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 that queer thing, genius." Joyce is, as usual, quite accurate in this contemporary judgment of the young Padraic Colum. In 1904, the year of Bloomsday, Colum was very much a part of all the activity that later came to be remembered as the Irish literary revival, and several of the poems that he had published by that time did, indeed, seem to hold the promise of "that queer thing, genius." And although Colum's name is much less likely to come to mind now in discussions of the literary revival, his contribution to modern Irish literature cannot be ignored; for it was Colum--writing out of his childhood experience of life in the midlands of Ireland, and writing in a style that largely eschewed the literary self-consciousness and the mythic and symbolic dimensions that colored much of the work of the revival--who most accurately expressed the sensibility of the Irish peasant that larger figures like W.B.
