When Robert Frost was given an honorary degree at Oxford University a few years ago, he stopped in Ireland to receive the same honor from the University of Ireland. Frost met Austin Clarke, earlier a very promising Irish poet who, through too many years of personal anguish, had lost his touch. But Frost was anxious to talk with Clarke, and taking him aside, they spent several hours together, Clarke later said that Frost asked him what kind of verse he wrote and uncertain of the proper answer he blurted out. "I load myself with chains and try to get out of them."

"Good lord!" exclaimed Frost, "you can't have many readers." In fact, Clarke's readership was never impressive and rarely extended beyond the shores of his homeland. Yet until his death last year at the age of 78. Austin Clarke had claim to the grandest title of the richest language in the world: Ireland's greatest living poet. It was not a claim that went unchallenged, for some maintain that Thomas Kinsella had and continues to hold the title hands down. But since W.B. Yeats's death in 1939, Clarke was Ireland's unofficial poet laureate. The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke (Oxford University Press, 568 pp., $20.00) celebrates the recognition of Clarke's poetry that came so slowly during his life.

Clarke's poetry was the first to present faithfully in English the traditions of Irish Folklore and the intensity of Gaelic verse forms. Before him, Yeats and James Stephens--and even earlier in the 19th century, James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson--had attempted to revive in literature the traditions that had so long been suppressed during the English occupation. But while these earlier poets--Yeats especially--had helped create a profoundly nationalistic poetry for Irish writers, Clarke was the first to complete the task: he brought ancient Irish mythological themes to life in the same exciting way Robert Fitzgerald has brought the Iliad to modern English readers.

Austin Clarke's poetry is divided here into the three major periods of his life. The publication in 1917 of his first long poem, "The Vengeance of Fionn" set the mood for his early narratives based on the saga cycles of ancient Ireland. These include the Fiannaigheacht, a series of stories about Fionn MacChumhall and his young, unmarried, Fenian warriors, 2000-year-old stories that were lost to the mainstream of Irish consciousness but survived and multiplied among the peasantry; and the Ulster cycle, another series whose central epic, the Tain, relates the deeds of the mighty hero, Cuchulain, and the fights between king Conchobor's Ulster and other regions of Ireland.

"The Vengeance of Fionn," is the story of Grainne, the betrothed of Fionn, and how after she elopes with Diarmuid, Flonn wreaks his savage vengeance upon them. The poem begins with the same engulfing lyrical rhythms that were to characterize much of Clarke's earlier poetry; their sense of grace and music--especially when heard on recordings with Clarke's thick brogue--is perhaps the best this century has yet to offer, combining the rhythms of the symbolist tradition with the sharper forms of the imagists. When Fionn first learns that the two lovers have escaped, for instance. Clarke uses swift lines and the fierce play of light and dark to depict Fionn's tormented rage:

In shadowy corners--through tapestries night airs.

Whistled and waned--outside the torches tore

The night with windy flame--the frightened mares

And foals whinnied--hounds bayed their hunger--at last

With shouts, toss of torchlights, swept in a blast

Through clouds of stampeded dust, lashurged

The stallions screamed, the shuddering chariots creaked

Madder than mountain oakboughs stormfully wreaked

And the parched axles rumbling in the naves

Grew hot as when their hammered bronze was forged