Life
1896-1987; b. Dublin, ed. St. Columba’s and Oxon. RASC Officier 1916-18;
studied agriculture, and then taught in Switzerland, England, and Ireland;
Gibbon wrote The Man and the Masterpiece, Yeats as I Knew Him
(1959); he was associated with Horace Plunkett, assisted AE (George Russell)
on the Irish Statesman; befriended John Eglinton in old age in
Wales; poetry collections incl. The Tremulous String (1926);The
Branch of Hawthorn Tree (1927); For Daws to Peck At
(1929); Seventeen Sonnets (1932), This Insubstantial
Pageant (1951), collected poems; in prose, The Seals
(1935), a compassionate account of nature; also issued biographical
and critical works incl. The Red Shoe Ballet (1948); The Tales
of Hoffmann: AStudy of Film (1951); The Man and the Masterpiece
(London 1959); autobiographical writings incl. Mount Ida (1948), The Climate
of Love (1961) and Inglorious Soldier (1968), in which he relates
his neurastheic experince in the War; also The Brahms Waltz (1970)
and The Pupil (1981); he edited his friend Michael Farrell’s novel Thy
Tears Might Cease (1963); issued a study of
George Russell as AE: The Living Torch (1937); wrote introductions
for small collections of Douglas Hyde, Katherine Tynan and “Æ”
Russell in Allen Figgis's series of 1963; came to be admired as a stylist
by Eavan Boland and others; lived in the family home prominently
located on George’s St. at the Glasthule side of Dun Laoghaire. IF2
DIW DIB BREF OCIL FDA
[ top ]
Works
Poetry, The Tremulous String (Fair Oak: A. W. Mathew 1926);
The Branch of Hawthorn Tree (London: Grayhound 1927); For Daws
to Peck At (Gollancz/NY: Dodd, Mead 1929); A Ballad (Winchester,
Grayhound 1930), fol. [ltd. edn. 5,000]; Seventeen Sonnets (London:
Joiner & Steele 1932), and This Insubstantial Pageant (London:
Phoenix House 1951), prose poems; The Velvet Bow and Other Poems
(London: Hutchinson 1972).
Prose, The Red Shoe Ballet (London: Saturn [1948]); The Tales of Hoffmann: a Study of Film (London: Saturn 1951); An Intruder at the Ballet (London: Phoenix House 1952); The Man and the Masterpiece: Yeats as I Knew Him (London 1959) [unflattering study]; Austria (London: Batsford 1953), 258pp.; Western Germany (London: Batsford 1955); The Rhine and Its Castles (London: Putnam 1957); Netta (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1960), 255pp. [biog. of Hon. Henrietta (Montagu) Franklin], ills.
Autobiography, Mount Ida (London: Jonathan Cape 1948) [infra]; The Seals (London: Jonathan Cape 1935), [6] 15-247pp., and Do. [rep. edn.] (Dublin: Allen Figgis 1970), 247pp. [infra]; The Climate of Love (London: Gollancz 1961), 240pp.; Inglorious Solder (London: Hutchinson 1968), xiv, 335pp. [infra]; The Brahms Waltz (London: Hutchinson 1970), 224pp.; The Pupil: A Memory of Love (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1981), 121pp. [infra].
Miscellaneous, ed. & intro., George Russell, The Living Torch (London: Macmillan 1937); Foreword to Alan Denson, ed., Letters from AE (London: Abelard-Schumann 1961); ed. Michael Farrell, Thy Tears Might Cease (1963); ed. & intro., Poems from the Irish by Douglas Hyde (Dublin: Figgis 1963); ed. & intro., The Poems of Katharine Tynan (Dublin: Figgis 1963); contrib. to The Yeats We Knew, ed. Francis MacManus (Cork: Mercier Press 1965), pp 43-57; ‘Murder in Portobello Barracks’, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), pp.8-32 [extract from Inglorious Soldier dealing with killing of Francis Sheehy-Skeffingon by Colthurst-Bowen]; ‘The Unraised Hat’, in John Ryan, ed., A Bash in the Tunnel, London: Clifton Books 1970), pp.209-19 [infra]; ‘Am I Irish?’, in Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1982), pp.113-14.
[ top ]
- A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (1980) 189.
- John A. Murphy, ‘Monk Gibbon’s question, “Am I Irish”? Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1982).
-
Stephen Gwynn, Irish Lit. and Drama (1936) 224.
[ top ]
Notes
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction (Cork: Royal Carbery
1985), lists only The Climate of Love: The Love-Story of a Man
with Three Women (London: Gollancz 1961), and calls it a delightful
story with a wealth of descriptive passages ... lane ... lawn ... London
by the Thames ... &c.
Brian de Breffny, Ireland: A Cultural Encyclopaedia (London: Thames & Hudson), remarks: though primarily a writer of poetry, his prose makes excellent reading ... autobiog. Inglorious Soldier is a beautiful piece of writing [TMcC.]
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)