Series 1 - Jeremiah O'Donovan journal & poem

18pp

Kerby A. Miller's detailed observations on Jeremiah O'Donovan's A Brief Account of the Author's Interview with His Countrymen, and of the Parts of the Emerald Isle whence They Emigrated, Together with a Direct Reference to Their Present Location in the Land of Their Adoption, During His Travels Through Various States of the Union in 1854 and 1855 (Pittsburgh: self-published, 1864). The series contains both Miller's original 1970 notes on the journal and his later notes from 2018.
Per Miller: 'O'Donovan's title is misleading, because the first of the trips he described in his book occurred in 1848-49. O'Donovan, an Irish immigrant from Cork, whose home was in Pittsburgh, described his travels in the Northern States (he never went further south than Washington, D.C., and northern Kentucky, as a vendor of his own epic poem, A History of Ireland in Epic Verse, during 1848-49 and 1854-5. O'Donovan travelled and lodged almost exclusively with other Irish-American Catholics, and he rarely tried to sell his poetry to any others. O'Donovan wrote his epic history of Ireland's oppression to inspire Irish patriotism among Irish- Americans. In early 1848, and before news of Young Ireland's failure had reached the US, O'Donovan seemed to conceive of his as a mission to prepare his countrymen in America for Smith O'Brien's outbreak and to aid it.'
Miller's general observations on the quality of O'Donovan's poetry are quite negative, although by 2018 he had mellowed somewhat in his outlook ('Perhaps O'Donovan's regional, occupational, and linguistic characteristics help explain the extraordinarily verbose and extravagant language -- often to the point of absurdity -- that O'Donovan employed in both his prose and poetry. Indeed, O'Donovan appears to be a caricature of William Carleton's caricature of the hedge-schoolmaster -- whose speech and writings were full of what the latter called 'sesquipedalian and stilted nonsense'').