A life in love with verse - the passion for poetry of Tom Quinlan of Gluckman House

“You can live a long, happy life without reading a poem or listening to Beethoven, but your life is diminished”

Joe Quinlan is thrilled that among all the scholars and poetic luminaries celebrated at the Ireland House, there is now enshrined the name Tom Quinlan, a dedicated high school teacher. Tom Quinlan taught at nights and on weekends and during the summer, and worked a second job as a real estate agent to send his sons through college. Dinnertime conversation was unusual.

"In other families, kids grew up talking about politics and sports," Joe Quinlan recalls. "My father would be talking about poets and poetry and Walden. He read Walden every summer for 40 years and went on a pilgrimage there with one of his grandsons."

While Joe Quinlan devoured Sports Illustrated and Time, his father was a devotee of the New Yorker, which he read religiously for the poems. When Joe took his dad to Phillies games, Tom would bring along a folded copy of the New Yorker. When the action on the field flagged, he would reread a poem that fascinated or baffled him.

"His big thing is to read a poem and think about it a little bit, then think about it a little bit more," Joe says. "He's been this way throughout his life."

After Quinlan retired from teaching at Lincoln High School, he began taking poetry courses at Bucks County Community College. His fondness for Irish poetry inspired him to visit his ancestral homeland at age 70.

In Sligo, in northwest Ireland, he enrolled in the William Butler Yeats Poetry Festival, an intense immersion in Irish poetry that occurs over two weeks in the summer. At night there were numerous readings, and Quinlan became familiar with a wide range of Irish poets, such as Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, and especially William Butler Yeats. "To me, he's a giant," Quinlan says. "He's like Walt Whitman or Robert Frost is here."

Quinlan so enjoyed the experience that he returned 10 times, deepening his knowledge and passion for Irish poetry with each visit. He grew to appreciate what Yeats, in his poem "Coole Park," meant by "The intellectual sweetness of those lines / That cut through time or cross it withershins."

In the course he teaches at Delaware Valley College, Quinlan does not confine himself to Irish poetry. Judging from some recent class handouts, the poets and poems range from the classic to the modern and include the likes of Robert Browning, John Milton, John Keats, W.H. Auden, Lord Byron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Levertov, Billy Collins, Miroslav Holub, Philip Levine, Tony Hoagland, Robert Pinsky, Amy Lowell, and Theodore Roethke.

"He really lives for and cares about poetry," Joe Quinlan says of his father. "I know people who love poetry and write it all the time. He is rare in that he doesn't write poetry; he just loves to read it."

Anne Brown, 89, of Lahaska, has been attending Quinlan's poetry class for five years.

"He can recite poetry, and he puts us all to shame with his general knowledge of poetry, which is very impressive," Brown says. "His passion for poetry comes through, and his classes are always interesting. He gives us an overview of everything, including some of the modern poets.

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