Life
[Pseud. of Thomas Woods; var. Wood]; civil servant and critic; wrote in Irish Times as ‘Thersites’; noted for attacks on Myles
na Goppaleen.
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Works
{As Thomas Hogan], ‘Myles na gCopaleen’, in The Bell, XIII,
2 (1946), pp.126-40 [a witty ad hominem attack.
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Commentary
Thomas Kilroy, ‘The Anglo-Irish theatrical Imagination’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter
1997/Spring 1998), pp.5-11: ‘In the 1950s, Dublin had an exceptional
book and theatre reviewer (now forgotten, I’m afraid) who called
himself Thomas Hogan. (His real name was Woods and like many other Irish
Civil Servants of the day he adopted a pseudonym, but everyone in Dublin,
of course, knew the secret identity.) Writing in the magazine Envoy,
he described the playwright Denis Johnston as the last of the Anglo-Irish
playwrights, the product, as he put it, of a ‘literature written
in English, which was certainly not English literature and equally as
certain not Irish’. ‘The Anglo-Irish have become finally and
completely deracine, except for those who have completely accepted the
new order.’ And then, drawing upon a spectral image out of Denis
Johnston’s best-known play, The Old Lady Says ‘No’!: ‘It
is not possible to be an Anglo-Irish writer any more. The old blind fiddler
with his mysterious ways and his dark traditions, has moved in.’
(Envoy, 3, 9, 1950, p.33; here p.8.)
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