![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Tracing the relationship between P.H. [Patrick Henry] Pearse (1879–1916) and Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), this essay explores the impact their friendship had on their careers as writers and critics. Their work together in St Enda’s, the school for boys founded by Pearse in 1908, provides a significant context for this exploration. There, while working with MacDonagh, Pearse made drama an important part of school life and started writing plays for public performance. Meanwhile, their collaboration in putting together the St. Enda’s school journal, An Macaomh (1909–1913), helped to hone MacDonagh’s skills as a literary critic and to prepare for his later editorial role at the Irish Review (1911–1914). Attention then turns to how MacDonagh’s views on Irish literature and his translations from Old Irish influenced his friend’s development as both a critic and poet. Paticular consideration is paid to “Mise Éire”, one of Pearse’s best-known poems. Finally, similarities are considered between MacDonagh and the hero of The Wandering Hawk (1915–1916), Pearse’s unfinished, English-language, school story for children. Taken together, these various investigations reveal that, despite differing temperaments and at times divergent approaches to Irish writing, Pearse and MacDonagh enjoyed a mutually stimulating friendship that impacted positively on their literary careers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, 7, 8.
2. Pearse, The Home-life of Pádraig Pearse, 63.
3. Ibid., 64–78.
4. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, 7, 8, 14, 15.
5. Pearse, “Recent Booklets,” 4; and “About Literature,” 7.
6. Markey, “Patrick Pearse: Literary Pioneer and Propagandist,” 39.
7. See Ó Coigligh, “Filíocht Ghaeilge Phádraig Mhic Phiarais” and “Filíocht Ghaeilge Phádraig Mhic Phiarais; cuid a dó” for an account and nalysis of Pearse’s Irish-language poetry.
8. Kenna, Thomas MacDonagh, 25, 35.
9. Cited in Parks and Parks, Thomas MacDonagh, 78.
10. Ibid., 7.
11. MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, 64–82.
12. Kenna, Thomas MacDonagh, 50.
13. Parks and Parks, Thomas MacDonagh, 14.
14. Kenna, Thomas MacDonagh, 71.
15. Crowley, Patrick Pearse, 46.
16. Pearse, “By Way of Comment,” An Macaomh 2, no. 2, 7.
17. O’Conluain, “This Man Had Kept a School.”
18. MacDonagh, NLI MS 8,903.
19. Parks and Parks, Thomas MacDonagh, 19.
20. Ryan, “St Enda’s; Fifty Years After,” 83.
21. Ibid., 84.
22. O’Conluain, “This Man Had Kept a School”; and McGarry, “Memories of Scoil Eanna,” 36.
23. MacDonagh, NLI MS 10,855.
24. Ní Ghairbhí, Willie Pearse, 18.
25. Ibid.
26. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, 121.
27. Pearse, “Annálana Scoile,” 86.
28. Ní Ghairbhí and McNulty, Patrick Pearse, 19.
29. Ryan, Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse, 92.
30. Ní Ghairbhí and McNulty, Patrick Pearse, 46, 370.
31. Augusteijn, Patrick Pearse, 174.
32. Ní Ghairbhí and McNulty, Patrick Pearse, 38.
33. Pearse, “By Way of Comment”, An Macaomh 1, no. 1, 7.
34. Pearse, “By way of Comment”, An Macaomh 2, no. 2, 7.
35. Pearse, “By Way of Comment”, An Macaomh 1:1, 12–13.
36. Cited in Parks and Parks, Thomas MacDonagh, 21.
37. MacDonagh, “The Personal in the New Poetry,” 30.
38. Ibid., 32.
39. Ibid., 30.
40. Meyer, “Eve’s Lament,” 148.
41. Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 50–51; I am grateful to Christina Cleary and Mícheál Hoyne for their advice on what constitutes a “dán díreach”.
42. MacDonagh, “The Personal in the New Poetry,” 31.
43. Ibid., 30.
44. Pearse, “Some Aspects of Irish Literature,” 811.
45. Ibid., 817.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 817, 812.
49. “Mise Éire” was first published in Barr Buadh, 30 March 1912, and reprinted in Suantraidhe agus Goltraidhe, 17. Pearse later translated the poem into English and it was published posthumously in Plays, Stories, Poems as “I am Ireland”.
50. Pearse, Plays, Stories, Poems, 323.
51. Ní Ghairbhí, “The battle before us now is a Battle of Words,” 159, 161.
52. De Paor, “Irish Language Modernisms,” 163.
53. Gifford, The Years Flew By, 19.
54. MacDonagh, NLI MS 44,318/3/2.
55. See note 53 above.
56. Pearse, “Specimens from an Irish Anthology,” Irish Review 1, no. 1, 45; and Pearse, “By Way of Comment,” An Macaomh 1, no. 2, 12.
57. McCormack, “Preparing for the ‘end times’,” 24.
58. Kiberd, “Writers in Quarantine?” 16.
59. Pearse, “Specimens from an Irish Anthology,” Irish Review 1, no. 4, 193.
60. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, volume 2, 143.
61. De Paor, “Irish Language Modernisms,” 163.
62. Ó Muimhneacháin, Dánta Ard-Teastas 1968–69, 16.
63. Augusteijn, “The Road to Rebellion,” 15.
64. Kiberd,”Patrick Pearse: Irish Modernist,” 78.
65. MacDonagh, “Criticism and Irish poetry,” Irish Review 4, no. 39, 137.
66. Ibid., 139.
67. Ibid., 139–40.
68. Henebry, “Revival Irish,” 587.
69. Cronin, “Half the Picture.”
70. MacDonagh, “Criticism and Irish Poetry,” 142.
71. Ó Buachalla, The Letters of P. H. Pearse, 313–4.
72. Ibid., 316–7.
73. See, for example, Fisher, Intent upon Reading, 171; Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy, 91–92; and Grenby, Children’s Literature, 103.
74. Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches, 112.
75. The charismatic teacher was named after John Kilgallon, a wealthy young American who came to St. Enda’s in 1914 as a university resident and went on to take part in the 1916 Rising. Pearse, who stayed with the Kilgallon family in Far Rockaway during his fundraising tour in America, seems to have been unaware that John was being sued for damages by the family of a young woman who was paralysed as a result of an accident when she was a passenger in a stolen car driven by young Kilgallon; see Marion R. Casy, “Remembering the Rising of John Kilgallon, Irish Independent, 11 December 2016 at https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/remembering-the-rising-of-john-kilgallon-35284286.html (accessed 7 March 2019.
76. Pearse, The Wandering Hawk, 177.
77. Ibid., 170.
78. Kenna, Thomas MacDonagh, 77.
79. Pearse, The Murder Machine, 41; and Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters, 143.
80. Clarke, A Penny in the Clouds, 22.
81. MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, 151.