Author: Shannon, Edward N.
Biography:
SHANNON, Edward N. (c.1795-1860: WBIS)
There is no solid information about his background or family and his birthdate might be up to five years earlier (1790), but Shannon left a significant body of work as a writer. An Irish author with an entry in O'Donoghue but not in DIB, he published at first in London and anonymously. (His Philadelphia publisher, however, used his name on the title-page.) He was a great admirer of Italian literature and of Byron. In 1836 he published a collection of his own work spuriously attributed to Byron "and some of his contemporaries": Arnaldo, Gaddo, and Other Unacknowledged Poems. The volume also includes his translation of ten cantos of Dante's Inferno, under the pseudonym Odoardo Volpi. O'Donoghue remarks admiringly that Shannon was "a clever poet whose pieces were really attributed to Lord Byron by some." In 1842, Tales Old and New . . . the first volume of the Works of Edward N. Shannon appeared in Dublin and London, dedicated to the Marquis of Lansdowne, with a preface defending the author against anticipated charges of imitation. There was no second volume. He may have been writing for periodicals all along; in the 1840s his name is associated briefly with the new nationalist paper, The Nation, founded in 1842. According to O'Donoghue, he became the editor of the Galway Vindicator (founded 1841) and died in Galway. (WorldCat; O'Donoghue)