Pollock, John Hackett (‘An Philibín’) (1887–1964), writer and doctor, was born in Dublin, son of Hugh Pollock, a protestant barrister who later became registrar of the land commission, and Mary Pollock (née Donnelly), a catholic. He was educated at the Catholic University School, Leeson St., and the Catholic University Medical School, Cecilia St., receiving the MB and B.Ch. of the NUI. Appointed assistant pathologist to the Richmond hospital, during the 1916 Easter rising he courageously went through the city streets wearing a Red Cross armlet to assist the wounded. Although his subsequent fiction would reveal contradictory feelings about political commitment, during the civil war he collaborated with Patrick Little (qv) (with whom he remained a lifelong friend) on producing republican propaganda pamphlets. Thinking that he had a late vocation to the religious life, he resigned his hospital position and entered Buckfast abbey, a Benedictine foundation in Dorset, England, but left after a time and resumed his career in pathology. Becoming pathologist and bacteriologist to the Cork St. fever hospital, and pathologist to Mercer's hospital, he held both positions into the 1960s. Reinstated as pathologist to the Richmond in the 1940s, and remaining till his death, he gave Saturday morning classes in morbid anatomy, notable for the theatricality of his presentation and graphically witty descriptions of naked-eye specimens, such as ‘strawberry gall-bladder’, ‘sago-spleen’, and ‘nutmeg liver’. He published some dozen articles on pathological subjects in the Irish Journal of Medical Science (1922–9). Assistant professor of pathology in the RCSI (1937–63), he had a private practice in Rathmines, which he relinquished in the 1940s.
Pollock published prolifically as a poet, critic, playwright, and novelist, producing nineteen volumes, all with Irish publishing houses. His poems appeared in the Catholic Bulletin, Ireland To-day, and the Irish Monthly, and he wrote book reviews for Irish Book Lover and other periodicals. All of his poetry and most of his prose (save for several novels and some criticism) appeared under the penname ‘An Philibín’ (‘The Plover’). He wrote poetry throughout his career, commencing in his student days, when he read verses before the Students' National Literary Society in Rutland (later Parnell) Sq., and published six poetry collections: Hills of Dublin (1917), Athens aflame (1923), The secret altar (1924), Grass of Parnassus (1936), Wild honey (1942), and Autumn crocus (1947). He was a founding member (1928) of the Dublin Gate Theatre Studio, which staged his one-act play ‘Tristram and Iseult’ (previously published as a ‘dramatic poem’ in 1924) in the Peacock theatre (1929); he wrote another long dramatic poem, The sun-child (1925), based on the ancient Irish saga of Cú Chulainn (qv) and Conla; a nativity play, ‘The fourth wise man’ (c.1934), subsequently translated into Irish by Colm Ó Lochlainn (qv) in the 1940s; and several unpublished plays. His short fiction is best described as ‘wonder tales’, the term he applied to his first such production, and appeared in four volumes: The wisdom of the world (1919), Smoking flax (1922) (tales and poems), A tale of Thule, together with some poems (1923), and Irish ironies (1930). In this early work Pollock showed himself in thrall to both the poetry and prose of William Butler Yeats (qv) in the latter's ‘celtic twilight’ manifestation, his subjects often drawn from ancient Irish saga, classical and Norse myth, and historical periods romantically treated. While the inflated rhetoric of his poems was painfully stilted, the studiously archaic and lyrical diction of the tales suited his material and purpose. Some of his poetry of the 1920s reflected his religious obsessions of the period. In his later poetry he turned to homelier themes, meditations on nature and domestic life, but never developed a credible poetical voice.
It was in longer fiction that Pollock found a distinct and authentic expression. He wrote five novels, the first two incorporating autobiographical elements. In The valley of the wild swans (1932) he wrote of a young man torn by contrary impulses in the Ireland of the 1910s, culminating in the Easter rising: a Dubliner, he is divided between urban culture and sophistication, and rural nature and simplicity; a poet, he tosses between ‘definite action’ and ‘dreaming inactivity’; a middle-class southsider, he vacillates between romantic attraction to Irish nationalism, and family ties to the British state. Peter and Paul (1933) likewise wrestles with dichotomies, being about identical twins of contrasting temperaments and allegiances, also against the background of the political troubles; an interesting motif is the comparison between Dublin's two universities: TCD, refined, tradition-steeped, but static; UCD, primitive, provincial, and motley, but promising development. Pollock's alertness in both books to the separate but related strands constituting the Irish national character reflects his own mixed religious parentage. There followed three historical novels. The moth and the star (1937) deals with the relationship, in both Dublin and Rome, between the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Irish-born painter Amelia Curran (qv). Pollock indulged to the full his loose, imaginative approach to historical material in Mount Kestrel (1945), which combines the 1916 Kerry landing of Roger Casement (qv) with the fate of the Spanish Armada through the device of a mentally unstable first-person narrator who confuses events. His last book, The lost nightingale (1951), is a romance based on the Elizabethan lutenist and composer John Dowland, believed (probably spuriously) to have been born in Dalkey. Pollock wrote a monograph (1935) on the poetry of Yeats, one of the first critical surveys of the subject. Pollock's love of nature and sensitivity to landscape (especially the topography of south Dublin and north Wicklow) permeates his work; continually he lauds the beauties of the vale of Shanganagh (subsequently smothered beneath housing estates) and the ‘Silver Spears’ of the Sugarloaves. His fondest recreations were walking and gardening. An amateur musician and opera enthusiast, he broadcast on Radio Éireann on the musical life of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. He married (1926) Anna Waters; they had two sons and two daughters, and resided at 38 Park Dr., Rathmines. He died in the Richmond hospital on 11 December 1964, and was buried in Dean's Grange cemetery.