Sean Lucy

Sean Lucy (March 12, 1931 – July 25, 2001) was an Irish poet and educator. He is regarded as an important conduit in the development of a new generation of Irish poets in 1970s and 1980s Ireland.

Biography

Lucy was born in Bombay, British India in 1931.^[1] His father was an Irish officer in the British army, who resigned his commission in 1935 to resettle the family in Ireland. Lucy was enrolled at Glenstal Abbey School, and later attended University College Cork, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees.^[1]

In 1954, he moved to England where he served two years as an education officer in the British army. He subsequently taught for four years at Prior Park College in Bath as a Senior English Master. During this time, he married Patricia Kennedy, his first wife, with whom he had five children.

Lucy returned to Ireland in 1960 and joined the English faculty at University College Cork in 1962,^[2] where he eventually became professor and department chair. The composer Sean O Riada who lectured in music at the university from 1963 to 1971, was a friend. During this time, he published his first major critical work, TS Eliot and The Idea of Tradition (1960).^[1] He continued to write and edit critical works in English and Irish including Love Poems of the Irish (1967), as well as his own creative works in poetry including Unfinished Sequence and Other Poems (1979). In 1979, he co-founded the University College Cork, Summer School for American students. During the 1980-81 academic year, he served as visiting professor in the English department at Loyola University Chicago.^[3]

Following his early retirement from University College Cork in 1986,^[1] Lucy moved to Chicago and married his second wife, fellow poet, Susan Leah Lederman. During these years, he taught Irish Literature at Loyola University, the Newberry Library and the Irish American Heritage Center. He died of a heart attack in 2001 after falling from a bus.^[3]

Lucy is perhaps less important as a critic or poet himself than he is a cultural facilitator of his time and place, but in that he is crucial. He was instrumental in bringing the poet John Montague to the English Department at University College Cork, and Lucy's former students include the poets and writers Greg Delanty, William Wall, Theo Dorgan, Sean Dunne, Maurice Riordan, Gerry Murphy and Thomas McCarthy. There is broad consensus that Lucy's chief legacy lies in his inspiration of a cohort of fledgling writers and poets who were his students, many of whom are now eminent.

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