Between Motion and Stasis: Denis Devlin’s Intercessions and the Idea of Social Justice

Abstract

Denis Devlin’s early poetry has been characterised as being preoccupied ‘with justice … and in this respect … while more surrealist than engaged, [it] is coloured by the debate over the nature of “committed” literature central to [the 1930s]’.1 His 1937 volume Intercessions (the first to appear after the 1930 Poems that collected Devlin’s and Brian Coffey’s work) already signals this kind of preoccupation in its title, developing a critique of underprivileged labour and social inequality. However, Devlin’s indebtedness to Paul Éluard and André Breton on the one hand and T. S. Eliot on the other indicates a fraught approach to the investigation of social justice. Whereas his affiliation with left-wing ideals puts him in line with the English generation of the 1930s – W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender – Devlin’s poetic shares with Eliot the penchant for parataxis and delirious landscapes in the mode of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and the opening of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.2 Although critics like Alex Davis have drawn attention to these various influences, what remains a largely uncharted territory is Devlin’s interest in ideas of motion and stasis, which in Intercessions are underlaid with wider issues of the social and cultural politics of the day. Coffey, with whom Devlin was already friends in 1927, was the first to report this aspect of his fellow poet’s oeuvre when he quoted Devlin as having told him: ‘the meditation which I make and which then seems to be necessary to be formed poetically is always an excited joy of life in action’.3 This coupling of meditation and action undergirds Intercessions more than it does Devlin’s later poetry, and it is this tension that is here explored to show that Devlin’s early work often brings such issues as racism and unequal distribution of wealth into sharper focus without becoming propaganda.