The Case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting

In September 1935, the League of Nations Assembly was convened to discuss the Abyssinia crisis, with Italy's belligerence making war seem increasingly likely. On September 3, the Irish delegation to the League departed from Dun Laoghaire en route to Geneva, the city where, as Susan Pedersen writes, "internationalism was enacted, institutionalised, and performed," with "a genuinely transnational officialdom" functioning as "its beating heart."¹ The delegation was headed by Éamon de Valera, President of the Executive Council and Minister for the Department for External Affairs. The delegation had Cabinet backing for de Valera's support for a League-mediated solution.² The secretary to the delegation was the poet and diplomatic cadet, Denis Devlin (fig. 1). Devlin was among the "youngest generation" of Irish poets, modernists such as Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, in whom a year earlier Samuel Beckett located "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland" in his August 1934 essay in The Bookman "Recent Irish Poetry," a blistering attack on the "antiquarians" in the line of the Irish Revival.³

On October 4, two days after Italy invaded Ethiopia, de Valera addressed the nation a day later than scheduled on Radio Athlone (known as 2RN prior to 1933), in which he conceded that all hopes for a League-sponsored resolution to the crisis were now gone. Several hours earlier on the same station, Devlin, de Valera's most junior diplomat in the delegation, delivered a talk on Irish poetry, "A Reply to F. R. Higgins," in which he waded into debates surrounding modernism and revivalism in response to an earlier series of radio talks by Higgins, an associate of

Fig 1.

Denis Devlin (center) and other Irish diplomats seated with Èamon de Valera, Geneva, mid-1930s. Dorothy Macardle, de Valera papers, UCDA P150/2818, c. 1935.

W. B. Yeats and one of the leading proponents of an anti-modernist, postrevivalist "racial consciousness" in anglophone Irish poetry. De Valera's Abyssinia crisis address and Devlin's defense of modernist poetry airing in the same evening program on Radio Athlone emphasizes the cross-fade complexity of Irish modernism's radiophonic mediation, as well as modernism's inextricable situation within national and transnational political contexts.

As this article explores, Devlin's involvement in international broadcasting against the backdrop of the September 1935 session of the League has a curious, significant place in the history of Irish modernism.⁴ While the centrality to modernism of what Timothy Campbell calls "the radio imaginary" has been firmly established thanks to pioneering scholarship, Irish modernism's broadcasting context, with notable exceptions, has not been extensively investigated, studies tending in the main to focus on major figures such as Yeats, and the BBC rather than Irish radio.⁵ This article recovers Radio Athlone's role in the 1930s international mediascape as a fertile site for debates about Irish revivalism versus modernism, debates which also had echoes in the intrigue surrounding the legitimacy of the station's state-mandated role as a transmitter of a specifically "Irish-Ireland" collective consciousness.⁶ By the mid-1930s, Radio Athlone played a crucial role in relaying Irish national identity to international listeners, an identity which was the discursive subject of many of its broadcasts. This article reconstructs the "radio imaginary" of these debates in the absence of surviving recordings, weaving the conflicted dynamics of Irish modernism as they emerge in all their density. By reconstructing Irish modernism's archival traces, this article resituates competing statements on Irish poetry by modernists and their opponents within the full context of their delivery.

The case for Irish modernism as made by one of its most intriguing voices, the poet Denis Devlin, clarifies the case for the categorical and critical value of Irish modernism (and modernism tout court) in contemporary scholarship, which has recently been questioned. The most striking intervention in this regard is made by Edna Longley in Yeats and Modern Poetry (2013), in which the rap sheet against modernism includes the assertion that its post-hoc...