McFadden, Roy (1921–99), poet, was born 14 November 1921 in Beechfield St., Belfast, younger son of Roland Victor McFadden, bank official from Downpatrick, Co. Down, and Maud McFadden (née Steel). His paternal grandmother's family, the Quails, had been prominent tradesmen in Downpatrick for some 200 years, especially as cabinetmakers. His mother's father, James Steel, a Scot, immigrated to Belfast from northern England in 1905, becoming a chief draughtsman in the Workman Clark shipyard; a unitarian lay preacher, amateur painter, and bibliophile, he instilled in the young Roy a love for language and the arts, especially the poetry and painting of William Blake. Though he was reared in the Church of Ireland, McFadden inherited from both sides a stoutly individualist, inquisitive, and dissenting protestantism, laced with theosophy, agnosticism, and Christian socialism. In his first year the family, under IRA threats amid sectarian conflict, fled their home and moved to Dundonald, on the city outskirts. During the second world war their home in Wandsworth Parade was destroyed in a German air raid, forcing temporary residence with relatives in Downpatrick. McFadden was educated at Regent House School, Newtownards, Co. Down, and at QUB; graduating in law (1944), he practised as a solicitor in Belfast till retirement in the 1980s, becoming sole principal of his firm in 1954.
McFadden's writing career progressed through three distinct stages. Associated with Robert Greacen on the QUB magazine The Northman, in its ambitious but ill-fated programme for an Ulster literary revival, he published the pamphlet poem Russian summer (1941), and was represented in the volume Three new poets (1942). A wartime pacifist, he was influenced by the political-cultural anarchism of Herbert Read and Alex Comfort. Through three poetry collections, his style developed from a forced, extravagantly inflated exuberance, emulative of the quasi-surreal neo-romanticism of the English ‘new apocalypse’ poets (Swords and ploughshares (1943)), through the elegiac morbidity of Flowers for a lady (1945) – inspired by the war and the recent death of his mother – to the more precise imagery, restrained diction, and resigned, reflective tone of The heart's townland (1947), the voice most suited to his subject matter and personal temperament. Engaging in the latter volume with the Ulster regionalism espoused by John Hewitt (qv), McFadden accepted the movement's tenets conditionally: his love of place was qualified by unequivocal repudiation of bigoted provincialism, and his celebration of local and family tradition tempered by wariness of ‘prescribed, narrow boundaries fostering a reactive mini-nationalism’ (Collected poems, p. xv). As implied in his title, the region he inhabits is the townland of the heart, a personal experience and vision transcending geography and affirming ‘dissenting minds and the rejects of society’ (quoted in Brown, 136).
During the quarter-century of his second stage, McFadden, preoccupied with legal career and family, did not produce a published volume (save for the hauntingly moving pamphlet-poem Elegy for the dead of the Princess Victoria (1953)), while continuing to write for periodicals: poems, reviews, short stories, and essays. He edited several anthologies and journals, most notably the Ulster literary magazine Rann (1948–53). With his rich speaking voice, he was frequently heard on BBC local radio, presenting a ‘Poetry notebooks’ programme; a radio play in verse, ‘The angry hound’, was broadcast in 1952. The remarkable late flowering of McFadden's third stage represented his most confident and accomplished work. In five volumes of new poetry and two collections combining new and retrospective work, he plumbed the private sphere of home, family, work, and identity, linked to the public space of a divided community, shattered in the past and present by political violence. Exhibiting a disciplined mastery of poetic craft – his rhetoric terse, laconic, and understated; his tone wry, detached, and ironic, but devoid of condescension or cynicism – he spoke as the stoic outsider, repudiating murderous tribal loyalties, quietly asserting reverence for life through painstaking cataloguing of its diurnal mystery. In the first of his late volumes, The garryowen (1971), he voices a consciousness of personal and poetical breakthrough: ‘The garryowen, and the game set free’; his title derives from the gambit in rugby (the sport that unites Ireland) ‘when the ball is kicked high ("up and under"), giving time for a maverick assault’ (Collected poems, 342). In Verifications (1977), he continues his exploration of family life and family roots, worked into a personal mythology. A watching brief (1979) observes the contradictions of plying the trades of lawyer and poet in a lawless and philistine society. There followed The selected Roy McFadden (1983), Letters to the hinterland (1986), and After Seymour's funeral (1990). For his Collected poems 1943–1995 (1996), McFadden reworked (‘translated’) certain of his early poems into a more succinct, austere style, while preserving the thought and emotion of the original texts; for a sense of his earlier style, therefore, the reader must revert to the original publications. Perhaps the most under-rated Irish poet of his generation, he shunned self-publicity, directing inquirers into his viewpoints to read the poems. McFadden and his wife Margaret (m. 1952), had two daughters and three sons. He died at his home in Belfast on 15 September 1999. The Collected poems includes an introduction by Philip Hobsbaum; a comprehensive bibliography; a preface and extensive, informative notes by the author; and a portrait drawing by Rowel Friers.