Charles L. O'Donnell — and the campus poetry line

1884–1934 · NOTRE DAME'S POET-PRESIDENT

The tie. Charles Leo O'Donnell, C.S.C., was born at Greenfield, Indiana, on 15 November 1884, was formed by Notre Dame, taught English there from 1910 — the appointment came, on his own account, because the university needed teachers who could write — and served as the university's president from 1928 until he died, in St. Joseph's Hospital in South Bend, on 4 June 1934. The school's boundary stands as printed everywhere in this record: his workplace was the university across the river, and his poetry was published, taught and mourned on both sides of it.

The books. Three volumes in his lifetime: The Dead Musician, and Other Poems (Laurence J. Gomme, New York, 1916) — its title poem for a brother of the congregation; Cloister, and Other Poems (1922); and A Rime of the Rood, and Other Poems (Longmans, Green, 1928). His doctoral dissertation, written at the Catholic University of America under the direction of Francis Thompson's friend Wilfrid Meynell, was a study of Thompson himself. A collected Poems, edited by his nephew, appeared in 1942, eight years after his death. He presided over the Catholic Poetry Society of America, the circle in which Sister Madeleva's presidency was served, and his tenure as Notre Dame's president is remembered in the university's own magazine for the buildings and the stadium it raised; the poetry is the part of him this section keeps.

The line it runs into. The campus poetry did not end with the priest-poets. The university's own tribute history of its creative writing program names John Matthias and Sonia Gernes as the poet colleagues of the program's founding generation, in the English department of the late 1980s; the living program — the MFA that succeeded them, the journals and presses — stands in Arts, and the poets of that later generation are carried there and in the program's record rather than re-shelved here.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine — Father Charles L. O'Donnell, eleventh president: the Greenfield birth (15 November 1884), the English teaching years, the presidency 1928–1934, the Thompson dissertation under Meynell, the collected Poems of 1942, and the death at St. Joseph's Hospital, South Bend, 4 June 1934.
2. LibraryThing author catalog — the shelf as catalogued: The Dead Musician, and Other Poems (Laurence J. Gomme, 1916), Cloister, and Other Poems (1922), A Rime of the Rood, and Other Poems (1928).
3. University of Notre Dame, Creative Writing Program — the 2015 tribute booklet: John Matthias and Sonia Gernes named as the founding poetry faculty.