Life and career
Thomas William Hazen Rolleston won a prize for English verse at Trinity College Dublin. After his marriage in 1879 he lived for several years in Germany, where an interest in Walt Whitman grew into a correspondence with the American poet. Rolleston helped translate Leaves of Grass into German. Back in Dublin, he and Charles Hubert Oldham founded the Dublin University Review. In 1885 their magazine published an early poem by W. B. Yeats.
Rolleston helped organise the Rhymers’ Club in London and became the first secretary of the Irish Literary Society. His interest in a cultural revival extended to people making a living from craft. As secretary of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland he edited its journal and helped arrange classes. From 1909 he lived in London, editing German literature for the Times Literary Supplement.
Work and ideas
His books drew on both sides of that career. Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911) brought heroes and stories from Irish and Welsh literature to an English-speaking public. Rolleston wrote as a modern reteller, drawing together material that had come down through different languages and manuscript traditions. He also worked with Stopford Brooke on A Treasury of Irish Poetry, where the editorial task was to bring many individual poets into a single volume.
In his illustrated Wagner books Rolleston adapted stories already recast for the German stage. The division of labour matters in these editions. Wagner supplied the dramatic source, Rolleston the English retelling and Willy Pogány the visual interpretation. The books grew out of the same sustained engagement with German literature that had begun with his years in Wiesbaden and Dresden.
