Description:

Yeats William

Small 4.75" x 3" postcard inscribed with 58 words, including two cross-outs, by Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). Signed as “WBYeats” along the bottom of the message side. Yeats sent this note from his “53 Mountjoy Square, Dublin” home to “Kenerton Parkes Esq., Windsor Road, Penarth, N. Cardiff”. Postmarked from Dublin on July 24, 1892.

 

The text in full reads: “If not too late, please send the two Fairy Tale books (mine + the other) to T.W. Rolleston, Bornham, Spencer Hill, Wimbledon. His letter to me offering to review them went astray or you [would have] heard before. Yours, WBYeats”.

 

Yeats co-founded the London-based Rhymers’ Club in 1890, two years before penning this postcard. The Rhymers’ Club was a group of male poets from the so-called “Tragic Generation” who met regularly at a London pub to recite and critique original work. Yeats published the group’s first anthology in 1892, followed by the second anthology two years later. Yeats co-founded the Irish Literary Society with Anglo-Irish poet and fellow Rhymer Thomas William Hazen Rolleston (1857-1920) the same year that he wrote this note.

 

Yeats directs his postcard recipient to forward “two Fairy Tale books” to T.W. Rolleston for peer review. Yeats and Rolleston had a turbulent relationship. At first, Yeats admired Rolleston; later, Yeats criticized Rolleston for his superficiality, calling him both an “intimate enemy” and a “hollow image”.

 

W.B. Yeats was one of the leading figures of Dublin’s late-nineteenth-century Celtic Revival movement, which celebrated Ireland’s unique cultural identity. Artists, writers, linguists, and teachers took a renewed interest in Irish history, mythology, and language. Yeats was an early and instrumental advocate who promoted the movement through organization and example. He was not only involved in co-founding various organizations, like the Abbey Theater in Dublin, but also in making a name for Irish poetry. Yeats’s poetry drew inspiration from Celtic folklore and the Gaelic language. The rediscovery of Irish heritage ushered in by Yeats and other Celtic Revivalists later manifested itself in early-twentieth-century Irish nationalism.

 

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