Aubrey Thomas de Vere's claim to importance in the literary history of Victorian England rests on two principal accomplishments: his career as a poet who continued the Wordsworthian tradition while anticipating some of themes of the Celtic revival, and his activity as a polemicist on the Irish question, in which he defended the principle of loyalty to the British crown but sharply criticized English methods of rule and the imposition of Catholic disabilities. He is also remembered as one among the second-generation wave of converts who followed John Henry Newman from Anglicanism into the Roman Catholic Church in the 1850s and as an engaging personality who was the friend of many Victorian literary figures, especially Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Taylor (who married de Vere's first cousin), Coventry Patmore, and Sara Coleridge, the daughter of the poet.

De Vere was born in the idyllic surroundings of Curragh Chase, Adare...