Ó Tuama, Seán (1926–2006), poet, playwright and critic, was born 28 January 1926 at 35 Dublin Street, Blackpool, Cork city, the third of ten children (seven boys and three girls (one of whom died in infancy)), of Aodh Ó Tuama (1890–1985), insurance official, and his wife Eibhlín Ní Thuama (née Ní Éigearta) (1893–1979). His father, a native Irish-speaker from Doire an Aonaigh, Réidh na nDoirí, near Baile Bhuirne, was an itinerant teacher with the Gaelic League; his mother, from the same district, a teacher by profession, whom Seán describes as being more practical and forward-looking, had been awarded a gold medal for her part in the war of independence. Seán celebrated them both in a poem that described his upbringing as a native Irish-speaker in the house on the northern outskirts of Cork city where they came to live when he was about seven years old; the poem 'Maymount: tigh Victeoireach a leagadh' ('Maymount: a Victorian house, demolished'), with its long, lingering, reflective line, is one of his finest. It was an upbringing that, if it did not altogether determine the course of his life, would greatly influence his outlook. Their dream of 'an t-athaoibhneas', 'the joyful renewal' of Gaelicisation, would never be achieved but equally he would never allow it to be ridiculed:
'Is sa mhéid gur chuireas féin chun cinn go poiblí, nó príobháideach / an t-athaoibhneas a shantaigh m'athair is í féin, / is chuige é, cuid mhaith, ná leomhfainn do bhoicíní / fonóid faoi bheirt a chuir sna flaithis bheaga mé / tráth bhí móin á dó is Gaeilge á labhairt faoin scáthán imeall-órga.'
(And if, in public or in private, I myself advanced / the joyful renewal that my parents wished for, / it's mostly that I won't allow any upstarts / to belittle the two who made for me a little Eden / when turf was burning and talk was Irish under the gilt-framed mirror.)
Childhood summers were spent with his father's relatives at Doire an Aonaigh, described objectively as 'paiste dealbh luachra is geitirí' ('a bare patch of sedge and rushes'), but for the children a remote, self-contained world of wonder supplementing a dual-language existence in the city which was the source of alternate pride and embarrassment: praise meted out for proficiency in An Mhodhscoil (the Model School), the Irish-medium primary school they attended, being countered by the sense of difference and shame experienced when overheard and remarked upon, albeit approvingly, when speaking Irish to one another on the bus journey there. He refers in the poem 'Maymount' and elsewhere to his father's almost ceremonial untying of the cord on the timber gate at the rear of the house allowing them to roam free among the neighbouring children in the 'Red City' of Gurranabraher then growing up rapidly beside them. From his new playmates he would learn the distinct dialect of the English language of the lanes and develop a lasting affection for their ways of thought and expression. His increasing engagement with the area would lead to his attending secondary school in the North Monastery (1938–42) and playing hurling with Glen Rovers, winning county championship medals as a substitute in 1944 and 1945. In one of his best-known poems, he mythologises Christy Ring (qv) who played on the same team: 'Samhlaím é uaireanta / is é ar buanchoimeád / sínte ar leac na honóra / i mBrú na Bóinne / is Aonghus Mac an Daghda á choimhdeacht / go dtí an leath-uair bheag gach Geimhreadh / go soilsíonn ga gréine go hómósach / ar a chúntanós.' (Sometimes I imagine him / being venerated / in the care of the great god, Aengus, / on a slab at Newgrange / and at each winter solstice / for just one half an hour / a ray of sunshine / lighting up his countenance.)
He entered University College Cork (UCC) in autumn 1942, selecting Irish, English and Spanish as his subjects for the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree, and graduated in 1945 with first-class honours and first place in the faculty of arts, being also awarded the Mansion House scholarship in Irish of the National University of Ireland (NUI) for which all graduating students of the constituent colleges were eligible to compete. The following year (1946), aged twenty, he was awarded the Master of Arts (MA) degree in Irish with first-class honours. But the greatest influence on his academic life and work was not his Irish teachers such as Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (qv) ('Torna') and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, worthy as they may have been, but the professor of English, Daniel Corkery (qv), then nearing retirement. While his attempts to rescue Corkery's reputation as cultural historian, following damaging criticism by Louis Cullen and John A. Murphy in particular, cannot be said to have greatly succeeded, his account of Corkery's teaching bears a very close resemblance to his own practice in later years, eschewing theory in favour of close reading of text. At the conclusion of his course of study, Ó Tuama writes: 'The little white-haired man had become a luminous indestructible personage in my mind – the best teacher of literature I had met or would meet. In his classes, he fingered lovingly, as it were, the text of the poems or plays he discussed, taught you to appreciate the texture of words or images, helped you to see how the elements worked together in a successful piece of art. He was very much then a teacher who valued the poem as structure, long before the new critics and the structuralists advanced their notions. His observations on structure, of course, were mostly those of a practising writer concerned with the manner in which a literary artefact achieved its effect' (Ó Tuama, Repossessions, 234).
Ó Tuama was also a practising writer, being both poet and dramatist, but, like Corkery, will probably be remembered primarily for other aspects of his remarkable oeuvre. Looking back, at fifty years of age, in his poem 'Who knows before the end what light may shine?', he thinks of the four great Cork figures he had encountered in his life whose like he does not expect to meet again: Seán Ó Ríordáin (qv), poet; Seán Ó Riada (qv), musician; Seamus Murphy (qv), sculptor; and, at their head, Daniel Corkery, 'an máistir-saoi' ('the master sage'). Of these, aside from Corkery, Ó Ríordáin was the one with whom he was most closely associated. In 1950, aged twenty-four, he published what was perhaps his most remarkable work, the seminal Nuabhéarsaíocht, which brought both Ó Tuama and Ó Ríordáin to national prominence. He had caught the tide at the full and was borne along by it, as were many others at the time and for some years afterwards. To the still considerable number of readers of Irish at the time, when the national revival of the language yet seemed possible, Nuabhéarsaíocht would have come with a sense of freshness and excitement similar to that with which a more antiquarian but no less fascinated audience would have greeted the Reliques of Irish poetry (1789) of Charlotte Brooke (qv) or the Irish minstrelsy (1831) of James Hardiman (qv). Nuabhéarsaíocht prepared the way for the reception of Eireaball spideoige, Ó Ríordáin's first collection, published two years later. In his introduction to Nuabhéarsaíocht, which is almost as well known as Ó Ríordáin's to Eireaball spideoige, Ó Tuama brings rank and order, not to say recognition, to the work of the poets who had been writing in a new idiom in the previous decade, giving pride of place to Ó Ríordáin over the more established and more widely published Máirtín Ó Direáin (qv), with Máire Mhac an tSaoi (b. 1922) a fairly remote third; this judgement has been largely vindicated over time, not least by Ó Tuama's own continuing critical output. He vigorously defended Ó Ríordáin against those critics, of whom Máire Mhac an tSaoi was the most prominent, who attacked Eireaball spideoige mainly on the basis of minor infractions of grammar and idiom, claims shown to be largely unfounded and which were, in any event, altogether beside the point.
Also in 1950, he married Betty (Beití) Dinan. They would raise their family of five boys on the outskirts of Cork city, so beginning the cycle all over again. Meanwhile, Ó Tuama had been appointed to the post of assistant lecturer in Irish at UCC in 1949, having earned a living by stints of secondary teaching from 1946, the highlight of which seems to have been the discovery that Chesterton's poem 'The donkey' could engage a class in an inner-city school long enough to keep it from mischief. It is doubtful that he ever felt entirely fulfilled or wholly at ease in UCC. There were the interminable wrangles of college politics (presidents to be selected, professors and lecturers to be appointed, courses to be approved or otherwise) in which he was an active participant, being elected by the graduates on several occasions to governing body. He had always wished for a professorship of modern Irish literature to be created, which would be separate from the more philological mainstream, through which students could specialise in critical and creative writing, but he did not come to occupy this new chair until 1982 when one senses it was already too late. By then he was in his late fifties; the Innti generation of the late sixties and early seventies (so called after the magazine in which they published) had come and gone, as had the social and intellectual ferment that had generated it; a depressed economy and increasing emigration saw a growing demand for foreign languages at university to the detriment of Irish; the ideal of language revival, or at very least the compromise of some kind of stable bilingualism, to which he had devoted his life, was being openly questioned where it had not already been silently set aside; his remaining creative energy was being sapped by new administrative duties and by service to national bodies such as his tenure as chairman of Bord na Gaeilge (1982–5), a signal honour, no doubt, but also a distraction, as well as being a hopeless task.
But there were compensations. He also served on the Arts Council (1973–81) where he formed a lasting friendship with Seamus Heaney (1939–2013); in Heaney's words: 'The one new poet friend I made in those days was Seán Ó Tuama, whom I got to know when I was appointed to the Arts Council in 1973. Seán and his wife Beití were in the first circle, as it were, from that time. Seán was somebody whom I could always talk to honestly and merrily and get honest and merry truths from in return. Sharp as a tack and full of knowledge' (O'Driscoll, 153). Heaney contributed the opening poem to an anthology compiled by his peers in Ó Tuama's honour following his retirement. It is a reworking of a poem of which Ó Tuama was particularly fond, the instructions of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (qv) to a blacksmith, Séamus Mac Gearailt, on how to fashion a spade for him. But Heaney's poem has more to do with artistic fellowship than with spadework, a tribute by one craftsman to another, mediated by the address of a third craftsman to a fourth, the first Séamus/Seamus in the sequence:
'Séamus, make me a weapon to take on the earth, / A suitable tool for grubbing and digging the ground, / Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift, / Tastily finished and trim and right for the hand.
No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade, / The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain … (de Paor, 1).'
Ó Tuama had by then achieved much in his own right, including three collections of poetry: Faoileán na beatha (1962), Saol fó thoinn (1978) and An bás i dTír na nÓg (1988). This last may well be his finest, containing such poems as 'Maymount', 'Who knows before the end what light may shine?' and a moving tribute to his father, 'an duine daonna / ba shéimhe casadh ormsa ar an saol' (the most gentle human being I ever met on this earth), whose humanity has been taken from him in old age; where the blue eyes that had been the mark of his father's people through the generations once danced with merriment, they now reflect only the terror of an animal caught in a trap from which is no escape. It is as though all play and pretence have been abandoned in the face of the poet's own approaching debility and death.
He had fostered the appreciation of literature from the beginning, as Corkery had fostered it in him. As the founder of the discipline of modern literary criticism in Irish he had made straight the path for others in universities elsewhere to follow; what he had struggled to establish gradually became the norm. It was his part in nurturing the Innti poets such as Michael Davitt (qv), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (b. 1952) and Liam Ó Muirthile (b. 1950), that showed how porous were the formal barriers erected between teaching and writing, between lecturer and student. One of these, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, he would go on to admit to the pantheon of great modern poets in Irish, placing her second only to Ó Ríordáin. Other poets, such as Colm Breathnach and Louis de Paor, none of whom might have found their voice had Ó Tuama not helped and encouraged them to tune it, would follow sporadically, but there would be nothing again that would resemble a school of poetry.
In 1955–6 he had spent nine months in France studying contemporary theatre and on his return formed Compántas Chorcaí with Dan Donovan as a vehicle for producing original plays in Irish written by Ó Tuama, of which there were eight in all. It is difficult to appreciate when such things are but a distant memory how important these plays were in the cultural life of Cork and beyond. Probably the best known of them is 'Gunna cam agus slabhra óir' ('A crooked gun and a golden chain'), a metaphor for the still ongoing tension between physical force and negotiation in the national movement, here worked out in a sixteenth-century context. Premiered in the Abbey Theatre, its production in the School of Music was attended by the president of Ireland, Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh (qv), who visited Cork especially for the occasion on 30 May 1957. 'Moloney' (1957) had as its theme the interrogation of Oliver Plunkett (qv) at Drogheda and his subsequent trial; the Moloney of the title is a drunken priest on whose compelled evidence he is convicted. 'Ar aghaidh linn, A Longadáin' ('On we go, Longadán') (1959) was based on the medieval Irish tale of the madness of Sweeney. The more risqué 'Is é seo m'oileán' ('This is my island') (1961) explored the attitudes of a smugly conservative middle-class family to the predicament of a servant girl who has had what was then described as an illegitimate child. 'Déan trócaire ar shagairt óga' ('Have pity on young priests'), his final play, was similarly close to the bone in that it centred on the role of the priest in a changing Ireland and had a strong underlying current of homosexuality; it was widely believed that it was based on a particular priest who was well known to the author. Other productions were 'Ceist ar Phádraig' ('A question for St Patrick) (1960), 'Corp Eoghain Uí Shúilleabháin' ('Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin's corpse') (1963) and 'Iúdás Iscariot agus a bhean' ('Judas Iscariot and his wife') (1967). While all played to full houses, with a hard core of Gaelic enthusiasts not all of whom were greatly interested in drama for its own sake, it was impossible to sustain this extraordinary rate of production that made a particular demand on the author's resources. More professional actors such as Dan Donovan, who generally had a leading role, were supplemented by local Irish-language teachers and by whatever promising students Ó Tuama could round up at UCC (Michael Davitt and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill both performed in 'Déan trócaire ar shagairt óga').
His academic output was equally prodigious. His monographs include An grá in amhráin na ndaoine (1960), the subject of his doctoral thesis, in which he traces French influence, following the Anglo-Norman conquest, on various categories of Irish folksong. It remains a seminal work, although more recent research suggests that it may have underestimated the English contribution. It was followed by Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (1961), an edition and analysis of one of the greatest poems in Irish, the lament composed by Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill (qv) for her husband Art Ó Laoghaire (qv) on his slaying in May 1773. Here Ó Tuama wrestles, not always successfully, with the problem of restraining a fluid oral medium in the straightjacket of print. His introduction is a very fine example of creatively critical writing in Irish. Filí faoi sceimhle (1978) is a study of the two poets whom he regards as the most important to have emerged in Irish since the end of the seventeenth century, Aogán Ó Rathaille (qv) and Seán Ó Ríordáin, who resemble each other, he argues, in that only the act of creation will serve them in bringing a semblance of order to the terrifying world they inhabit. An grá i bhfilíocht na nuaisle (1988) revisits the themes of love poetry, this time expressed in the higher register of court and nobility, from the late fourteenth century to the collapse of the old order and its literary superstructure in the early seventeenth. Cúirt, tuath agus bruachbhaile (1990) is a miscellany of essays on literary topics ranging from 'Cúirt an mheánoíche' to modern poetry and short story. An early popular work was The facts about Irish (1964; reissued in 1970) in question and answer format, prompting Eoghan Harris to compare it to the penny catechism.
Increasingly he began to reach an accommodation with English. In An duanaire: poems of the dispossessed (1981), the texts of the poems he introduces are complemented by Thomas Kinsella's verse translations directly opposite. The format, if not always the detail of text and translation, proved a remarkable success, although we may take it that the great majority of the readers confined themselves to the right hand page. Ó Tuama acted as general editor of a number of the journal Translation (fall, 1989), more than half of which (152 pages) consisted of translations of writing in modern Irish, both prose and verse. Ó Tuama's own Repossessions: selected essays on the Irish literary heritage (1995), translations and reworkings of material previously published in Irish, was launched in Cork by Seamus Heaney. Finally, the book of his selected poems, Death in the land of youth (1997), was published with parallel translations by Ó Tuama and Peter Denman. It had been a long journey from Nuabhéarsaíocht and the prospect it seemed to hold out for Ó Tuama and his fellows, almost all of whom, at least of those who lived long enough, came to accept if not always to embrace the bilingual arrangement.
In his opening address to Ardfheis Chonradh na Gaeilge in Cork, May 1992, Ó Tuama spoke despairingly of the language situation in Dunquin where he had been coming for some forty years. It was here he had spent summers listening to Cáit 'Bab' Feirtéar, finding 'a new miracle of words before me each night I would visit'. He had thought of it as being an impregnable fortress and it was now clear to him that it was about to fall, as the majority of pre-school children were being raised through the medium of English. There was little of any consequence left to say to anybody who would really understand.
Marks of academic recognition had come by way of visiting professorships at Harvard (1996) and Oxford (1997). He was awarded a Doctor of Literature (D.Litt.) degree from the NUI (honoris causa) in 1995. A Festschrift of scholarly essays in his honour, Saoi na héigse, was published in 2000. The fact that he was a full-time academic probably militated against his admission to Aosdána, which would have meant more to him than any other accolade in giving explicit recognition to his creative talent.
The final years of his life were spent struggling with an increasingly debilitating illness. He died 14 September 2006 and is buried in St Oliver's cemetery, Carrigrohane, Co. Cork.
More information on this entry is available at the National Database of Irish-language biographies (Ainm.ie).