The Castrated Priest: Wordsworth, Terry Hogan , and Walter Savage Landor’s Irish Interlude

Walter Savage Landor’s Terry Hogan, An Eclogue of 1836 has been condemned or ignored by his critics because of its indecency; it was silently omitted from the standard Complete Works and is made generally available here for the first time. The poem, which describes the castration of an Irish priest, was a product of Landor’s fierce turn against Wordsworth in 1836; it is partly a burlesque of the Wordsworthian pastoral and ‘low’ style, and partly a comic assault on the Catholic clergy, of the kind continued in Landor’s High and Low Life in Italy of 1837–38. The exceptional scarcity of Terry Hogan suggests that Landor may have suppressed it, and there is evidence that he may have adapted it into an interlude intended for professional performance. In 1839, certainly, he completed a verse interlude, now lost, in a similar style to Terry Hogan and with a central Irish role.