Monk Gibbon

William Monk Gibbon (1896 - 29 November 1987) was an Irish poet and prolific author. He wrote also novels, travel writing and criticism. He has been characterised as "self-regarding and prickly".

He was the son of William Monk Gibbon, of the Gibbon family of Sleedagh, Co. Wexford, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and from 1900 vicar of the parish of Taney, Dundrum.[1]. His mother, Isabella Agnes Meredith, was a niece of John Walsingham Cooke Meredith. At his father's church, Lily Yeats, sister of W. B. Yeats, was a parishioner.[2]. There was also a family relationship: Gibbon and the Yeats family were cousins. There was no love lost between the poets Gibbon and Yeats, however; and the biography Gibbon wrote was rather hostile. In 1963 he collaborated in the editing and publication of Michael Farrell's posthumous novel Thy Tear's Might Cease.

Works

• The Branch of Hawthorn Tree (1927)
• The Seals (1935) autobiography
• The Living Torch (1937) poems by AE, editor
• Mount Ida (1948)
• This Insubstantial Pageant (1951)
• The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeats as I Knew Him (1959) biography
• The Climate of Love (1961)
• Inglorious Soldier (1968) memoir
• The Brahms Waltz (1970)
• The Velvet Bow (1972)
• The Pupil (1981)

External links

• Irish Literature Library