Item 3 - Letter to Fr John Conmee SJ from the poet Aubrey de Vere

Letter to Fr John Conmee SJ from the poet Aubrey de Vere, Curraghchase, County Limerick in reply to Fr Conmee’s letter thanking de Vere for sending him some of his father’s sonnets, “…but for a mistake on the Publisher’s part they would have been forwarded to you long since. They form part of a volume now out of print, which my Father published as long ago as 1842 entitled ‘A Song of Faith’ and consisting chiefly of poems illustrative of the Apostles’ Creed”. Discusses some of his father’s poems, the nature of poetry and reflects ‘It is really marvellous to think what might be done for the Catholic cause and for the moral and intellectual well-being of the country by even a few first-rate Catholic literary works. Perhaps the next generation may give us a Catholic Coleridge to write Philosophy, a Catholic Wordsworth to be our Poet, a Catholic Scott to illustrate Ireland as Scott illustrated Scotland in his Novels, and a Catholic Historian to undo all the mischief done by the erroneous Tradition. Four such writers would do a marvellous work in the next thirty years; and there seems no reason why Ireland alone might not provide them all, if only the ability so constantly running to waste among us were at once properly developed and disciplined.’