KAVANAGH, Patrick: Envoy. Nos. 1 – 20 (all published). Twenty issues bound in five volumes.

Dublin: Envoy, 1949/1951. Bound in brown buckram with original pictorial covers bound in. A fine set.  Founded and edited by John Ryan, this periodical of literature and art filled the place vacated by ‘The Bell’. With Valentin Iremonger as poetry editor it viewed itself as a link between Irish and European writing. There are contributions by Paddy Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin, Denis Devlin, Aidan Higgins, Pearse Hutchinson, Mary Lavin, John Montague, Flann O’Brien, Francis Stuart, Samuel Beckett, Michael Hamburger, Martin Heidegger, Nathalie Sarraute, Gertrude Stein, and some others contributed individual pieces from abroad. There are special numbers on Yeats and Joyce. Paddy Kavanagh contributed a ‘Diary’ to each of the twenty issues and he also published at least 10 poems in this periodical. He sometimes referred to his Envoy phase as a time of poetic rebirth.

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