![]() MacBride was later executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. Yeats disapproved of her belief in violent methods in the promotion of the nationalist cause and was horrified and heartbroken when she married the nationalist rebel, Major John MacBride. The world should thank me for not marrying you”. Yeats proposed marriage at least four times but Gonne refused him on every occasion, stating once, “.you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. A reference to the Chiswick Book Festival was also included.An undated photograph of Maud Gonne taken in her apartment in Paris. While the poet lived much of his life in London until this age, the family left Bedford Park when Yeats was in his 30s. An earlier version said that Yeats lived at Bedford Park “into his 50s”. This article was amended on 7 September 2022. But interpretations should run free, since as Yeats’s father, the artist John Butler Yeats, once wrote to him in a letter dated between 19: “What can be explained is not poetry.” Others to a flock of the white birds that appear in Yeats’s work, or the flight of angels from Yeats’s Bedford Park-period poems and the cover of his 1895 volume, Poems. Some have already compared his 4.5 metre-high artwork to a fall of autumn leaves. But the line that inspired Shawcross is not its best known phrase, “tread softly because you tread on my dreams”, but the earlier couplets which first impressed him when he heard Hinds read the verse at the launch of the project in 2018. ![]() The artwork, being unveiled on the eve of the Chiswick Book Festival, was partly funded by a £25,000 award from the Royal Academy, as well as by public donations, and support from the London Borough of Hounslow and the Irish embassy.įor Cahal Dallat, a local contemporary poet and founder of the project, the new sculpture will be “a dazzling piece that reflects Yeats’s genius” as well as an apt memorial to the “exiled longing” the poet expressed.Īround the base of the artwork are words from Yeats’s poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, inscribed in stone. Now, to misquote the line from the poet’s famous Easter, 1916, “a shimmering beauty will be born” when Williams reveals Shawcross’s tower of flashing metal. Soon the park, which had its own inn, stores, church, school of art and social club, had drawn in an eclectic, bohemian crowd and become a magnet for creative activism. Yeats’s parents had brought the family over to Victorian England to settle in the village near the Thames that was being built “for communal happiness” by Dublin-born Jonathan Carr. Organisers of the project claim the sculpture will be a fitting gateway to the park, which was the world’s first garden suburb, with its carefully conserved architecture from the Arts and Crafts movement.Įnglish Heritage had originally suggested a blue plaque should go up on the house in Blenheim Road, Chiswick, west London where the young Yeats met the inspirational, radical figure of Maud Gonne, and co-founded the Irish Literary Society. Surrounded by his extraordinary family and his radically revolutionary neighbours, Bedford Park whipped the beautiful young poet into the maelstrom of poetry that would give rise to a nation.” In British polls of favourite lyrical works, it is Yeats who regularly scores the most hits.Īs Geldof has put it: “Bedford Park is where the national poet understood what it was to be impoverished, alien, exiled, became obsessed with a woman who would haunt his life and give rise to the greatest poetry of the 20th century. ![]() The west London enclave of Bedford Park is also the place where he created some of the most popular poems ever written in the English language, among them The Lake Isle of Innisfree. The sculpture, to be unveiled on Tuesday by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is the work of the British sculptor Conrad Shawcross, and its arrival in a leafy London square will mark the end of a slow process of recognition in the area where Yeats grew up and lived well into adulthood. ![]() Photograph: George C Beresford/Getty Images ![]()
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