Virginia Lucas Poetry Scrapbook

Biography of Charles Wolfe

Charles Wolfe was born in 1791 in Dublin, Ireland, and died in 1823. His home of birth is what identified him as an Irish poet (“Charles Wolfe”, 2022). Irish literature has a long and complex history. In all the literary history in Europe, Irish literature comes right behind the Greek and Latin literatures in antiquity; however, with wars, famines, colonialism, migrations, and revolution, distinguishing Irish authors comes with much debate (“Irish Literature”, 2022). For Charles Wolfe, there have been instances in past literary histories (i.e., Thomas Humphry Ward’s The English Poets, 1880) that include him as an English poet, but as of today, there is no question of his nationality; he was a poet of Ireland (Trent, 1893, p. 130).

One review of him from 1893, only a few decades after his passing, laid claim to a few interesting facts: W. P Trent, the author of this review, wrote that Wolfe was often regarded as a “one-poem poet,” only known for his famous “The Burial of Sir John Moore,” which he also claimed was recited in many school rooms in that century. The difficulty in finding reliable biographical information on Wolfe seems not only a difficulty for twenty-first-century scholars but also for those in the Wolfe’s own century. Trent speculated as to why so little information about him exists. He stated that readers of his ode to Moore either forgot that Wolfe wrote the poem, or presumed Wolfe did little else worth remembering (Trent, 1893, p. 130).  

However, in all these historical obstacles, this is what we know: Wolfe went to Trinity College in Dublin, and he was not only known by his writing but was also known for serving as a clergyman (“Charles Wolfe”, 2022). In fact, the 1893 review on Wolfe by Trent was titled The Reverend Charles Wolfe, distinguishing his life of one with marked spirituality instead of only penmanship (Trent, 1893, p. 130).  


Sources:

Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2022). Charles Wolfe. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Wolfe

Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2022). Irish literature. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Irish-literature

Trent, W. P. (1893). The Reverend Charles Wolfe. The Sewanee Review, 1(2), 129-152. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27527738.pdf