Austin Clarke at the Poetry Ireland Library

Abstract

This paper reports on research into Austin Clarke’s personal library which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) series of demonstrator research projects. Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was a major Irish poet and his personal library forms a large part of the 5,000 volumes that comprise the Poetry Ireland Library which is now housed in UCD Library Special Collections. Clarke’s library offers fascinating insights into the intellectual life of mid-twentieth-century Ireland and into specific textual influences on Clarke’s own work. The research project focused on the issue of cultural production and the influence of international literature and literary criticism on such production. The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials but could also present material in new ways and suggest themes for further research. This project did so through highlighting Clarke’s activity as a professional reviewer and the diversity of his personal library (both of which demonstrate an intense engagement with a wide range of literary genres, cultures, languages, and periods) as well as by holding a symposium on transnational elements in Irish poetry. The paper additionally reports on the process of selecting appropriate outputs for digitisation (a selection of Clarke’s reviews together with visual representations of the reviewed volumes as well as a provisional shelf list of Clarke’s library and a selected list of his reviews and essays) and suggests directions for further research.