He joined the Irish diplomatic service in 1935 and spent a number of years in Rome, New York and Washington. During this time he met the French poet St. John Perse, and the Americans Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. He went on to publish a translation of Exile and Other Poems by St-John Perse, and Tate and Warren edited his posthumous Selected Poems.
Since his death, there have been two Collected Poems published; the first in 1964 was edited by Coffey and the second in 1989 by J.C.C. Mays.
References
Coffey, Brian. Biographical note in Denis Devlin Collected Poems (The Dolmen Press, 1964)
Denis Devlin at the Princess Grace Irish Library (http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/d/Devlin,Denis/life.htm)
External links
Some poems (http://www.wfu.edu/wfupress/poetry/devlin.html)
One of the major figures, and major influences, of modern and modernist Irish poetry, alongside Brian Coffey he was described by Samuel Beckett as "without question the most interestering of the youngest generation of Irish poets".
Introduced by JCC Mays, who regards Devlin's poems as "constructs in which an idea is worked through" (while offering a fascinating insight into the work, including the way in which "lines that push beyond rhyme extend into rhythmical prose"), Collected Poems is an extraordinary book which has, unsurprisingly, become something of a collector's item.
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