Oliver St John Gogarty (Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty) Biography

Irish poet and memoirist, born in Dublin, where he trained as a surgeon at Trinity College's medical school. In 1904 he and James Joyce lived briefly in the Martello Tower at Sandymount that provides the setting for the start of Ulysses, in which Gogarty is cast as ‘stately plump Buck Mulligan’. He was a senator of the Irish Free State for fourteen years and was well known in Irish public and literary life. His volumes of verse include Hyperthuleana (1916), An Offering of Swans (1923), and Wild Apples (1928). W. B. Yeats thought highly of his poetry, featuring seventeen poems by Gogarty in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), a representation generally considered disproportionate to his importance as a poet. He possessed, however, a distinct lyrical talent and a sharply epigrammatic wit. Collected Poems appeared in 1951. The Abbey Theatre produced several of his plays, among them Blight (1917) and The Enchanted Trousers (1919). In 1939 he moved to New York, occupying himself mainly with writing and lecturing. He is best known for the prose memoirs As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) and It Isn't this Time of Year at all (1954); Tumbling in the Hay (1939) is a semi-autobiographical novel of considerable comic individuality. Oliver St John Gogarty: Man of Many Talents by J. B. Lyons was published in 1980.