In 1927, Devlin abandoned the priesthood and left Clonliffe. He graduated with from UCD his BA in 1930 and spent that summer on the Blasket Islands to improve his spoken Irish. Between 1930 and 1933, he studied literature at Munich University and the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting, amongst others, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy. He then returned to UCD to complete his MAthesis on Montaigne.
His niece Denyse Woods went on to become a writer.
Diplomatic career and later writings
He joined the Irish Diplomatic Service in 1935 and spent a number of years in Rome, New York and Washington. During this time he met the French poet Saint-John Perse, and the Americans Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. He went on to publish a translation of Exile and Other Poems by St-John Perse, and Tate and Warren edited his posthumous Selected Poems.
Since his death, there have been two Collected Poems published; the first in 1964 was edited by Coffey[2] and the second in 1989 by J.C.C. Mays.[3]
Jack Morgan. Denis Devlin (1908-1959). In: Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Alexander G. Gonzalez (Editor), pp. 64–68. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. ISBN978-0-313-29557-7
Wilson, James Matthew: Catholic modernism and the Irish "avant-garde": the achievement of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevy, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023, ISBN978-0-8132-3763-3
