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Anthony Cronin

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Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin, by Patrick Swift, 1950, National Gallery of Ireland
Anthony Cronin, by Patrick Swift, 1950, National Gallery of Ireland
Born1928
Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland
OccupationPoet
NationalityIrish
EducationUniversity College Dublin

Anthony Cronin (born 1928 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford) is an Irish poet, novelist, biographer, critic, commentator and arts activist.

With writers Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Con Leventhal, Cronin celebrated the first Bloomsday in 1954. Cronin has contributed to many television programmes, including Flann O’Brien: Man of Parts (BBC) and Folio (RTE).[1] From 1966-1970 Cronin was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Montana and Poet In Residence at Drake University. Cronin has Honorary Doctorates from several institutions such as Dublin University, Trinity College, the National University of Ireland and the University of Poznan.

As an arts activist and Adviser on Arts and Culture to Taoiseach Charles Haughey (and briefly to Garret Fitzgerald) Cronin was the originator of important artistic initiatives established during Cronin's tenure such as Aosdána, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Heritage Council (Ireland). Cronin was the inspiration and a founding member of Aosdána and was elected its first Saoi (a distinction conferred for exceptional artistic achievement) in 2003. Cronin is a member of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. Cronin has been a member of the governing bodies of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland (of which Cronin was for a time Acting Chairman) and is currently a member of the Toscaireacht of Aosdana.

Cronin wrote an influential and stylistically elegant weekly discourse, Viewpoint, in the Irish Times from 1974-1980. More recently Cronin contributes a column on poetry to the Sunday Independent.

Cronin began his literary career as a contributor to Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, was Editor of The Bell (magazine) in the 1950s and Literary Editor of Time and Tide (magazine) (London). Cronin's first collection of poetry, "Poems" (Cresset, London), was published in 1958. Several collections followed and "Collected Poems" (New Island, Dublin) was published in 2004. The End Of The Modern World (New Island, 2016), written over several decades, is his most recent publication. Cronin's poetry is remarkable ‘for its modernist rigour and wit, shot through with a perceptive understanding of emotional frailty’.[2]

"The Life of Riley", Cronin's first novel is a brilliantly sophisticated satire on bohemian life in the Ireland of the mid 20th century while Cronin's memoir "Dead As Doornails" is regarded as a movingly witty classic on the same subject.

Cronin has written landmark biographies of two significant Irish literary figures, Flann O’Brien in "No Laughing Matter" and Samuel Beckett in "The Last Modernist".

From 1966-68, Cronin was a visiting lecturer at the University of Montana and from 1968–70 and Poet in Residence at Drake University. Cronin had a weekly discourse, 'Viewpoint', in the Irish Times from 1974–80.

Cronin lives in Dublin with his wife, fellow author Anne Haverty[3] and contributes to the Sunday Independent.

Bibliography

Poetry: main collections

  • Poems (London, Cresset, 1958)
  • Collected Poems, 1950-73 (Dublin, New Writers Press, 1973)
  • Reductionist Poem (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1980)
  • RMS Titanic (Raven Arts Press, 1981)
  • 41 Sonnet - poems 82 (Dublin : Raven Arts, 1981)
  • 41 Sonnet Poems (Raven Arts Press, 1982)
  • New and Selected Poems (Raven Arts Press/Manchester, Carcanet, 1982)
  • Letters to an Englishman (Dublin, Raven Arts, 1985)
  • The End of the Modern World (Raven Arts Press, 1989 & 1998 - reissued in new expanded edition, New Island Books, 2016)
  • Relationships (Dublin, New Island Press, 1992)
  • Minotaur (New Island Books, 1999)
  • Collected Poems (Dublin, New Island Press, 2004)
  • The Fall (New Island Books, 2010)
  • Body and Soul (New Island Books, 2014)

Novels:

  • The Life of Riley (Knopf 1964, New Island 2012).
  • Identity Papers (Co-Op Books, Dublin, 1980)

Literary Criticism & Commentary:

Poets Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin at the church in Monkstown with the carriage in which they had been proceeding about Dublin in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist in Ulysses - 50 years after Bloom traversed the city in James Joyce's novel.
  • Botteghe oscure : quaderno XII, Roma, (De Luca editore, 1953, contributor)[4]
  • A Question of Modernity, a collection of critical essays by Cronin (Secker & Warburg, 1966)
  • Heritage Now: Irish Literature in the English Language (Dingle: Brandon 1982)
  • An Irish Eye (Dingle: Brandon 1985)
  • Art for the People?: Letters from the "New Island" (Raven Arts Press, 1995)
  • Ireland: A Week in the Life of a Nation, text by (Century Pub, 1986)
  • An Illustrated Historical Map of Ireland, text by (London, Cassell Ltd., 1980)
  • Personal Anthology: Selections from his Sunday Independent Feature (New Island, 2000)
  • Contributed to: Envoy, The Bell, Time and Tide, Nimbus, X magazine,[5] The Irish Times, and the Irish Independent, among others.

Plays:

Memoirs:

  • Dead as Doornails (Dolmen Press 1976; OUP 1983; Lilliput 2008)

Biography:

  • Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (HarperCollins, 1996)
  • No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien (New Island Books, 2003)

Editor:

About:

  • Where the poet has been, Michael Kane (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1995): portraits of Anthony Cronin and paintings inspired by his poems / with an essay by Ulick O'Connor.

Pseudonyms:

References

  1. ^ http://www.redirectify.com/people/anthony-cronin.html
  2. ^ Encyclopaedia of Ireland
  3. ^ Miriam O Callaghan meets writers Anthony Cronin and Anne Haverty Retrieved 2016-03-11.
  4. ^ http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000189542
  5. ^ The Notion of Commitment, X, Vol. I, No. I (November 1959); Is Your Novel Really Necessary? (under the pseudonym Martin Gerard), X, Vol. I, No. I (November 1959); R.M.S. Titanic, X, Vol. I, No. II (March 1960); Goodbye to All That: A Child's Guide to Two Decades (under the pseudonym Martin Gerard), X, Vol. I, No. II (March 1960); A Question Of Modernity, X, Vol. I, No. IV (October 1960); Molloy becomes Unnamable (under the pseudonym Martin Gerard), X, Vol. I, No. IV (October 1960); Getting Wurred In, X, Vol. II, No. I (March 1961); Two Poems, X, Vol. II, No. II (August 1961); It Means What It Says (under the pseudonym Martin Gerard), Vol. II, No. II ( August 1961). Also in An Anthology from X (OUP 1988).
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