even a good piece of journalism. There is an unfolding, there is a revelation going on, even if it's of a point of view."

These influences may partly explain Cronin's peculiar place: outside the mainstream of 20th-century Irish poetry but not part of an avant-garde engaged in experiments of language and form. In some reasonably early poems there is a defiantly self-conscious refusal to engage in the rural romanticism that was typical of Irish poetry when he started writing: "He did not think that the cabin where the rain came in under the door was free from sordidity; / And thought in any case that the sordid we had always with us. / But that when it came to the sordid / Metropolitan sordidity was richer and more fecund."

His body of work is also striking for the absence of autobiographical references or childhood anecdotes. "I hate anecdote in poetry. And that includes autobiographical anecdote. I just loathe it. I don't think poetry is the medium for it. I think Thomas Hardy was responsible for bringing it in. Most people who write poems about their childhoods do it anecdotally, and really it's almost the only direct way to do it. And I think I've always had the feeling 'Why burden the reader with this little anecdote of mine?'

"It seems to me there is a terrible tendency in direct autobiographical writing in Ireland - and there is a lot of it - to exploit material for picturesque purposes, for charm, for certain kinds of feeling, and I really don't want to do that. It's not a recent thing; it goes back to Frank O'Connor and others, this exploiting your own life material and making it more charming or more amenable in various ways, or more typical, or more something, but all of these are things I would disapprove of. When I started out T. S. Eliot's injunctions about impersonality - about poetry not being an expression of personality and not being autobiographical - were very strong, and they had a big effect on me."

At a time when serious writers were marginalised in Ireland anyway, Cronin's aesthetic position made it even more difficult for him to find a place here. "It was literally impossible for people whose writing wasn't sufficient to support them, and who therefore had to depend on ancillary activities like reviewing, to live on the rates here and the work available."

When he went to England in the late 1950s, however, he found a more congenial environment. "Not only could you get such employment, and as much of it as you could reasonably accommodate, but also literary people were much more generous. They'd put you in the way of things and point you towards possibilities. Whereas here it's a law of life that the less there is the more people fight over it."

He sees the literary drinking culture that led so many of his contemporaries to early deaths as "very largely a result of desperation". He fell under its spell for a period, even though he saw its effects on friends such as Kavanagh and Behan. "Nothing frightens you of that kind when you're young. There is this thing with drink: you're the one, you can continue to carry on like this, but you're still in charge. You're stronger than they are." Yet, when he came out the other side intact, he was fiercely determined to make sure writers would not live in penury.

When Haughey, whom he had known and admired at University College Dublin, asked him, after the funeral of Pádraic Colum, in 1972, for help with a speech on the State and the arts he was due to give at Harvard, Cronin had the feeling that "if I got him to deliver some of my ideas on support for the artist in his speech he could be locked into them". It turned out to be a good bet on a politician who was then in the wilderness, and the result is Aosdána.

Through all his excursions into cultural politics and into prose he never lost his identity as a poet, a calling that he sees, looking back, as a blessing and a curse.

"Poetry has always been the ground music of my life, and I never felt I was neglecting it for further activities. But it is a terrible taskmaster. It's the last activity left which has no commercial value or importance whatever. For somebody who's had to earn his living by his pen, to be always turning to this activity which wasn't going to put food on the table was a bit of a burden. But really it has kept me sane; it has kept me going. I can quite honestly say with Goldsmith, in the beautiful exordium to poetry itself at the end of The Deserted Village, 'Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe, That founds't me poor at first, and keep'st me so.' "

Collected Poems by Anthony Cronin is published by New Island, €20