Corkery, Daniel (1878-1964), man of letters. Born in Cork to a family of craftsman carpenters and active trade unionists, he was educated by the Presentation Brothers and at St Patrick's College, Dublin. He taught at a Christian Brothers National School in Cork for more than twenty years. With Terence MacSwiney and other members of the Gaelic League he founded the Cork Dramatic Society in 1908. His play King and Hermit (1909) dramatizes a conflict between civil authority and the spirit. A Munster Twilight (1916) was a collection of short stories drawing on his familiarity with the west Cork Gaeltacht to illustrate the persistence of Gaelic culture. Cork city is the setting for his novel The Threshold of Quiet (1917), a gloomy meditation on Irish Catholic discontent. The play, The Yellow Bittern (1917), centres on the dying Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Gunna and deals with the relative merits of the Gaelic poets of Munster and Ulster. From 1901 Corkery had been a frequent contributor to D. P. Moran's Leader newspaper, sharing Moran's brand of ‘Irish-Ireland’ nationalism. The Labour Leader (1920) was performed at the Abbey Theatre; the theme is a Cork dockers' strike in which the leader Davro (modelled on Patrick Pearse) calls for militant action. The Hounds of Banba (1920), a collection of stories, reflected Corkery's republicanism. In The Hidden Ireland (1924) he described the lives, work, and social conditions of writers such as Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, and Brian Merriman, giving an account also of the aisling, a form of vision-poem especially favoured by Munster Jacobite poets.
Corkery completed an MA at UCC in 1931, becoming Professor of English there. In the same year he published his thesis as Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature. With the appearance of the work on Synge, Corkery's conception of Irish society and Irish writing came under attack, and was long to remain a target for revisionist critiques of Irish-Ireland ideology. Corkery's last collection of stories, Earth Out of Earth (1939), showed him returning to urban settings in a mood of sympathy and tolerance. He could be doctrinaire, but his best work reveals an understanding of rural and urban life in Ireland, a sympathy for the oppressed, together with an appreciation of their longing for freedom.
Bibliography
Patrick Maume, Life That Is Exile: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish-Ireland (1993).
