Anthony Cronin


Anthony Gerard Richard Cronin was an Irish poet, arts activist, biographer, commentator, critic, editor and barrister.

Early life and family

Cronin was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford in December 1928. After obtaining a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, he entered the King's Inns and was later called to the Bar.
Cronin was married to Thérèse Campbell, from whom he separated in the mid-1980s. She died in 1999. They had two daughters, Iseult and Sarah; Iseult was killed in a road accident in Spain.
Cronin in his eighties suffered from ailing health which prevented him from travelling abroad, thus limiting his dealings to local matters. He died on 27 December 2016 at the age of 88, having married a second wife, the writer Anne Haverty; his daughter Sarah also survived him.

Activism

Cronin is best known as an arts activist, rather than an artist. He was Cultural Adviser to the Taoiseach Charles Haughey. He involved himself in initiatives such as Aosdána, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Heritage Council. He was a founding member of Aosdána and was elected its first Saoi in 2003. Cronin was a member of its governing body, the Toscaireacht, until his death. He was also a member of the governing bodies of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland, of which he was Acting Chairman.
With Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Con Leventhal, Cronin celebrated the first Bloomsday in 1954. He contributed to many television programmes, including Flann O'Brien: Man of Parts and Folio.
From 1966 to 1968 Cronin was a visiting lecturer at the University of Montana and from 1968 to 1970 he was poet in residence at Drake University. Cronin read a selection of his poems for the in 2015. He had honorary doctorates from several institutions, including Dublin University, the National University of Ireland and the University of Poznan.

Writing

Cronin began his literary career as a contributor to Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art. He was editor of The Bell in the 1950s and literary editor of Time and Tide. He wrote a weekly column, "Viewpoint", in The Irish Times from 1974 to 1980. Later he contributed a column on poetry to the Sunday Independent.
His first collection of poems, called simply Poems, was published in 1958. Several collections followed and his Collected Poems was published in 2004. The End of the Modern World, written over several decades, was his final publication.
Cronin's novel, The Life of Riley, is a satire on bohemian life in Ireland in the mid-20th century, while his memoir Dead as Doornails addresses the same subject.
Cronin knew Samuel Beckett slightly, from when they did some work for the BBC during the 1950s and 1960s. Cronin gave a prefatory talk to Patrick Magee's reading of The Unnamable on the BBC Third Programme. Beckett was not impressed: "Cronin delivered his discourse… It was all right, not very exciting". Cronin waited until Beckett had died to publish a 645-page tome on him. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist followed on from No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien, another posthumous effort - though on that occasion on a writer he knew better.