Centenary Essay: Irish poet Brian Coffey was born on June 8th, 1905. On the eve of his centenary, poet Michael Smith remembers a force in Irish literature who has not always had the recognition he deserves.
Although there are two modest homages planned, one in Cork and another in Dublin, there is a danger that this year could pass without a major centenary celebration of the life and work of an Irish poet who is considered by many critics, both here and abroad, as a great poet, and certainly one of the great Irish poets of the 20th century: Brian Coffey, who was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1905 and died in Southampton in 1995.
The relative lack of recognition in Coffey's lifetime did not surprise him; he never courted it. If it was mentioned, his response was a shrug of the shoulders, not in arrogant indifference, however; it was simply that, for him, poetry had nothing to do with courting the public. A man of ebullient humour and razor-sharp wit, he was deeply concerned about the moral issues and environmental hazards of our time (Advent), but his poetry was never moralising or didactic except when he was being deliberately satirical, as in his long poem The Big Laugh.
His background was academic. His father, Denis, was professor of anatomy and the first and longest-serving president of University College Dublin.
Brian Coffey took degrees in arts and in science at UCD, where he met the poet and future diplomat, Denis Devlin, who was to become his lifelong friend and whose posthumous Collected Poems he edited. From 1930 to 1933, Coffey studied physical chemistry in Paris under Jean Berrin. While there, he also studied the philosophical problems of physical science under the great neo-Thomist, Jacques Maritain. During this time he met Thomas MacGreevy and later, in London, Samuel Beckett, who had replaced MacGreevy at the Ecole Supérieur in Paris. Coffey was invited by Beckett to meet James Joyce, but refused the invitation because, he told me, he knew Joyce had a tendency to turn people into his servants, a role he wasn't prepared to play (and ultimately, neither was Beckett).
Turning to Coffey's poetry, it is difficult reading. To the consumers of the trivial, domestic and social poetry now in vogue - which Geoffrey Hill has impishly called "home video poetry" - this difficulty is sometimes labelled obscurantism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
For Coffey, poetry was always a way of asking questions about the meaning of human existence. These questions may be the same questions asked by philosophers but poetry asks them differently, in its own unique way. As with philosophy, it is our encounter with the questions that is the important experience of poetry - the humanising experience - not its capacity to deliver answers. It is essentially the Socratic method of inquiry: it is necessary to remove the crutches to find out if the cripple can walk.
Coffey saw poetry as a special kind of actualisation of the human spirit, both in its making and in its appreciation. Therefore, he saw the poetry of stock response - personal, political or social - as reductionist, false and often dangerous. The difficulty many readers have with his work is its thoroughgoing rejection of conditioned response, linguistic, conceptual and emotional. Its avoidance of stock response - the raw material of popular success - has made it extremely difficult to raise a critical scaffolding which could be of use to uninitiated readers.
The modernity of his poems consists of his preoccupation with the making of poetry, in the deepest sense of the word making: that is to say, bringing into existence. And it was this preoccupation, throughout a long lifetime, that most clearly distinguished him from other Irish poets of his time. In general, Irish poets have had, and indeed some continue to have, a stereotypic notion of what a poem is - notwithstanding that the stereotype changes with the fashions - and their efforts are often directed exclusively to producing that stereotypic object. Many have refused to question the meaning or validity of that interpretation (Thomas Kinsella is a notable contemporary exception), or have been unable to do so.
Coffey applied himself to the question "what is poetry?" with the same seriousness and rigorous intelligence that a scientist normally applies to empirical research. The reason that question was so fundamentally important for him was that he perceived poetry as the human activity par excellence. To investigate its nature was for him no less that to investigate the meaning of being human.
And this humanness was also the principal characteristic of the man himself; humanness in the spirit of the Latin humanitas and its collective meaning, "humane conduct, gentleness, kindness and politeness". In the more than 20 years that I knew him, it was Coffey's humanitas that most impressed me. Always acutely intelligent and sensitive, he was invariably kind and tolerant of everything except posturing.
Critical neglect did not hinder his writing. Towards the end of his life he wrote two major long poems, Advent and The Death of Hektor, which rank among his best work. And he continued writing to the end, working on a series of poems entitled Prayers.
Besides these longer works there were the numerous short lyrics in his Selected Poems, published by New Writers' Press in 1971, and in Chanterelles (Melmoth, 1985) and Poems And Versions 1929-1990 (Dedalus, 1991). A lifelong translator, he produced a magisterial version of Mallarmé's Un Coup De Dés, as well as translations of Rimbaud, Aragon, Eluard and others.
With his English wife, Bridget, and large family, he lived much of his adult life in England, where he taught mathematics. Twenty years before his death a significant salute to his place in the Irish canon came with publication of a special Brian Coffey issue of the Irish University Review (Vol 5, No 1, 1975).
He was a great letter-writer, in the heyday of letter-writing. In one of his letters to me he wrote:
The poet only has the capacity to make words into a form of human truth. He discovers nothing that is not already present in being human, and he is, to begin with, thoroughly human; but his mistakes lead him into invidious positions and relationships with powers and dominations which ultimately lead to some form of idolatry - the anti-human . . . The poet's first aim is to write the poem he is capable of. When it at last exists he can think about giving it to the world. And don't forget it is all luck, chance, hazard, fortune, unpredictable and not at the poet's command; towards him it is a gift, from him it goes best as a gift.
He once wrote a short essay about his friend Samuel Beckett which tells us as much about Coffey as it does about Beckett:
We were on a bridge, lake waters each side. A mother was placing bread crumbs on her about-five-year-old daughter's head, above which the birds, gulls and pigeons planed and hovered. The child was awaiting the alighting of airborne feet, webbed or scratching, the small face an expectation and a concern. I heard Sam exclaim: "Look, Brian, look!" And I looked to see the scarred, wrecked and still beautiful features declaring his delight, his happiness at another like human being, sharing the feelings that had been his own much more than 50 years ago. Ever the same anew. The real Beckett . . . who has discovered compassion and loving in the night of agony, in the man-made midden of malice.