Aubrey Thomas de Vere

• Name — Aubrey Thomas de Vere • Born — 10 January 1814 • Died — 20 January 1902 • Birthplace — Curraghchase House, Curraghchase, Kilcornan, County Limerick, Ireland • Parents — * Sir Aubrey de Vere, 2nd Baronet • Mary Spring de Vere (' Rice) • Relatives — * Sir Aubrey de Vere, 3rd Baronet • Sir Stephen Edward De Vere, 4th Baronet (brothers) • Lord Monteagle (uncle) • Lucy Knox (cousin) • Occupation — Author • Place of death — Curraghchase, Kilcornan, County Limerick, Ireland • Notable Works — * In verse: • The Sisters (1861) • The Infant Bridal (1864) • Irish Odes (1869) • Legends of St Patrick (1872) • Alexander the Great (1874) • St Thomas of Canterbury (1876) • Legends of the Saxon Saints (1879) • In prose: • Essays Chiefly on Poetry (1887) • Essays Chiefly Literary and Ethical (1889)

Aubrey Thomas Hunt de Vere was born at Curraghchase House (now in ruins) at Curraghchase, Kilcornan, County Limerick, the third son of Sir Aubrey de Vere, 2nd Baronet (1788–1846) and his wife Mary Spring Rice, daughter of Stephen Edward Rice (d.1831) and Catherine Spring, of Mount Trenchard, County Limerick. He was a nephew of Lord Monteagle, a younger brother of Sir Stephen de Vere, 4th Baronet and a cousin of Lucy Knox. His sister Ellen married Robert O'Brien, the brother of William Smith O'Brien. In 1832, his father dropped the original surname 'Hunt' by royal licence, assuming the surname 'de Vere'. The characteristics of Aubrey de Vere's poetry are high seriousness and a fine religious enthusiasm. His research in questions of faith led him to the Roman Catholic Church where in 1851 he was received into the Church by Cardinal Manning in Avignon. In many of his poems, notably in the volume of sonnets called St Peters Chains (1888), he made rich additions to devotional verse. For a few years he held a professorship, under Newman, in the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin. In "A Book of Irish Verse," W. B. Yeats described 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."

His best-known works are: in verse, The Sisters (1861); The Infant Bridal (1864); Irish Odes (1869); Legends of St Patrick (1872); and Legends of the Saxon Saints (1879); and in prose, "The Foray of Queen Meave and Other Legends of Ireland's Heroic Age" (1882), Essays Chiefly on Poetry (1887); and Essays Chiefly Literary and Ethical (1889). He also wrote a picturesque volume of travel-sketches, and two dramas in verse, Alexander the Great (1874); and St Thomas of Canterbury (1876). According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, both of these dramas, "though they contain fine passages, suffer from diffuseness and a lack of dramatic spirit." One of his best remembered poem is Inisfail while two of his historical poems used to be on the Junior Cycle English syllabus, The March to Kinsale and The Ballad of Athlone.