Life
1843-1913; b. Cork, 3 May; ed. QCC, TCD, 1859, grad. 1863; m. 1866;
Professor of English at TCD, occupying the newly created chair of English,
1867; friend and correspondent of John Butler Yeats. His Mind and Art (1875), postulating ‘Four Periods’
of the Shakespeare's life corresponding to comedies of youth, histories
of middle age, tragedies of Later life, and the mature comedies of his
final homeward stage; iss. Shakespeare for School Children (1877),
commencing ‘In the closing years of the sixteenth century the life
of England ran high’; attacked by W. B. Yeats in ‘The Poetry
of Sir Samuel Ferguson’, in Irish Fireside (9 Oct. 1886),
rep. Dublin University Review (Nov. 1886); elected Pres. of English
Goethe Soc., 1888; issued ‘Hopes and Fears for Literature’,
Fortnightly Review, Vol. 266 (Feb. 1889), pronouncing inter alia
on the ‘wedlock’ of Irish and English literature; answered in
time by W. B. in essays such as ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’(1892);
first Taylorian lect., Taylor Inst., Oxon., 1889; RIA Cunningham medal
and hon. LLD awarded by Edinburgh and Princeton; m. Elizabeth Dickinson
West, 1895 [see West, RX]; contrib. Contemporary Review; Fortnightly
Reivew; Westminster Review; Fraser’s Magazine, and Cornhill
Magazine; opposed to Home Rule; resided at Rathgar, a close neighbour
of Yeats at Harold’s Cross; d. Dublin, 4 April; there is a signed
portrait by Walter Osborne [NGI]. CAB PI JMC DBIV TAY DIB DIW OCIL
Works
Shakespere: [A Critical Study of] His Mind and Art
(1875) ; Studies in Literature, 1789-1877 (1875), incl.
essay on George Eliot; Poems (1876), poetry; Life of Shelley
(1886); Robert Browning (Dent 1904); Elizabeth Dowden, ed., Poems
by Edward Dowden ([Dent] 1914); ed. Letters of Edward Dowden and
his Correspondents, with H. M. Dowden (1914).
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Criticism
John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I (London:
Macmillan 1970), Pref., pp.41-42; Terence Brown, ‘Edward Dowden’,
[chap. in] The Literature of Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan
1988).
W. B. Yeats, ‘Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson - II’ (in Dublin University Review, Dec. 1886). See also John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, I, 1970, p.104. Note however that Dowden is not mentioned by name in this the last sentence of the article.
W. B. Yeats, Review in Dublin Daily Express (26 Jan & 7 Feb. 1895; and 8 Mar. 1895) [Frayne, op. cit., pp.346-49; 351-53].
Mark Storey, Poetry in Ireland since 1800 1988, p.130.
Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work, S. Illinois UP 1965, p.361.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Modern Irish Poetry’ (1904).
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, NY 1904, Vol. III, pp.vii-xiii; p.xiii.)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.269.
John Frayne, Uncollected Prose, Vol. 2, p.151.)
J. H. Hone, ed., Letters, 1944; Faber Edn., intro. John McGahern, 1993, p.112.
E. A. Boyd, Appreciations and Depreciations, Dublin 1918, p.152
Dowden in Irish Literature and Drama (London 1936), p.117.)
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), pp 12ff, 48-9, 68.
Terence Brown, [‘Edward Dowden’,] in The Literature of Ireland (1988).
Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), p.39.
A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Biography (1988).
John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I (London: Macmillan 1970), Pref., pp.41-42, 270-71.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jon. Cape 1995),75, 114, 273.
John Eglinton, ed., Letters of Dowden and his Correspondents, Dent 1914, p.45
Terence Brown, W. B. Yeats, 1999, p.10.)
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Dictionary of National Biography lists Shakespere, His Mind and Art (1875), and Shakespere Primer (1877) [sic], and so listed in DNB (1950).
John Cooke, Dublin Book of Irish Verse (1910), ‘Awakening’; ‘Swallows’; ‘Sunsets’; ‘Evening’; ‘An Autumn Song’; ‘Life’s Gain’. Elizabeth Dickinson West, Mrs. Edward Dowden, ‘Adrift’; ‘There Shall be no More Sea’ ("Yet though the Blessed need no more the Seas,/Will not God leave her to the Lost?’).
Margaret Drabble, ed., Oxford Companion of English Literature (OUP: 1985), mentioning ‘editions of many single plays’.
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); selects from Transcripts and Studies, ‘The Interpretation of Literature’; ‘England in Shakespeare’s Youth’; and ‘Shakespeare’s Portraiture of Women’; also from Shakespeare, A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, ‘The Humour of Shakespeare’; and poems, ‘Aboard the Sea-Swallow’; ‘Oasis’ [‘Let them go by - the heats, the doubts, the strife;/I can sit here and care not for them now,/Dreaming beside the glimmering wave of life/Once more - I know not how.’ (Three quatrains)] and a sonnet, ‘Leonardo’s Monna Lisa’ (sic; with b/w print of Mona Lisa facing [with a ftn., possibly Dowden) [‘Make thyself known, Sibyl, or let despair/Of knowing thee be absolute, I wait/Hour-long and waste a soul ... Allure us and reject us at thy will’]. ALSO a Shakespeare Primer in the Literature Primers ser. ed. J. R. Green; Southey, in English Men of Letters, gen. ed. John Morley; other titles, Transcripts and Studies; New Studies in Literature; The French Revolution and English Literature; The History of French Literature;, and ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles; The Passionate Pilgrim; The Correspondence of Henry Taylor; and a collection of lyrical ballads. JMC cites W MacNeile Dixon, in A Treasury of Irish Poetry [?1900], writing, ‘He recalls to us Marvell’s fine simplicity, his unfailing sense of the beautiful, his pervading spirituality, his touch of resolute aloofness from the haste and fever of life, his glad and serious temper, his unaffected charm and movement.’
Seamus Deane, gen ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; quotes D. P. Moran, editorial, The Leader (1900), ‘What have we done, what great sin have we committed that Professor Dowden should be put in an anthology, as if he could possess the cunning to strike a note to which the heart of Ireland would respond?’ [FDA2 971-72]; also 967n.
Belfast Public Library holds a centenary life by H. O. White (1943).
Whelan (Cat. 32) lists Poems by Edward Dowden (Dent n.d.).
Dear Sir: Yeats’s “List of 30 Best Irish Books” printed in the letters column of the Daily Express, 27 Feb. 1895
(Wade, ed., Letters, pp.246-51): ‘During our recent controversy
with Profesor Dowden certain of my neighbours here in the West of Ireland
asked me what Irish books they should read [...] Here then is my list,
and I will promise you that there is no book in it that “raves of
Brian Boru” or display an “intellectual brogue” more “accentuated”
than the Scottish characeristics in Scott and Stevenson.’ (ibid.,
p.246; see further under W. B. Yeats.) Yeats’s dispute with Dowden
produced a first letter to the Editor of The Daily Express, 26
Jan. 1895 (Uncollected Prose, p.347; quoted in Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, Vol. 1, 1980
[note err. Press]; also A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Life,
1988, p.79, & n.5, p.357. See also Yeats’s Letter to the Express (7 Feb., 1895): ‘A very amusing proof of the unfounded
nature of one of Professor Dowden’s charges against the Irish literary
movement has just reached me. At the very time Professor Dowden was sending
to the Press an introduction, saying that we indulged in indiscriminate
praise of all things Irish, and went about “plastered with shamrocks
and raving of Brian Boru”, a certain periodical was giving the hospitality
of its pages to a long anonymous letter making a directly contrary charge.
The writer of the letter accused some of the members of the Irish Literary
Society of discouraging “worthy workers in the field”, of endeavouring
to substitute the pursuit of what he called “high art” for the
old, easy-going days when every patriotic writer was as good as his neighbour,
and even of making allegations against the literary merits of the Young
Ireland Party.’ (See John Kelly, ed., Letters, 1, 1986, p.437;
cited in Edna Longley, The Living Stream, 1994, p.16.)
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R. M. Fox gives an unflattering view of Professor Dowden at home in Temple Rd.; see in Fox, Louie Bennet (1950), p.11ff.
J. J. Abraham was lent books by Dowden, who advised him to pursue his medical studies in preference to attempting a literary career. (See Abraham, Surgeon's Journey: The Autobiography of J. J. Abraham, London: Heinemann 1957, 54ff.)
High Dowden?: Dowden’s Shakespeare for school children (1877) begins: ‘In the closing years of the sixteenth century the life of England ran high’ (quoted in Hugh Kenner, Ulysses; rev. edn. London 1987, p.113).
Sell out : A book sale was executed in 1913 (see The Irish Book Lover, Vol. VI, p.28.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)