The Irish-American author Padraic Colum (1881-1972), best known for his poetry and plays, was active in the Irish Literary Revival. Padraic Colum was born in County Longford and as a youth met many who had lived through the Great Famine, which ravaged...

At one point during the discussion of Dublin's literary life that takes place in the National Library in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalus overhears the following comment: "I liked Colum's Drover. Yes,I think he has...

Byline: Shane Phelan BERTIE Ahern yesterday gave his longest and most passionate insistencethat he and NCB stockbroker boss Padraic OConnor were friends during theNineties a claim Mr OConnor has repeatedly denied on oath. In a passionate outburst, the Taoiseach rattled off...

"When you read Colum McCann's newest book, Everything in This Country Must (Metropolitan, $21), you'll know what it is to hear a symphony without instruments. Setting these two stories and a novella in his native Ireland, McCann chooses children as the eyes and voices...

It is wholly proper that Padraic Colum is best known as poet, for his poems are his most significant contribution to literature…. To dismiss Colum's style as merely straightforward, accurate, or simple, as many critics have done, is to do the craftsmanship of the poetry a considerable disservice. The way Colum says things is very often beautiful and his poetic scenes and the characters as delightful as they are unassuming and familiar. His language is unpretentious and his verse forms are pred...

Padraic Colum was the first of the peasant dramatists, in the strict sense of the word; he was, that is to say, the first to dramatise the realities of rural life in Ireland. Where Synge's fantastic intuition divined human prototypes, Colum's realistic insight revealed local peasant types, whose general significance is subordinate to the immediate purpose of the dramatist. Together they define the limits within which our folk-drama has developed, for none of the later playwrights has added any...

[Though] "Balloon" cannot be regarded as an "intellectual" play, it is none the less true that its writing must have first been impelled by a general idea. To put it briefly, Mr. Colum purports to show that a man's acts are significant only as they are expressions of his own inner being, and that a world where action becomes a value in itself is a ludicrous and empty show. But this is the world we live in; and in the play it is represented by the great hotel in Megalopolis...