I fell into a delightfully artsy rabbit hole this morning when a friend posted this painting by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet and mystic W. B. Yeats (who famously kicked Aleister Crowley down a flight of stairs once). The name of the painting is “About to Write a Letter” (1935).
W. B. Yeats popularized the leanan sidhe as a beautiful vampiric fairy who selects an artist or poet to love. "She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she [feasts on]. Gaelic poets die young, for she... will not let them remain long on Earth."
🎨 Walter Crane #FolkloreSunday#OfDarkandMacabre#WBYeats#poetry#mythology#folklore#Celtic#Ireland
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats is a key 20th-century English-language poet.
He was a Symbolist, using allusive imagery/symbolic structures throughout his career.
He chose words & assembled them so that (in addition to a particular meaning) they suggest abstract thoughts that may seem more significant & resonant.
Modernists read the poem "The Second Coming" as a dirge for the decline of European civilization, but it also expresses Yeats's apocalyptic mystical theories & is shaped by the 1890s.
Maud Gonne MacBride (Irish: Maud Nic Ghoinn Bean Mhic Giolla Bhríghde) died on 27 April 1953. She was an English-born Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. Of Anglo-Irish descent, she was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of evicted people in the Land Wars. She actively agitated for Home Rule and then for the republic declared in 1916. She was long-time love interest of WB Yeats.