J. J. Hogan

Life
[Jeremiah J. Hogan]; Professor of English at UCD, and later President of UCD, 1964; author of The English Language in Ireland (Dublin: Educational Co. of Irel. 1907), a work of scientific philology cited in illus. of the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ in OED, Supplement 1972.

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Commentary
Roy Foster, ‘When the Newspapers Have Forgotten Me ...’, in Yeats Annual 12, 1996, includes comments on Hogan’s evaluation of Yeats in a Studies article wherein he took ‘a judicious and fairly critical line about some of the work, making an interesting comparison to D’Annunzio, “the great poet of insolence, cruelty, and lust [... &c.]” ‘At his best, however, Hogan judged that Yeats’s true European peer was Goethe [...] his kind of Irishness was carefully defined: “Yeats is specially the poet of the Anglo-Irish. But he has lived in Ireland and taken part in every Irish cause and quarrel or nearly forty years. He has fallen in with nationalist movements, and has fallen out with them and lashed them from the Anglo-Irish, the planter’s side”.’ Foster notes that The Catholic Bulletin quoted Hogan’ earlier summing-up in Studies (with apposite italicisation of ‘our’ in the new context ): ‘The first great poet of modern Ireland; the poet who will command our literature as long as we use the English tongue. he was great, too, in other fields; a fine prose-writer and critic, a dramatist, and the chief creator of our theatre. He was perhaps also though this cannot be said with certainty yet, a great public man, and a principal shaper of our recent history.’ (Hogan, Studies, March 1939; Foster, p.173.)

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Quotations
Anglo-Irish language: ‘Recently formed as to its main elements, in a country unified and possessing good communications, Anglo-Irish is fairly homogeneous, outside of Ulster. This language, as a whole and in its variations, has received no systematic study. [...] A programme of study would embrace three processes: the examination of living speech in various localities; the examination of all written records; the synthesis of all the information thus gathered in a dictionary and grammer, and perhaps an atlas.’ (‘Notes on the Study of Anglo-Irish Dialect’, Béaloideas, 14, 1944, pp.187-91, attached to a glossary of the English of Ireland, together with an afternote proposing the formation of a Dictionary of the English of Ireland. (Quoted in Michael Montgomery, ‘The Lexicography of Hiberno-English’, in Irish Studies: Working Papers, 93:3, Nova Southwestern, 1993, pp.20-35, p.27.)

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Notes
Russell Alspach (Irish Poetry, Penn UP 1959) quotes Hogan as a source for records on Irish language connected with the Dublin Assembly in 1657, viz., ‘there is Irish commonlie and usuallie spoken and Irish habitt wor not onlie in the streetes ...’ (p.10.)

See remarks on Hogan as Professor of English at UCD in Denis Donoghue, Irish Essays (Cambridge 2011), Introduction.

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