Poet to the eye, giant in the canon

Padraic Colum delighted in his role as the 'peasant poet' of the Irish people, but his legacy is still understated, writes Sara Keating

'There is no way of keeping self-esteem out of a self-portrait", the playwright and poet Padraic Colum confessed in a monologue entitled Vagrant Voices, broadcast by RTÉ in 1962 as part of the Self Portrait series. A man, Colum suggests, is always subject to his own mythology. In his friendships and acquaintances with the leaders of the 1916 Rising, he saw how historical circumstances could transform popular personalities into the austere icons of posterity. However, Colum himself suffered in the face of history because, despite being a popular literary hero in his time, and one of the longest surviving members of the literary revival of the early 20th century, the cultural history that he was so involved in shaping has all but written him out of its narrative.

Colum was a popular figure of the cultural nationalist movement and a prominent figure at the at-homes, which he describes in Vagrant Voices as the hub for cultural exchange in early 20th-century Dublin. It was a time when being a writer was seen as one of the greatest vocations that a man could be called to, and Colum, as contemporary observers often commented, had the innate aspect and attitude of a poet of the highest calibre.

Joseph Holloway, architect and professional social diarist, paints a detailed portrait of Colum in his journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, where he records a personal account of the first 30 years of the burgeoning Irish theatre movement. "What a strange and wonderful head is Colum's," Holloway rhapsodies, "with its big, half-dome-like forehead and large, velvety, soft, sad eyes . . . His nose is delicately formed and his mouth regular, with thin hollow cheeks and drawn sad expression. A poet to the eye!"

Another contemporary, playwright TC Boyle agreed that, physically, Colum was the quintessential poet-figure, but he insisted that Colum was "far too clean and washed" to be authentic. Colum described himself merely as short: "A psychoanalyst once told me that the inferiority complex (that I've had all my life) must be because I have always had to look up to people."

One of Colum's favourite stories about his life both projected and deflated the mythology that developed around him as a "peasant poet" of the Irish people. Born in a workhouse for the poor in Longford on December 8, 1881, Colum delighted in repeating the circumstances of his birth; "because where most poets end their life in the workhouse, I was born in one - of course, not because my parents were indigent, but because my father was the master there."

The family moved briefly to Cavan and then to Dublin when he was nine years old, but Colum insisted that the workhouse gave him an insight into the real concerns of impoverished rural Ireland, even if he never experienced such poverty first-hand.

The real social problems in contemporary Ireland were the subject of his early plays: Broken Soil (later renamed The Fiddler's House), performed by The Irish National Theatre Society (the forerunner to the Abbey Theatre) in 1903, The Land, performed at the Abbey in 1905, and Thomas Muskerry, performed in the Abbey in 1910.

The popular interest of the plays' themes was one of the reasons for his popularity, as theatre historian Adrian Frazier has commented: "Yeats and Synge gave the Irish a piece of their minds; Colum gave them a piece of themselves."

Colum's relationship with the early Abbey was also shaped by his belief in the democratic function of culture, eventually drawing him into conflict with the more aristocratic artistic ideals that the Abbey aspired to. In Self Portrait, Colum credited Ibsen as the man "that brought me into the theatre"; his "writing in ordinary language about ordinary people living in ordinary houses had a great impact on me, like the coming of the atom bomb on the world".

Colum also marked out his relationship with the Fay brothers as particularly significant on the development of his realist literary aesthetic. The actor-manager brothers at the early Abbey were influential in developing the idiosyncratic Abbey "acting style", which drew on the latent "peasant heritage" among the Dublin company to create the theatrical illusion of authenticity, and they taught Colum the key lesson that "naturalism is something acquired". In fact, Colum broke away from the Abbey at the same time that the Fays did, in 1906, amidst disillusion about the theatre's commitment to the nationalist cause.

There are various contemporary reports about Colum's personal reasons for leaving the company. Joseph Holloway's account states that Colum left "because the company would not play to a six-penny audience", although he also records a comment made by Annie Horniman, the theatre's patron, in which she expresses her dismay that Colum "intended to imperil his artistic career for nationality".

Other sources suggest Colum was not prepared to grant the Abbey exclusive performance rights to his plays - artistic policy at the theatre at the time. What unites the different accounts is Colum's identification with the populist cause, and with the popular audience.

Some say the loss of Colum - the only Catholic playwright of significance within the emerging theatre, and one of the theatre's greatest box-office attractions - sealed the Abbey's allegiance with an elitist middle-class audience over the "national" audience that it had set out to serve.

Following his marriage to Mary Maguire in 1912 - who as Mary Colum carved out her own significant niche in the world of letters - Colum's life began to resemble the romantic life of vagrant on the road that had become a preoccupation of his poetry and his plays. The young married couple embraced a peripatetic lifestyle, spending time in New York (where Colum gained a reputation as a writer of children's books), Paris (where Colum typed Finnegan's Wake for the near-blind James Joyce), London, the Riviera, and Hawaii (where Colum had accepted a commission to collect the folklore of the indigenous culture of the Hawaiian Islands).

After the 1930s, the couple settled in America and became absorbed in the literary social scene there too, cultivating long friendships with Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham and Ezra Pound among others. In between teaching at Columbia University, Colum continued to write and revise his poetry, maintaining his reputation as an Irish "poet of the people", even though he never returned to Ireland on a permanent basis.

In the last 20 years of his life, as his friends and mentors from the literary revival began to die off, Colum became a kind of historical medium; a mouthpiece for the cultural nationalist movement of the turn of the century. He published significant biographies of Arthur Griffith and James Joyce, and five plays in the Japanese Noh tradition devoted to the memories of William Wilde, Charles Stuart Parnell, Roger Casement, James Joyce and Henry Joy McCracken. In the build-up to the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1916 Rising, a 40-minute interview of his personal encounters and friendships with the various rebel leaders was recorded by RTÉ.

In this short piece, the 85-year-old Colum insists that the leaders "were really all poets at heart" and recites the verse of McDonagh, Pearse and Plunkett from memory as if they were his own. In the recorded self-portrait, Vagrant Voices, Colum recites two of his own poems, incanting them with closed eyes in the simple, rhythmic intonation that he had learned from the Fay brothers at the turn of the century.

However, he recites two new poems, rather than his most famous verse, his consciousness of intruding "self-esteem" transformed into modesty. Colum concludes the recording by confessing his hopes to be remembered as a poet above all, and he hopes that his own poems will be absorbed by tradition into the anonymous canon of popular ballads and classroom rhyme, like those of his literary hero Thomas Moore were.

Ironically, his wish has come true, because while many can quote lines from poems such as The Old Woman of the Roads (number 11 in the 1999 survey of the nation's 100 favourite Irish poems conducted by this newspaper) or She Moves Through the Fair, few can identify Colum as author. Few would be able to place him in the canon of Irish drama either, despite the fact that his plays were more admired in their time than the work of Yeats or Synge, and were frequently revived.

This month is the 125th anniversary of his birth (and next year will be the 35th anniversary of his death), and there appear to be no plans for festivals or conferences or celebrations of his work. Popularity, it appears, is no guarantee against the vagaries of posterity, and so that quintessential poet-figure, "that little scrap of humanity with pathos clinging around the edge of his personality", seems destined to disappear entirely into the myth of the Irish literary canon.