Ewart Milne (25 May 1903 – 14 January 1987) was an
Irish
Irish may refer to:
Common meanings
* Someone or something of, from, or related to:
** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe
***Éire, Irish language name for the isle
** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
poet who described himself on various book jackets as "a sailor before the mast, ambulance driver and courier during the Spanish Civil War, a land worker and estate manager in England during and after World War 2" and also "an enthusiast for lost causes – national, political, social and merely human".
Life
He was born in
Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...
, of English and Welsh-Irish parents, and was educated at Christchurch Cathedral Grammar School.
Clifford Dyment
Clifford Henry Dyment FRSL (20 January 1914 – 5 June 1971) was a British poet, literary critic, editor and journalist, best known for his poems on countryside topics. Born to Welsh parents, his mother was widowed when Dyment was four years old.P ...
, Roy Fuller
Roy Broadbent Fuller CBE (11 February 1912 – 27 September 1991) was an English writer, known mostly as a poet.
He was born at Failsworth, Lancashire to lower-middle-class parents Leopold Charles Fuller and his wife Nellie (1888–1949; née ...
and Montagu Slater
Charles Montagu Slater (23 September 1902 – 19 December 1956) was an English poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, critic and librettist.
Life
One of five children, Slater was born in the small mining port of Millom, Cumberland facing L ...
(editors), ''New Poems 1952'' (1952), p. 163-4. In 1920 he signed on as a seaman and worked on boats, off and on, until 1935. During the 30s too he began writing and had his first poems published in 1935. That year, Milne was one of the three founders of a duplicated publication called ''Irish Front'', together with two other poets, Charlie Donnelly and
Leslie Daiken
Leslie Herbert Daiken (29 June 1912 – 15 August 1964) was an Irish-born advertising copywriter, editor, and writer on children's toys and games, in his youth in the 1930s a poet active in leftist politics and editor of the duplicated circular '' ...
.
The background to the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, link ...
contributed to his political awakening and he came to England to work as a voluntary administrator for the
Spanish Medical Aid Committee
The International Brigades ( es, Brigadas Internacionales) were military units set up by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The organization existed f ...
in London, for whom he often acted as a medical courier. Milne has also described how he was once unwillingly involved in some arms deal while visiting Spain on their behalf.
![Spanish Medical Aid Armband](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Spanish_Medical_Aid_Armband.jpg)
Arthur Peacock, a British volunteer in the
International Brigades wrote:
After SMA was wound up, Milne returned to Ireland but remained politically active in support of the campaign for the release of
Frank Ryan, the leader of the
Connolly Column
The Connolly Column (, ) was the name given to a group of Irish republican socialist volunteers who fought for the Second Spanish Republic in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. They were named after James Connolly, the ex ...
of Irish volunteers on the Republican side, who had been captured and imprisoned in Spain. At one point Milne took part in a delegation to
Westminster
Westminster is an area of Central London, part of the wider City of Westminster.
The area, which extends from the River Thames to Oxford Street, has many visitor attractions and historic landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster, B ...
seeking
Labour Party support for this. In August 1938 he was reported in ''The Worker's Republic'' as being one of the 12 member committee of the
James Connolly
James Connolly ( ga, Séamas Ó Conghaile; 5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916) was an Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader. Born to Irish parents in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh, Scotland, Connolly left school for working life at the a ...
Irish club in London.
During his time in England and Spain, Milne got to know the left-leaning poets who supported the Republican cause, including
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
,
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by th ...
and
Cecil Day-Lewis. In 1938 his first collection of poems, ''Forty North Fifty West'', was published in Dublin, followed by two others in 1940 and 1941. Having taken a pro-British line in neutral Ireland, he was informed by Karl Petersen, the German press attache in Dublin, that he was on the Nazi death list. This decided him to help in the British war effort and he returned to England with the help of
John Betjeman (then working at the British embassy in Ireland).
Between 1942–62 he was resident in England and an active presence on the English literary scene. In particular he became associated with the poets grouped around the magazine ''Nine'', edited by
Peter Russell and
Ian Fletcher. He and his wife Thelma also backed the young Irish poet
Patrick Galvin
Patrick Galvin (15 August 1927 – 10 May 2011) was an Irish poet, singer, playwright, and prose and screenwriter born in Cork's inner city.
Biography
Galvin was born in Cork in 1927 at a time of great political transition in Ireland. His moth ...
when he launched his own magazine, ''Chanticleer''. This generous encouragement of younger writers was later extended to several others, including
John F. Deane,
Gerald Dawe
Gerald Dawe (born 1952) is an Irish poet.
Early life
Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and grew up with his mother, sister and grandmother. He attended Orangefield High School across the city in East Belfast, a leading progres ...
and
Maurice Scully.
Milne regarded his return to Dublin in 1962 as a disaster, overshadowed as his four-year stay was by quarrels with the establishment, the discovery of betrayal by a friend and the death of his wife from lung cancer. The misery of those events is recorded in ''Time Stopped'' (1967); the artistic frustration of the time also resulted in the poems included in ''Cantata Under Orion'' (1976). Returning to England in 1966, he settled in Bedford, where he died of a heart attack early in 1987. Politically he remained involved and spoke alongside
Auberon Waugh
Auberon Alexander Waugh (17 November 1939 – 16 January 2001) was an English journalist and novelist, and eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was widely known by his nickname "Bron".
After a traditional classical education at Downsid ...
at the rally on behalf of Biafra in 1968, but his views moved further to the right in later years. He wrote to ''
The Irish Times
''The Irish Times'' is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper and online digital publication. It launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Ruadhán Mac Cormaic. It is published every day except Sundays. ''The Irish Times'' is considered a newspaper ...
'' on 13 April 1976, saying that he'd been "taken in by
Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
and that
Leninism is Satanism"; he also sided with the Loyalist position in the Ulster conflict.
Milne was twice married, first to Kathleen Ida Bradner in 1927, by whom he had two sons; then in 1948 to Thelma Dobson, by whom he had two more sons.
Poetry
Milne "set himself against the
Celtic Twilight school which had dominated his youth", as ''The Times'' obituary put it, much as Yeats's later poetry sought to undo the twilit fashion set by his own earlier verse. In addition, Milne frequently entered into a poetic dialogue with his contemporaries, but besides Yeats these included
Ezra Pound,
Dylan Thomas and
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, '' Th ...
, among many others. In reality, the Irish sources that inspired Milne were quite other than Yeats.
Both in his conversation and in his poetry, Milne used to complain of being passed over because of his dual heritage: "The English see I am not English...To the Irish I am Anglo." He resisted categorisation, and his changes of residence back and forth across the Irish Sea only added to the problem. From the 1970s onwards, the part he had played during the Spanish Civil War brought his name back into notice and continues to do so. The poems he wrote on the subject were largely confined to a section in his second book, ''Letter from Ireland'' (1940).
[The poems "Thinking of Artolas" and "Letter from Ireland" appear in ''Irish Writing in the 20th Century'', David Pierce, Cork University, 2000, pp. 548–550]
available in Google Books
/ref> These were supplemented by the autobiographically-based stories he wrote at the time, only three of which were published in the 1930s; they and the remaining four, plus a later account of his involvement in a gun-running deal, appeared only in 1985 (''Drums Without End'', Isle of Skye).
Milne's poetry was very varied and included the slight, the serious and the sexy. At its best it employed a fluent long-lined narrative, a rhythmically driven rhetoric. There are good examples of this, and of several jeux d'esprit, in his two volumes of selected poems: ''Diamond Cut Diamond'' (London 1950) and ''A Garland for the Green'' (London 1962). Selection for the latter was left to Patrick Galvin and Thelma Milne prior to the move back to Dublin and over-emphasises the Irish side of his writing. In later years his poetry became increasingly more autobiographical.
Milne's 80th birthday was celebrated by the publication of a book of poems largely centred on his youth, ''The Folded Leaf'' (Aquila, Isle of Skye, 1983), as well as a special issue of the literary magazine ''Prospice'' (#14) and an hour-long poetry reading that he gave in Dublin. He was working to complete another collection, ''The Broken Arcs'', just before his death, but it was never published.
Books
Poetry:
*''Forty North Fifty West'' (Dublin: Gayfield 1938 with six woodcuts by Cecil Salkeld)
*''Letter from Ireland: Verses'' (Dublin: Gayfield Press 1940), ix, 79pp
*''Listen Mangan: Poems'' (Dublin: Sign of Three Candles 1941), 102pp
*''Jubilo: Poems'' (London: F. Muller Ltd. 1944), vi, 47, p
*''Boding Day'' (London: F. Muller Ltd. 1947), 22p
*''Diamond Cut Diamond'': Selected Poems (London: Bodley Head 1950), 64pp
*''Elegy for a Lost Submarine'' (Burnham-on-Crouch: Plow Poems 1951), p
*''Galion'': a mock epic with prologue and epilogue (Dublin: Dolmen 1953, title page illustrated by Mia Cranwill)
*''Life Arboreal: Poems'' (Tunbridge Wells: Pound Press 1953), 94, p
*''Once More to Tourney: A Book of Ballads and Light Verse, Serious, Gay and Grisly'', intro. by J. M. Cohen (London: Linden Press 958
Year 958 ( CMLVIII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
* October / November – Battle of Raban: The Byzantines under John Tzimiskes ...
, 96pp
*''A Garland for the Green: Poems'' (London: Hutchinson 1962), 95pp
*''Time Stopped: A Poem Sequence with Prose Intermissions'' (London: Plow Poems 1967), 165pp
*''Cantata Under Orion'' (Isle of Skye: Aquila Poetry 1976), 54pp
*''Drift of Pinions'' (Isle of Skye: Aquila & Wayzgoose Press 1976), 6p
*''The Black Lady'', Poetry Ireland poems No. 14, December 1979,
*''Deus Est Qui Regit Omnia'' t. Beuno's Hand Printed Ltd. Edns. No. 9(Mornington: J. F. & B. Deane 1980), 6p
*''Spring Offering'' (Isle of Skye: Aquila 1981)
*''The Folded Leaf: Poems 1970–1980'' (Isle of Skye: Aquila Poetry 1983), 69pp
Prose:
*''Drums Without End'' (Portree sle of Skye Aquila 1985), 101pp.
References
External links
"Diamond Cut Diamond"
a frequently reprinted shaped poem
{{DEFAULTSORT:Milne, Ewart
Irish people of the Spanish Civil War
1903 births
1987 deaths
People from County Wicklow
Writers from Dublin (city)
20th-century Irish poets