Two voices of Seamus O'Kelly : A study of the man and his works

Seumas O'Kelly, a minor figure of the Irish literary revival, is said to be neglected. With the exception of a brief period of posthumous enthusiasm, his oblivion was swift, almost total. There had been little proportion in the dramatic burial of this quiet man whose integrity expressed itself in modesty. And subsequent to his death, by a kind of ironic inversion, there has been no proper ratio between O'Kelly's literary reputation and the honest merit of his work. Perhaps the key to both his limitation as an artist and his neglect in literary history lies in this modesty. It was not, to be sure, a mock modesty. "Too manly to be self-deprecatory," Seumas O'Connelly reminisces, "if O'Kelly was growing surer of himself as he progressed in his art, it was a very silent growth in him. He was rather shy than diffident . . . he was the least self-assertive of bards and generous in others' praise. In the witty, competitive Dublin of the early twentieth century where writers struggled not only for literary reputation but contested in the art of self-perpetuation by means of mask and pose, it would seem that Seumas O'Kelly was uniquely without role. He was a man of talent without assumption.

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