Brian Coffey - Paris

Paris

In the early 1930s, Coffey moved to Paris where he studied Physical Chemistry under Jean Baptiste Perrin, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926. He completed these studies in 1933, and his Three Poems was printed in Paris by Jeanette Monnier that same year, as was the poem card Yuki Hira, which was admired by Æ and William Butler Yeats. He also became friendly with other Irish writers based in the city, including Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett. In his 1934 essay Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett picked out Coffey and Devlin as forming 'the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland'.

He then entered the Institut Catholique de Paris that year to work with the noted French philosopher Jacques Maritain, taking his licentiate examination in 1936. He them moved to London for a time and contributed reviews and a poem to Eliot's Criterion magazine. On trips home to Dublin, he contributed to programmes on literary topics on RTÉ radio and published poems in Ireland Today.

He returned to Paris in 1937 as an exchange student to work on his doctoral thesis on the idea of order in the work of Thomas Aquinas. In 1938, Coffey's second volume of poetry, Third Person, was published by George Reavey's Europa Press. He also contributed translations to the same publisher's Thorns of Thunder (1936), the first collection of Paul Éluard's work published in English. The poems of this period saw Coffey shake off his earlier influences and begin to find his own voice, but, for a variety of reasons, Third Person was to be his last poetry publication for a quarter century.