George William Russell, a.k.a Æ

Bathers by Æ

George William Russell (April 10, 1867 – July 17, 1935) who wrote under the pseudonym Æ, was an Anglo-Irish supporter of the Nationalist movement in Ireland, a critic, poet, and painter. He was also a mystical writer, and centre of a group of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for many years. He is not to be confused with George William Erskine Russell (1853 - 1919).

Biography

He was born in Lurgan, County Armagh. His family moved to Dublin when he was eleven. He started working as a draper. He worked many years for the Irish Agricultural Organization Society (IAOS), an agricultural co-operative movement founded by Horace Plunkett. The two came together in 1897 when the co-operative movement was eight years old. Plunkett needed an able organiser and W.B. Yeats suggested Russell, who became Assistant Secretary of the IAOS. He was an able lieutenant and travelled extensively throughout Ireland as a spokesman for the society, mainly responsible for developing the credit societies and establishing co-operative banks in the south and west of the country whose numbers rose to 234 by 1910. The pair made a good team each gaining much from the association with the other.^[1]

Russell was editor from 1905-1923 of The Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS, and infused it with vitality that made it famous half the world over. He was also editor of the The Irish Statesman from September 15, 1923 – April 12, 1930. He used the pseudonym AE, or more properly, Æ. This derived from an earlier Æ'on signifying the lifelong quest of man, subsequently shortened.

He met the young James Joyce in 1902, and introduced him to other Irish literary figures, including William Butler Yeats, to whom he was close. He appears as a character in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Joyce's Ulysses, where he dismisses Stephen's theories on Shakespeare.

Notes

1. ^ AE and Sir Horace Plunkett J.J.Byrne (The Shaping of Modern Ireland (1960) Conor-Cruise O'Brien) pp. 152-157

Poetry

• Homeward Songs by the Way (Dublin: Whaley 1894)
• The Earth Breath and Other Poems (NY&London: John Lane 1896)
• The Nuts of Knowledge (Dublin: Dun Emer Press 1903)
• The Divine Vision and Other Poems (London: Macmillan; NY: Macmillan 1904)
• By Still Waters (Dublin: Dun Emer Press 1906)
• Deirdre (Dublin: Maunsel 1907)
• Collected Poems (London: Macmillan 1913)
• Gods of War, with Other Poems (Dub, priv. 1915)
• Imaginations and Reveries (Dub&London: Maunsel 1915)
• The Candle of Vision (London: Macmillan 1918)
• Autobiography of a Mystic (Gerrards Cross, 1975), 175pp.;
• Midsummer Eve (NY: Crosby Gaige 1928)
• Enchantment and Other Poems (NY: Fountain; London: Macmillan 1930);
• Vale and Other Poems (London: Macmillan 1931)
• Songs and Its Fountains (London: Macmillan 1932)
• The House of Titans and Other Poems (London: Macmillan 1934)
• Selected Poems (London: Macmillan 1935).