# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Callanan, Jeremiah John

​CALLANAN, JEREMIAH JOHN (1795–1829), Irish poet, was born in Cork in 1795. He was brought up in the country, where he acquired the knowledge of the Irish language which qualified him for his subsequent vocation as national bard and collector of popular traditions. At the earnest wish of his parents, who had devoted him to the priesthood from his cradle, he studied at Maynooth, but felt no inclination for the ecclesiastical profession, and offended his friends by deserting it. He was subsequently admitted as an out-pensioner of Trinity College, Dublin, where he remained for two years, and gained the prize for an English poem on Alexander's restoration of the spoils of Athens. Having, however, exhausted his resources, and seeing no prospect of qualifying himself for the pursuit of law or medicine, he abruptly left the college, and enlisted in the royal Irish regiment, from which he was speedily bought out by his friends. He returned to Cork, and partly supported himself by tutorship. One of his numerous brief engagements was in the school then kept by Maginn, who procured the insertion of his early poems in ‘Blackwood's Magazine.’ Most of his time, however, was spent in wandering about the south-west of Ireland, repaying the hospitality he received from the country people with songs, and collecting popular ballads and legends. In an unpublished letter to Crofton Croker, who had sought his assistance, he says: ‘I converted what before was a matter of amusement into a serious occupation, and at every interval of leisure employed myself in rescuing from oblivion all that I could find of the songs and traditions of the south-west of Munster.’ Writing on the same day to Maginn, he says: ‘I am certain I could get up a good trumpet-blast or ball-cartridge volume of songs—Jacobite, love, Keenes, English Ninety-eighters—with ​an ample store of forays, anecdotes of bards, drinking, fighting, and Lochinvaring, &c.’ These collections seem to have been lost, and many of Callanan's own poems have perished, having never been committed to paper, though retained in his powerful memory and frequently recited by himself. At length his health failed, and he accepted a tutorship at Lisbon, where he spent the last two years of his life, dying of consumption on 19 Sept. 1829, after an ineffectual endeavour to return to Ireland.
Like most Irish poets, Callanan was a pure lyrist, with no reach or depth of thought, no creative imagination, and no proper originality, but endowed with abundance of fancy, melody, and feeling. His only sustained effort, ‘The Recluse of Inchidony,’ is as good an imitation of ‘Childe Harold’ as could well be written, but little more. His lyrical poems leave no doubt of the genuine quality of his inspiration, but only one, ‘Gougane Barra,’ a fine example of musical and impassioned description, the alliance of the eye and the heart, has produced a deep impression or attained general celebrity. His versions of Irish ballads are very stirring, and his rendering of Luis de Leon's ‘Vida del Cielo’ is exceedingly beautiful. Some of his pieces are marked by an aversion to England, which he recanted on the passing of the Emancipation Act. His private character was amiable; he was refined and susceptible to an uncommon degree, but to no less a degree indolent, irresolute, and unpractical. His poems were collected after his death (London, 1830; reprinted at Cork, 1847 and 1861).
R. G.