Maurice Scully
Irish poet
Maurice Scully (1952 – 5 March 2023) was an Irish poet who worked in the modernist tradition. Scully was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College. He was a member of Aosdana.
Life
After some years living in Italy, Africa and the west of Ireland, he settled with his wife and four children in Dublin.
Scully died in Bolea, Spain on 5 March 2023.
The Beau
The Beau was an annual literary journal edited by Scully. It ran to three issues: 1981, 1982/83 and 1983/84. Although the journal was short-lived, its contributor list, featuring writers from Ireland, Britain and the United States, was impressive and it played an important role in the emergence of a number of experimental Irish poets. It also carried reproductions by a number of Irish artists.
Contributors included Roy Fisher, Knute Skinner, William Oxley, Randolph Healy, Brian Coffey, David Wright, Paul Durcan, John Freeman, John Jordan, Anthony Cronin, Gavin Ewart, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, George Barker, Dermot Bolger Billy Mills and Jim Burns.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maurice Scully” is irish poet. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maurice, Scully and Irish, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “irish poet” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6793462. VIAF identifies the subject as 8727664. The Library of Congress control number is n82057378. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 2023, 1981 and 1982.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maurice Scully” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.