The soul of John Montague was witness to a lifelong standoff between Irish piety and cosmopolitan licence. Lonely on a Fulbright Fellowship at Yale in 1954, Montague followed his tribal instincts and sought out the local Tyrone Men’s Association. Shortly afterwards, the young poet dramatically outgrew the rituals of the Irish dinner dance by meeting and marrying Madeleine de Brauer, the chateau-dwelling descendant of a Napoleonic general who features in War and Peace.

Rapid transitions, not all of them this pleasant, were a feature of Montague’s long life. Born in Brooklyn in 1929, he was sent home at the age of four to Tyrone, where he was raised by his aunts. When his mother returned from the USA, she took her older two sons into the family home but left John, the youngest, with her sisters. The resulting sense of rejection is the key to the personality explored in Adrian Frazier’s exemplary biography. At school, Montague’s self-doubt took physical form. Put on the spot by a teacher, he began to stammer. The condition never left him and, in later life, often made his poetry readings a difficult experience – for poet and audience. Montague’s name is often linked to Seamus Heaney’s, but for all the two men’s similarities as Northern Irish nationalist poets, Montague’s youthful formation took place in a very different world from Heaney’s. Studying at University College Dublin, he was a contemporary of the lordly Denis Donoghue, but tasted the rougher side of literary life amid the cenacle of McDaid’s pub, where he encountered the obstreperous Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh.

Two other striking figures on the scene were Garech Browne and Liam Miller. A Guinness heir and Anglo-Irish Maecenas, Browne hosted riotous parties at his country house in the Wicklow Mountains and used his label, Claddagh Records, to champion traditional music and poetry. Miller’s Dolmen Press published Montague’s first collection,