Thomas MacGreevy

Thomas MacGreevy was born in Tarbert, County Kerry, the son of a policeman and a primary school teacher. He joined the British Civil Service as a boy clerk aged 16 and worked in Dublin and later in London. During the First World War, he first served in the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty before receiving military training and being sent to the Ypres Salient and the Somme, where he was wounded twice. A scholarship for ex-officers allowed him to study Political Science and History in Trinity College, Dublin, after the war.

Following several trips through Europe, MacGreevy settled in London where he worked as a reviewer of books, ballets and operas for a variety of magazines and occasionally lectured at the National Gallery. Around this time, he also began writing poetry. In 1927, he moved to Paris where he taught English at the École Normale Supérieure until the arrival of his replacement, the young Trinity graduate Samuel Beckett. MacGreevy introduced Beckett to James Joyce and both contributed to the collection of critical essays which promoted Joyce's Work in Progress (Finnegan's Wake), Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work In Progress.
While in Paris, Chatto & Windus published MacGreevey's two monographs, T. S. Eliot: A Study and Richard Aldington: An Englishman. In 1934, Poems, the only collection published in his lifetime, appeared in London and later in New York. Between 1935 and 1941, MacGreevy again lived in London, making ends meet by lecturing at the National Gallery and working as art critic and literary translator. When the Blitz put an end to public lectures at the Gallery in 1941, he returned to Dublin where he soon became the art critic for The Irish Times.
In the years after the Second World War, MacGreevy was honoured by the French and Italian governments respectively, being made a Chevalier de l'ordre de la Légion d'honneur for his services to the Arts and receiving the Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1950 and remained in that position until his failing health compelled him to retire in 1963. Thomas MacGreevy died in Dublin a year later, on 16 March 1964.

In addition to hundreds of articles on art, literature, dance, and religion, MacGreevy's writings include an unpublished novel, several plays, monographs on contemporary writers and artists, catalogues of the National Gallery of Ireland's collections, and a large body of correspondence with writers like Samuel Beckett and Wallace Stevens among others. A volume containing his Collected Poems was posthumously issued, first in 1971 and later as an annotated edition in 1991.