Author, poet and a former professor of Modern English at University College Cork, Seβn Lucy died in Chicago on July 25th aged 70.
Born in Colaba, Bombay, on March 12th, 1931, he was one of four children of Col John F. Lucy (British army) and his wife Dorothea (nΘe Davis). Brought up in Cork from the age of four, he attended Glenstal Abbey School (1944-49). From there he went on a Kitchener scholarship to UCC in 1949 and graduated with a BA in English and history in 1952 and an MA in English literature in 1957.
His major thesis on T.S. Eliot earned him a PhD and was later published under the title T.S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition (Cohen & West, London, 1960). As early as 1951, two of his poems were published by David Marcus in Poetry Ireland; and his first short story in Irish Writing (1953).
Seβn Lucy began his working life at the Royal Army Educational Corps in 1954. In 1957, he became Senior English Master at Prior Park College, Bath. In 1962, he returned to Ireland to join the English Department at University College Cork. He was assistant lecturer to Prof B. G. McCarthy, a major influence on his early sensibilities and career. He was appointed Professor of Modern English in July 1967, a position he held with distinction until taking voluntary early retirement in 1986.
Seβn Lucy left UCC to pursue his writing career and to take up the post of Visiting Professor of English at Loyola University of Chicago. He later lectured at the Newberry Library and was well-known in Irish-American studies circles in the US.
He was highly regarded by his colleagues and students at UCC and is remembered as an ever-courteous and cultured colleague who gave generously of his time and energy to others.
Always an inspiring lecturer, his enthusiasm for poetry was electric. It communicated itself to a large number of teachers of English in the Munster region and beyond. It contributed spectacularly to the emergence of a group of young poets including Seβn Dunne, Theo Dorgan, Tom McCarthy, Maurice Riordan, Greg Delanty and Gregory O'Donoghue.
Five winners of the Patrick Kavanagh Award (for their first collection of published poems), were students of his and others are now distinguished academics in Ireland and the US.
For the students, Seβn Lucy was their living connection with the rich Cork tradition of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s (Daniel Corkery, T.C. Murray, B.G. McCarthy), and he steeped himself particularly in the vibrant U∅bh Laoghaire Munster tradition. He was also a brilliant story-teller.
Apart from his earlier critical work on T.S. Eliot, Seβn Lucy edited the anthology Love Poems of the Irish (Mercier 1967). He edited another anthology, Five Irish Poets (Irish Writers Now series, Mercier 1970), which included what he considered to be his first collection of poems.
In 1979, he published his second collection, Unfinished Sequence & Other Poems (Wolfhound Press); and in 1984 he edited and contributed Goldsmith: the Gentle Master to the Thomas Davis Lectures series.
Seβn Lucy had an artistic soul and the aesthete's view of life. His optimistic vision of things was a deeply spiritual, classical one, at once Celtic and Christian.
Apart from reading poetry, Seβn Lucy loved nothing better than to sing. Like his life-long friend and colleague Prof John A. Murphy, one felt he was always on the verge of a song. His earliest boyhood ambition was to be a forester; and his abiding love of woods and water is evident in his poems.
Seβn Lucy was happy in Chicago and did not wish to be regarded as an exile there. His work in promoting Irish studies and Anglo-Irish literature was a labour of love. He was instrumental in establishing student and staff exchange links between UCC and American colleges, including Loyola University at Chicago, Colby College in Maine and the University of St Thomas at St Paul, Minnesota.
He is survived by his wife Patricia; daughters, Catherine and Frances; sons, Brendan, John, and Fintan; brother Denis and sisters, Kate and Leise.
Seβn Francis Lucy: born 1931; died, July 2001