John Hewitt (poet)

[2] Hewitt had an active political life, describing himself as "a man of the left", and was involved in the British Labour Party, the Fabian Society and the Belfast Peace League.

[9] Roberta was also a convinced Socialist, and the couple became members of the Independent Labour Party, the Belfast Peace League, the Left Book Club[3] and the British Civil Liberties Union.

Firstly, his role models (including Vachel Lindsay) became more modern; secondly, he discovered in Chinese poetry a voice which was "quiet and undemonstrative but clear and direct",[10] and which answered a part of Hewitt's temperament which had been suppressed.

Finally, and most importantly, he began his lifelong work of excavation and discovery of the poetry of Ulster, starting with Richard Rowley, Joseph Campbell and George William Russell (AE).

The 1930s was a period of transition in Hewitt's poetry, one in which he began seriously to address the history of his native province, and the contradictions between his love for the people and the landscape, his inspiration in the radical dissenting tradition, and the conflicts which mark Northern Ireland.

A key text is The Bloody Brae: A Dramatic Poem (finished in 1936, though not broadcast – on the Northern Ireland Home Service of the BBC – until 1954; the Belfast Lyric Players performed a stage version in 1957, which they revived in 1986), which tells of a legendary massacre of Roman Catholics by Cromwellian troops in Islandmagee, County Antrim, in 1642.

[1] From the late thirties Hewitt was one of a set of Linen Hall Library members who would regularly retire to Campbell's Cafe in Belfast's city centre.

[11] The regulars, at various points, included writers John Boyd, Denis Ireland, Sam Hanna Bell and Richard Rowley, actors Joseph Tomelty, Jack Loudon and J.G.

Devlin, the poet Robert Greacen, artists Padraic Woods, Gerard Dillon, Harry Cooke Knox and William Conor and (an outspoken opponent of sectarianism) the Rev.

[12] During the 1940s and 1950s, Hewitt helped young Ulster poets by providing them with room, board and advice while he increasingly played the role of reviewer and art critic.