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Life
1867-1927; b. Carlingford, Co. Louth; solicitor in London and Manchester; sometime employed collecting from coin-machines; occasional contrib. to United Irishman; issued Poems (1906), containing short narrative poems on Irish mythological themes; encouraged by leaders of the Irish Literary Revival; acted as Sec. to London Irish Literary Society; his poems including included in A Treasury of Irish Poetry, ed. by T. W. Rolleston and Stopford Brooke (1900); also Poems (Dublin 1906). PI DBIV MKA OCIL
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Commentary
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), write that Boyd ‘was a member of the provisional committee for the New Irish Library, but was prevented from attending the inaugural meeting of the Irish Literary Society at Yeats’s House at Chiswick, 28 Dec. 1891, by insufficient notice’ (p.52.) See also Ryan’s literary sketch of Boyd: ‘constant attender at Irish Literary Club and Society meetings; his work was entirely unknown to the majority, but some of us who had read his poems in manuscripts recognised in him a real Irish poet; the writing was of two kinds - the first charming and slightly imitative, showing he had walked with Keats and Herrick and Marlowe - the second distinctly Irish and fanciful, sometimes quite original. He had all the shrinking sensitiveness of the poet when poets were born not made in the newspapers, as Justin McCarthy says; Irish legend was his home [... &c.]’ (“To the Lianhaun Shee”; here p.113.).
Frank O’Connor, The Backward Look (1967), remarks: ‘[...] and also Thomas Boyd, who appeared on the Irish scene in the year 1906, and then seems to have disappeared entirely. No one seems to know where he came from or where he went to, though he wrote two or perhaps three of the best poems written in that incomparable decade.’ Quotes “Bull of Cooley”: ‘The shadows of the primal wars / Darken his giant sides, / And his harness gleams with glimmering stars / That light his mighty strides. / / His voice is of the Deep; his path / With the fair dead is strewn; / Awful, upon his brow he hath / The great horns of the moon.’ (p.212.)
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References
Remarks: Stephen Brown writes, ‘Boyd ranks with the best poets Ireland has produced’ (?Guide to Book on Ireland). Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), quotes an account by Padraic Colum.
Anthologies: Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, ed. (WashingtonAmerica 1904), anthologises ‘The Lianhaun Shee’ ; ‘Leanán Sidhe’; see also Rolleston-Brooke, Treasury (1900); William Sharpe, Lyra Celtic; Frank O’Connor ed., Book of Ireland, et al.
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Quotations
Poems (1906), contains “On the Road to the Ford”, and “Cuchullin” [‘The fever of my deed yet burns in me / No calm can still the raging of this brow.’ Another, ‘On the Death of Cuchulainn’; Elegy on ‘Lionel Johnson’, ‘O life! the mighty fire consuming all! We mourn / That thou too soon didst burn / This branch of the singing leaves and flowers that / trembling shake / With light from beyond the sun.’
“To the Lianaun Shee”: ‘Where is thy lovely perilous abode? / In what strange phantom-land / Glimmer the fairy turrets whereto rode / The ill-starred poet band? [...] Thy luring song, above the sensuous roar, / He follows with delight, / Shutting behind him Life’s gloomy door, / And fares into the Night.’ (Given in E. A. Sharp, ed., Lyra Celtica, Edinburgh 1896; for full text see extra.)
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