MacDonogh, Patrick (1902–61), poet, was born in Dublin, one of five children of A. J. MacDonogh, founder in 1891 of Avoca School, Blackrock, Co. Dublin (a precursor of Newpark comprehensive school). He was educated at Avoca School and TCD, where he later completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the work of William Allingham (qv). After working as a commercial artist and a teacher he joined the management of Guinness's brewery, where he rose to occupy a senior position. MacDonogh was a successful student athlete (he represented Ireland at hockey) and later an enthusiastic hiker and hill-walker; many of his poems reflect the rural landscape of north Dublin, which in the mid-century was still rural. For much of his career MacDonogh and his family lived in a country house near Kinsealy; his reduced circumstances in later life forced him to move to Malahide, then to a bungalow at Portmarnock.
MacDonogh's poetry collections are Flirtation (1927), illustrated with his own drawing, A leaf in the wind (1929), The vestal fire (1941), a long epithalamium, fragments from which were later republished as separate poems, Over the water (1943), and One landscape still (1958); the last collection represented a final sifting of his oeuvre to present those poems he considered worth preserving. Poems (2001), edited and introduced by Derek Mahon, retains most of this selection, adds eight other poems (six composed after 1958) and makes minor textual emendations (circumstances prevented MacDonogh from correcting the proofs of the 1958 collection).
MacDonogh's work develops from an early derivative Georgian Romanticism with echoes of the Irish revival into a finely attuned conversational style reminiscent of Louis MacNeice (qv) and retaining echoes of the revival. Derek Mahon compares such monologues as ‘The widow of Drynam’ to the eighteenth-century aisling while at the same time noting MacDonogh's position as a voice from a protestant middle-class enclave. Several of his poems, such as ‘Dodona's oaks were still’, have been anthologised regularly since their first appearance.
MacDonogh was associated with the circle around the Dublin Magazine, which published several of his poems. He also published in The Bell and in British and American periodicals. He was a regular though quiet attender at the bar of the Red Bank restaurant (one of Dublin's literary hostelries), co-founded the Galway Oyster Festival, and participated in the filming of Moby Dick at Youghal (dir. John Huston (qv); released 1956). He regularly broadcast from Radio Éireann on sporting and literary topics. MacDonogh's sociability was accompanied by a depressive sense of isolation: some of his poetry expresses both pride and trauma at distancing himself from the conventional beliefs of his protestant middle-class background while refusing absorption by populist Irish catholicism, and presents the search for erotic love as a struggle against loneliness. In later life these depressive spells forced his early retirement, and he spent periods in mental hospitals. He died in 1961.
MacDonogh married Ellen May (Maisie) Connell, a well-known mezzo-soprano with a particular interest in Schubert; they had two daughters. He also had a lengthy relationship with Phoebe Hesketh, an Englishwoman whose husband was killed in the second world war; some of McDonogh's wartime poetry draws on reflections about the contrast between his position in neutral Ireland and hers in England under the blitz.
Like many other Irish writers of the transitional period between the literary revival and the 1960s, MacDonogh has been overshadowed by his predecessors and successors; but he has always maintained a small group of devotees who believe his voice deserves to be heard. Some of his lyrics were set to music by Roger Doyle and a selection of his poetry was translated into French in 1979.