EARTH OF CUALANN; With Twenty-One Designs by the Author

Dublin: Maunsel and Company, Ltd, 1917. First LImited Edition. Hardcover. Very Good Plus / Good. Joseph Campbell (MacCathmhaoil, Seosamh). Octavo, 6 x 9.5 in., pp. 62. Limited edition, number 298/500. Illustrated with twenty-one black ink drawings. Gray cloth boards over white spine, with matching endpapers. Gilt title to spine. Deckled edges. Light rubbing to corners and edges. Signature of previous owner. dated 1919, to front pastedown. Dustjacket designer gray paper with black title to front panel and spine. Sunning to upper third of dust jacket; chips to top and one inch chip to middle of spine. Campbell, Joseph (1879-1944), poet and republican, was born 15 July 1879 at Loreto Cottage, Castlereagh Road, Belfast, seventh among ten children of William Henry Campbell (1842-1900), road-building contractor, and Catherine Campbell (née Canmer; d. 1918) of Belfast. From his father, a catholic and a Parnellite, he imbibed fervent nationalist politics, and from his mother, of mixed catholic-presbyterian stock, a strong interest in Gaelic culture. He spent much of his youth on his paternal grandfather's farm at Florrybridge, south Co. Armagh, where he developed a love of nature and local folklore. Educated at St Matthew's national school and at St Malachy's College, Belfast, where he excelled as a student, he left school in 1895 and was apprenticed to his father.

A sensitive, moody, and solitary boy, in 1895 he succumbed to a nervous illness that lasted three years and limited his ability to work, but allowed him time to read widely. After his father died in 1900, Joseph took over the family business. His nationalist leanings were encouraged by the 1798 centenary celebrations and the Boer war (1899-1902).

Around 1900 he joined the Gaelic League, used the Irish form of his name, ‘Seosamh MacCathmaoil', and became a fluent Irish-speaker. He became a member of the informal ‘Firelight club' that regularly met at Ardrigh, the home of F. J. Bigger ... and contributed poems regularly to Arthur Griffith's (United Irishman and Standish O'Grady's (All Ireland Review. Steeped in Ulster folklore and proud of the north's radical and dissenting tradition, he loved its robust vernacular and believed that its racial and linguistic differences had created a rich and resilient culture; his own work draws heavily on both Gaelic legend and Scottish folk-tale...

Soon after the publication of his first volume of verse, The garden of the bees (1904), he moved to Dublin, where he obtained work as a clerk ...

Earth of Cualann (1917) was inspired by the landscape of north-east Co. Wicklow: its pared-down pieces show strong Imagist influences such as the use of free verse (he had known Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme in London). However, Campbell acknowledged a greater debt to Walt Whitman and William Blake, the two poets he most admired. He also admired the poetry of W. B. Yeats, but regarded him personally as ‘a poltroon'...

Caught up in the political excitement of these years, Campbell was a founding member of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin... He engaged in reconnaissance during the 1916 rising, after which he sheltered Desmond FitzGerald, and his home was raided. In 1917 he joined Sinn Féin and assisted in several of their election campaigns (1917-20). A member of the republican district court for east Wicklow (1918-20) and vice-chairman of Wicklow county council (1920-21), he earned considerable unpopularity for attacking nepotism in the county council, and resigned 25 June 1921...Strongly opposed to the treaty, particularly its acceptance of partition, he assisted the republicans in north Wicklow in the civil war and was arrested by Free State troops in Bray on 7 July 1922 and imprisoned in Mountjoy. ... During a hunger strike by the prisoners to secure their release, Campbell went ten days without food (19-28 October 1923). Released 23 December 1923, he was hardened and embittered, his religious faith shattered by the catholic church's condemnations of the anti-treatyites. ...

He cherished an abstract ideal of Ireland but bemoaned its censorship laws, materialism, and cultural stagnation, and denounced the national schools for turning out ‘appalling types-tittering, cigarette-smoking girls and uncouth boys' ....

He died from heart disease 5 June 1944 at Lackandaragh. Roibeárd Ó Faracháin recalled him as ‘a simple man, with both kinds of simplicity: the kind which over-simplifies, and the kind that never complicates.

(From Dictionary of Irish Biography).