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Death of Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poet & Translator

Denis Florence MacCarthy, Irish poet, translator, and biographer, dies at 7 Herbert Terrace, Blackrock, Dublin, on April 7, 1882.

MacCarthy is born in Lower O’Connell Street, Dublin, on May 26, 1817, and educated there and at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He acquires an intimate knowledge of Spanish from a learned priest, who had spent much time in Spain, which he is later to turn to good advantage. In April 1834, before turning seventeen, he contributes his first verses to the Dublin Satirist. He is one of a coterie of writers whose works appear in The Nation, which is started by Charles Gavan Duffy in 1842. Writing under the pseudonym “Desmond,” most of MacCarthy’s patriotic verse appears in this organ.

In 1846, MacCarthy is called to the Irish bar but never practises. In the same year he edits The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, which he prefaces with an essay on the early history and religion of his countrymen. About this time, he also edits The Book of Irish Ballads (by various authors), with an introductory essay on ballad poetry in general. His Ballads, Poems, and Lyrics appears in 1850, original and translated. His attention is first directed to Pedro Calderón de la Barca by a passage in one of Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s essays, and from then on, the interpretation of the “Spanish Shakespeare” claims the greater part of his attention.

The first volume of MacCarthy’s translations, containing six plays, appears in 1853, and is followed by further instalments in 1861, 1867, 1870, and 1873. His version of Daybreak in Capacabana is completed only a few months before his death.

Until 1864, MacCarthy resides principally on Killiney Hill, overlooking Dublin Bay. The delicate health of some members of his family then renders a change of climate imperative, and he pays a prolonged visit to continental Europe. On his return, he settles in London in 1871, where he publishes – in addition to his translations – Shelley’s Early Life, which contains an account of that poet’s visit to Dublin in 1812.

During MacCarthy’s final illness he returns to Dublin, settling at 7 Herbert Terrace, Blackrock, and died there on Good Friday, April 7, 1882. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His memorial committee includes Cardinals John Henry Newman and Edward McCabe, a lifelong friend, Thomas (Lord) O’Hagan, Gavan Duffy, Timothy Daniel Sullivan, and the poets Aubrey Thomas de Vere and Sir Samuel Ferguson. The committee finances the publication of his Poems (1882), edited by his eldest son, John, a minor poet living in London, and commission a bust by Thomas Farrell which is displayed at City Hall, Dublin. His poetical gifts are inherited by his daughter, who becomes a nun and writes as Sister Mary Stanislaus.

MacCarthy’s poems are distinguished by a sense of harmony and sympathy with natural beauty. Such poems as “The Bridal of the Year,” “Summer Longings” (alias “Waiting for the May”), and his long narrative poem, “The Voyage of St. Brendan,” are among his most enduring works. The last-mentioned, which paraphrases the “Ave Maria Stella” as the evening song of the sailors, is also marked by the earnest religious feeling which mark its author throughout life. But it is by his version of Calderon that he is considered to have won a permanent place in English letters. His success is sufficiently testified by George Ticknor, who declares in his History of Spanish Literature that MacCarthy “has succeeded in giving a faithful idea of what is grandest and most effective in [Calderon’s] genius… to a degree which I had previously thought impossible. Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic of the Spanish drama, and of Spanish poetry generally.”


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Birth of Sir Aubrey (Hunt) de Vere

aubrey-hunt-de-vere

Sir Aubrey (Hunt) de Vere, 2nd Baronet, Anglo-Irish poet and landowner, is born on August 28, 1788.

De Vere is the son of Sir Vere Hunt, 1st Baronet and Eleanor Pery, daughter of William Pery, 1st Baron Glentworth. He is educated at Harrow School, where he is a childhood friend of Lord Byron, and Trinity College, Dublin. He marries Mary Spring Rice, the daughter of Stephen Edward Rice and Catherine Spring, and sister of Thomas Spring Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon, in 1807. He succeeds to his father’s title in 1818.

The Hunt/de Vere family estate of 300 years (1657–1957), including the period of the de Vere Baronetcy of Curragh, is the present day Curraghchase Forest Park, in County Limerick. De Vere spends most of his life on the estate and is closely involved in its management. He suffers much trouble from his ownership of the island of Lundy, which his father, who was not much of a businessman, had unwisely purchased in 1802, and which becomes a heavy drain on the family’s finances. Sir Vere is never able to find a purchaser for Lundy, and it takes his son until 1834 to dispose of it.

De Vere stands for election in the 1820 General Election and comes in third with 2,921 votes.

De Vere changes his surname from Hunt to de Vere in 1832, in reference to his Earl of Oxford ancestors, dating back to Aubrey de Vere I, a tenant-in-chief in England of William the Conqueror in 1086. He serves as High Sheriff of County Limerick in 1811.

De Vere is a poet. William Wordsworth calls his sonnets the most perfect of the age. These and his drama, Mary Tudor: An Historical Drama, are published by his son, the poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere, in 1875 and 1884.

De Vere produces numerous works over his lifetime. The most notable are Ode to the Duchess of Angouleme (1815), Julian the Apostate: A Dramatic Poem (1822), The Duke of Mercia: An Historical Drama [with] The Lamentation of Ireland, and Other Poems (1823), A Song of Faith: Devout Exercises and Sonnets and his most famous work, Mary Tudor: An Historical Drama.

Sir Aubrey de Vere dies on July 5, 1846.


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Birth of Aubrey Thomas de Vere, Critic & Poet

aubrey-de-vere

Aubrey Thomas de Vere, a critic and poet who adapts early Gaelic tales, is born on January 10, 1814, at Curraghchase House, now in ruins at Curraghchase, Kilcornan, County Limerick.

Hunt de Vere is the third son of Sir Aubrey de Vere, 2nd Baronet and his wife Mary Spring Rice, daughter of Stephen Edward Rice and Catherine Spring, of Mount Trenchard, County Limerick. He is a nephew of Thomas Spring Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon and a younger brother of Sir Stephen de Vere, 4th Baronet. His sister Ellen marries Robert O’Brien, the brother of William Smith O’Brien. In 1832, his father drops the original surname “Hunt” by royal licence, assuming the surname “de Vere.”

de Vere is strongly influenced by his friendship with the astronomer Sir William Rowan Hamilton through whom he comes to a knowledge and reverent admiration for William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is educated privately at home and in 1832 enters Trinity College, Dublin, where he reads Immanuel Kant and Coleridge. Later he visits Oxford, Cambridge, and Rome, and comes under the potent influence of John Henry Newman. He is also a close friend of Henry Taylor.

The characteristics of de Vere’s poetry are high seriousness and a fine religious enthusiasm. His research in questions of faith leads him to the Roman Catholic Church where in 1851 he is received into the Church by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning in Avignon. In many of his poems, notably in the volume of sonnets called St. Peters Chains (1888), he makes rich additions to devotional verse. For a few years he holds a professorship, under Newman, in the Catholic University in Dublin.

In A Book of Irish Verse, W. B. Yeats describes de Vere’s poetry as having “less architecture than the poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in gray seas of stately impersonal reverie and description, which drift by and leave no definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary.”

de Vere also visits the Lake Country of England, and stays under Wordsworth’s roof, which he calls the greatest honour of his life. His veneration for Wordsworth is singularly shown in later life, when he never omits a yearly pilgrimage to the grave of the poet until advanced age makes the journey impossible.

de Vere is of tall and slender physique, thoughtful and grave in character, of exceeding dignity and grace of manner, and retains his vigorous mental powers to a great age. According to Helen Grace Smith, he is one of the most profoundly intellectual poets of his time. His census return for 1901 lists his profession as “Author.”

Aubrey de Vere dies at Curraghchase on January 20, 1902, at the age of eighty-eight. As he never married, the name of de Vere at his death becomes extinct for the second time and is assumed by his nephew.