John Montague (poet) - Education

Education

The teacher he remembers most from Armagh was Sean O Boyle, one of the leading experts on Ulster folksong and Irish poetry. From him John imbibed, almost against his will, a strong sense of the long tradition of Irish poetry. John studied at University College Dublin in 1946. He found an extraordinary contrast between the Ulster of the War Years and post-war Dublin, where the atmosphere was introverted and melancholy. Stirred by the example of other student poets (including Thomas Kinsella) he began to publish his first poems in The Dublin Magazine, Envoy, and The Bell, edited by Peadar O’Donnell. But the atmosphere in Dublin was still constrained and Montague left for Yale on a Fullbright Fellowship in 1953.

John had already met Saul Bellow at the Sazburg Seminar in American Studies and now he worked with Robert Penn Warren as well as auditing the classes of several Yale critics, like Rene Wellek and W. K. Wimsatt. He extended his sense of contemporary American literature, attending Indiana Summer School of Letters where he heard Richard Wilbur, Leslie Fiedler, and John Crowe Ransom, who like the Irish poet Austin Clarke, encouraged Montague, finding him a job at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1954-55.