Thomas Dermody

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Bibliographical details

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James Grant Raymond, The Life of Dermody (1806): ‘The life of few indeed have experienced so liberal, and exalted a patronage as Dermody, and it is infinitely to be regretted that none ever made so unwise a use of it. Unfortunately, he had so connected himself with the lowest associates, that no resolution he possessed could shake off the power which those harpies had gained over his too easy disposition. They knew his foibles; which they nourished in order to profit by them, and this they did at too large a cost. The sacrifice of his happiness was by them considered as trifling and indispensable, provided they were themselves to benefit by [220] it; and even character and honourable feeling (which he sometimes told them, were necessary to be preserved) were, when their exigences pressed, to be given up. [For longer extract, see infra; see also under Michael Griffin, infra.]

Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica [2 vols.] (1821), contains an extensive life of Dermody: ‘Often have we had to lament the union of talent with vice, but never more, perhaps, than in the present instance; for, if his biographer did not suffer partiality to guide his plume, never was there any individual whose knowledge was so intuitive, or whose profligacy was so precocious.’ (pp.76-82; here p.76; see full copy - as attached).

James Hardiman, Irish Minstrelsy (1831), Introduction: ‘The bards of Ireland were men of a very different character [from the ‘rude and uneducated’ rhymers of Scotland], but they were a proscribed and persecuted rage, their very very language interdicted, and yet from those outlawed bards, and in that denounced language, do we find specimen of poetic talent, which would do honour to any country. Had the unfortunate DERMODY been born a few years earlier, it is probably his name would appear only in the foregoing enumeration. The English tongue began to spread amongst the people of his native county, Clare, in the middle of the last century; and thus the talents which would have passed unnoticed, if confined to the langauge of his fathers, were universally admired in that of his adoption.’ (ftn., p.xxiv.)

Russell K. Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798 (Phil: Pennsylvania UP 1959), dismisses his ‘euphemistically’ named The Harp of Erin on the grounds that it is possible to go through it ‘without stumbling on anything that even faintly resembles poetry.’ (p.54). NOTE, not FDA entry.

Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, 1789-1850, Vol 1 (1980), remarks that Dermody plagiarises Thomas Gray, in Poems, 1789, p.13: ‘Now sober Evening, clad in matle grey / In solemn pomp steals on to shadowy night. / The twinkling stars begin their lucid way / And bashful Cynthia shows her silver light // No noise is heard, save yonder hooting owl / that shrieks his mournful dirge in scream of woe.’ Dermody was fourteen at this writing. Other poems are “Night” (p.26f.) and “Ode to Terror” (pp.29ff.) [Rafroidi, op. cit., p.30]. Also quotes, ‘Rank nurse of nonsense, on whose thankless coast; The base weed thrives, the nobler bloom is lost;/parent of pride and pverty, where dwell. Dulness and brogue and calumny - farewell!’ Harp of Erin, I. p.246. [Rafroidi, op. cit., 101]. See also Rafroidi, op. cit. (1980), Vol. 2, quoting his self-written epitaph [‘Unnoticed for the talents he had, and forgot / But most famously noticed for faults he had not.’]

Michael Griffin, ‘“Infatuated to his Ruin: The Fate of Thomas Dermody, 1775-1802’, in History Ireland (May/June 2006), pp.21-25, remarks, ‘Griffin wrote derivative, often dreadful, poems of sensibility; occasionally, very occasionally, he wrote poems of scabrous, honest wit. He found himself buffeted about, politically, by his patrons, to the extent that he had to retract some of his bolder statements, perhaps the most scandalous being his pamphlet on The Rights of Justice, which, in 1793, prooved to be too radical for the tastes of the polite patriot set. For them he was a show-and-tell child prodigy, a volatile young genius, who could be procduced into the public sphere as an ocacsion of self-congratulatory patronage.’ (p.25.) He quotes Raymond’s Life: ‘[A]nother Savage - born in a lower rank of life, and early let loose from the restraints of discipline and morality’, and further: ‘The common method has hitherto been, to encourage the immorality by indulgence, to repress the poetry by extravagant and pernicious applauses, and to exasperate the symptoms of poverty by thoughtless and unmeasured profusion, suceeded by desertion and neglect. The case of the unhappy patient before us, appears indeed to have been very desperate; andit is but justive to his patrons to say, that many of them appear to have followed a very rational system of cure: it failed however entirely, partly through the original bad constitution of the subject, and partly through the mismanagement of certain of his romantic admirers. [...] an alcoholic and a dreadful egomaniac, he was capable of writing poetry of shocking turgidity for his drink.’ (n.p.; here p.21-22.) Griffins recounts his dealings with his patrons and in particular quotes from his exchange of letters with Sir James Burges, ending with advise from the latter suggesting that the ‘bounty ... liberally bestowed’ by him and others would be ‘withheld from him who, having received a more than ordinary share of it, makes new demands in a manner which may not improperly be termed menacing.’ (p.25.) Also quotes the epitaph from his poem “The Fate of Genius” enscribed on his gravestone, calling it ‘unashamedly derived from Thomas Gray’ [see infra].: ‘Bibl., T. Bourke, Vagabond and Minstrel: The Adventures of Thomas Dermody (London: [Macmillan] 1936); J. G. Raymond, The life of Thomas Dermody, interspersed with pieces of original poetry, many exhibiting unexampled prematurity of genuine poetical talent, and containing a series of correspondence with several eminent characters, 2 vols. (London & Dublin 1806).

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Quotations
“The Fate of Genius” [extract on his tombstone]: ‘No titled birth had he to boast: / Son of the desert; Fortune’s child; / Yet, not by rowning Fortune corss’d, / The muses on his cradle smil’d. // He joy’d to con the fabling page / Of prowess’d chiefs, and deeds sublime; / and e’en essay’d in infant age, / Fond task! to weave a wizard rhime. // And though fell passion sway’d his soul, / By Prudence seldom ever won, / Beyond the bounds of her control, / He was dear Fancy’s favour’d son. /// Now a cold tenant does he lie / Of this dark cell, all hush’d his song: / While Friendship bends with streaming eye, / As by his grave she wends along; // On his cold clay lets fall a holy tear, / And cries, “Though mute, there is a poet here.”’ (James Grant Raymond, Life of Dermody, 1806, Vol. 2., p.336; quoted also, after ‘Now a cold tenant ...’, in Michael Griffin, ‘“Infatuated to his Ruin [... &c.]’, in History Ireland, May/June 2006 [see supra].)

Verses on departing for London: ‘For London now happily bound, / For a while we are free from that damnable ground / Where merit is spurned, where virtue is lost, / And invention chok’d up with Hibernian frost. /So bidding farewell to each opulent rogue / Who murder’d our hearing with nonsense and brogue, / We go, the pure air of the muses I breathe, / And smile at dull envy and malice beneath. / Like birds, sir, of passage, from dullness we fly, / To warble and wing in a far bright sky: / Where freedom and fancy are sweet combin’d, / Where the body too feels the fine glow of the mind; / Where bounty, the sun of perfection will blaze, / And ripen at once the full grape and the bays; / Where fortune and genius in amity shine, / And the true spark of poesy beams forth divine; / In short, where no son of St Patrick shall dare, / With a foul-mouthed huff, and a swaggering air, / Meek wisdom so gentle to thrust from the wall; / Then welcome misfortune! We rise from our fall: / At least, we are certain to suffer no curse; / We here were neglected, - they can’t use us worse.’ (Quoted [without title] in Michael Griffin, ‘“Infatuated to his Ruin [... &c.]’, in History Ireland, May/June 2006, p.24.)

Ireland?: ‘Rank nurse of nonsense; on whose thankless coast / The base weed thrives, the nobler bloom is lost: / Parent of pride and poverty, where dwell / Dullness and brogue and calumny - farewell!’ (Quoted in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.210, citing Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature, 1979.)

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References
Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB]: much as in Life, supra; of his last years: ‘persisted in dissipated life and died young in London’.Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 1789-1850 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. 2, lists Poems (Dublin: Chambers 1789), 31pp; Poems consisting of Essays, Lyric, Elegiac, &, by T.D., written between the 13th and 16th year of his age (Dublin: J Jones 1792), 112pp, small; Poems, Moral, and Descriptive, by Thomas Dermondy (London: Vernon & Hood [et al.] 1800), xi, 112pp, ill, ded. to Countess of Moira [inc. the poem ‘Retrospect’, 34 pp; the epistolary poem ‘The Pursuit of Patronage’, 30pp, and others]; The Histrionade, or Theatric Tribute, poem descriptive of the princ. performers at both houses ... by Marmaduke Myrtle, Esq. (London: ES Kirby [et al.] 1802), 56pp; also unpublished poems in J[ames] G[rant] Raymond, The Life of Thomas Dermody (London W. Miller; Dublin: J. Archer and M. Mahon, 1806), 2 vols; The Harp of Erin, poetical works of the late Thomas Dermody, 2 vols. (London: R Phillips 1807), ed. James Grant Raymond. Bibl., Rafroidi cites titles M. Ó Aodha, ‘The Child Poet from Clare,’ in Plays and Places (1961); Padraic Colum ‘The Child of Sorrow’, in The Dublin Magazine (Autumn 1965); Thomas Burke, Vagabond Minstrel ... (1936) 345p. See also Irish Book Lover, 6.

COPAC (Manchester) lists James G. Raymond, ed., The Harp of Erin, Containing the Poetical Works of the late Thomas Dermody, 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips 1807); Marmaduke Myrtle [pseud.,] The Histrionade: or, Theatric tribunal; a poem, descriptive of the principal performers at both houses, &c. (London: R. S. Kirby [et al.] 1802), 56pp.; Peace: A poem inscribed to the right honorable Henry Addington (London: J. Hatchard 1801), 19pp.; Poems, Consisting of Essays, Lyric, Elegiac, &c., by Thomas Dermody[,] written between the 13th and 16th year of his age (Dublin: J. Jones, 1792), 112pp.; Austin Gilbert [Guillimannus, Franciscus], ed., Poems (Dublin: Chambers 1789), 31pp.; Poems, Moral, and Descriptive (London: Vernor and Hood; Lackington, Allen, & Co. [J. Crowder printer] 1800), xi, [1], 112pp: ill., pls.; Poems on Various Subjects (London: printed for J. Hatchard [... et al.] 1802), xi,[1],206,[2]pp.; Poems, consisting of essays, lyric, elegiac, etc.; . Also incl. in Samuel Whyte, ed., Poems on Various Subjects, illustrated with notes, original letters and curious incidental anecdotes [...; 1st edn. 1792] (3rd. rev. edn. 1796); Poems, moral and descriptive; The histrionade; Poems on various subjects, intro. by Donald H. Reiman [rep. of 5 works, 1789-1802] (NY: Garland Publ. 1978); James Grant Raymond, The Life of Thomas Dermody (1806); John Carr, The stranger in Ireland, or, A tour in the southern and western parts of that country in the year 1805; to which is now first added an appendix, containing an account of Thomas Dermody, the Irish poet [Early American Imprints [microfilm], 2nd Ser., No. 12271] (NY: I. Riley & Co. 1807; rep. 1990); Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 2 articles on Dermody rep. from Notes and Queries (1939)

Booksellers, CATHACH BOOKS (Cat. 12) listed as The Life of T.D. with original poetry and correspondence with several Eminent Characters. by James Grant Raymond, 2 vols. London 1806). ERIC STEVENS (1992) lists The Harp of Erin, containing the poetical works of the late Thomas Dermody, Richard Phillips 1807 [1st ed.; the only collected ed.] 2vols, 8vo, xvi, 287, 310pp. (£95).

Belfast Central Library holds J. G. Raimond [sic], Life of Dermody, 2 vols. (1806).

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Notes
Anthologica Hibernica: The editor of Anthologica Hibernica, a “superior” literary monthly that only lasted a year, wrote in 1793: ‘Were the abilities of the Irish to be estimated by their literary productions they would scarcely rank higher than those nations who had just emerged from barbarism.’ (Quoted in Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson, London: Pandora 1988, p.60.)

Nonsense & brogue: notice that Dermody twice conjoins the ideas of nonsense and brogue with Ireland in poetry quoted above.

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