One of the leading Irish poets of the generation after William Butler Yeats, Austin Clarke also wrote verse drama, novels, and criticism. From his parents he imbibed the Irish nationalism of his father and the stern religious conscience of his mother. As a boy he attended the same Belvedere College as James Joyce and later attended University College, Dublin. He was appointed to a teaching post for a three-year term, but a nervous breakdown, an abortive marriage, and the nonrenewal of his teaching position led to Clarke's departure in 1922 for England, where he spent most of the next 15 years. Chosen as a charter member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1932, Clarke returned to Dublin… permanently in 1937 and devoted himself largely to writing verse drama. A lifelong Roman Catholic, he took a leading role in the battle against censorship, which had already banned some of his books from his native country. His final years saw a renewed outpouring of poetry, much of it on social issues. Clarke's early poetry turned to Celtic themes and adaptations. Unlike Yeats and others, he knew enough Gaelic to read his sources in the original, and he tried to reproduce some of their complex patterns of assonance in his own verse. For the last 20 years of his career, he focused more on contemporary social issues. Throughout his poetry, Clarke displayed both technical skill, particularly in his complex assonance, and a thematic preoccupation with the struggle between conscience and repression. When asked by Robert Frost to describe his poetry, he remarked, "I load myself with chains and then try to get out of them."