Æ
Entry updated 14 April 2025. Tagged: Author, Poet.
Pseudonym, often printed as A E or AE, used by the Irish poet George William Russell (1867-1935) for all his writing. In 1886 he and William Butler Yeats helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society (see Theosophy) and much of his work reflects a mystical agenda – not very coherently in the supernatural tales assembled in The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories (coll 1904), but with very much more force in his Scientific Romance The Interpreters (1922), set in a great City in the indeterminate future just as a long-lived Pax Aeronautica dissolves into factional warfare involving great Airships; those captured in this schism then engage in philosophical debates. More elegiacally, in The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (1932), set in a future Ireland, this agenda comes to life as two supernal beings hauntingly invoke a vision of a world less abandoned to materialism, their seductive discourse drawing the protagonists to "the margin of the Great Deep", as Monk Gibbon puts it in his long and informative essay on A E's work which introduces The Living Torch (coll 1937), a posthumous volume of nonfiction. "The House of the Titans", the long narrative tale that dominates The House of the Titans and Other Poems (coll 1934 chap), inhabits similar territory. [JC]
see also: Joseph O'Neill.
George William Russell
born Lurgan, Ulster: 10 April 1867
died Bournemouth, Dorset: 17 July 1935
works
- The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories (Dublin: Whaley and Co, 1904) [hb/]
- The Interpreters (London: Macmillan, 1922) [hb/]
- The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (London: Macmillan, 1932) [hb/nonpictorial]
- The House of the Titans and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1934) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Living Torch (London: Macmillan, 1937) [hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry