Born at Dublin, and a member of the Irish bar, but never practiced. His first literary work was contributed to the Irish Nation, and he was especially noted for his linguistic attainments; his poems including, in addition to original verse, translations from nearly all of the modern European languages. In 1881 he received from the Royal Academy of Spain a medal for his translations of the works of Calderon. He published “Ballads, Poems and Lyrics,” 1850; “The Bell Founder,” 1857; “Underglimpses, and Other Poems,” 1857. His translations of Calderon were published 1853–1873.

Personal

  MacCarthy, like Charles Lamb when he was the associate of Hazlitt and Hunt, loved the men more than he shared their political passions. He was a law student soon to be called to the bar, but he was essentially a poet and a man of letters, happy in his study, charming in society, where his spontaneous humour was the delight of his associates, but never thoroughly at home in the council room or on the platform.

  While Ireland has lost in him one of the most graceful of her lyrists, his large circle of intimates deplore a friend endeared to them, not more by his brilliant intellectual endowments than by the genial sympathies of his nature. For the gift of song was not in his case counterbalanced by the extravagance of feeling or action which too often accompanies it, and was rather the crowning harmony of a finely tuned mind, than the wild note of undisciplined fancy setting all the other strings ajar. This immunity of his nature from the flaws of the poetic temperament is shared by his writings, and the strain of morbid feeling and fantastic exaggeration of thought affected by many modern bards finds no echo in his simple and manly verse.

  It cannot but be a melancholy satisfaction to me to contribute to a memorial that will commemorate, not only the lofty genius, but the social and moral worth of one of the truest poets and best men it has been my lot personally to know, esteem, regard, honor—the late Denis Florence MacCarthy.

General

  It is, [“Translation of Calderon”] I think, one of the boldest attempts ever made in English verse. It is, too, as it seems to me, remarkably successful. Not that asonantes can be made fluent and graceful in English verse, or easily perceptible to an English ear, but that the Spanish air and character of Calderon are so happily and strikingly preserved…. In the present volume Mr. MacCarthy has far surpassed all he had previously done; for Calderon is a poet who, whenever he is translated, should have his very excesses and extravagances, both in thought and manner, fully produced in order to give a faithful idea of what is grandest and most distinctive in his genius. Mr. MacCarthy has done this, I conceive, to a degree which I had previously supposed impossible. Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic of the Spanish drama, perhaps I ought to say of what is most characteristic of Spanish poetry generally.

  Mr. MacCarthy’s national poetry is rather didactic than historical or dialectic, with a few exceptions, such as the very spirited ballad of “The Foray of Con O’Donnell,” in which the portrait of the ancient Irish wolf-dog is very admirable; and he has also some graphic descriptions of national scenery. He has a fondness for intricate and what may be termed assonanté metres, which are sometimes remarkably successful, as in “Waiting for the May.”

  Under the head of political and occasional poems may be mentioned, in conclusion, the odes for the O’Connell Centenary in 1876 and the Centenary of Moore in 1879, recited before immense audiences with great enthusiasm. As we have said before, all the above poems are buried in a few rare volumes or scattered through the pages of periodicals. The worthiest monument his much-loved countrymen could raise to his memory would be a complete edition of his original poems. In the volume of “Ballads, Poems, and Lyrics,” published in 1850, appeared a number of translations from the French, Italian, Spanish and German. These were distinguished by their grace and fidelity, and showed the wide range of the poet’s reading.

  MacCarthy taught the uses of a national literature, and the noble and unselfish reward it aimed to win, with a persuasiveness that recalled Davis.

  A prose work, “Shelley’s Early Life from Original Sources” brought out some highly interesting facts in reference to the great English poet, especially as to that period of his youth when he for a while threw himself into the struggles of Ireland for the amelioration of her laws. “Waiting for the May” is one of Mr. MacCarthy’s best known and most admired lyrics. In the Centenary of Moore he was naturally chosen to take a leading part, and composed an ode which was fully worthy of the great occasion.

  Despite his gift of melodious verse, it is less through his original poetry that Mr. MacCarthy is known in literature than through his successful translations from the great Spanish dramatist whom he chose for his principal subject of study, and whose works his own lyrical facility, and other mental endowments, so well qualified him for interpreting…. With the more mobile Celt the case is different. His quicker perceptions and more responsive temperament give him the power of merging his own individuality in that of another, and clothing his mind at will in a new language or a new habit of thought. And it was because he grafted on this typical Irish geniality of temperament the quick sensibilities of a poet, and the finely-strung perceptions of a man of letters, that Mr. MacCarthy was so admirably fitted for his part as the interpreter of foreign genius.

  Was a frequent and valuable contributor to it (The Nation)…. He was an industrious writer, having produced five volumes of original verse as well as numerous translations from Calderon, and his work was always on a high level. The strain of indignant satire in “Cease to do Evil” does not often recur—his imagination dwelt rather on the sweet and gracious aspects of life and Nature, and these he rendered in verse marked by sincere feeling, wide culture, and careful though unpretentious art.